Thank You, Elizabeth

The Catholic channel’s fearless leader, Elizabeth Scalia, has written a very kind welcome, which I much appreciate. It’s a pleasure to write a weblog for Patheos and I am grateful for her invitation.

I’m not sure about that “buttoned-down” business, though there may be something to it. All my shirt collars are buttoned down and that may be symbolic of other tastes and tendencies. Some years ago, while my wife and I were reading the newspaper, she looked up and said brightly, “This article says that button-down collars are going out of style!” I looked at her in silence until she said, “You don’t care, do you?”

What Elizabeth takes to be button-downed-ness is a mixture of a conviction that we (modern people) have to deal with too much information and that simplicity of look and prose lets us get what we need more easily, and technological limitations, that is, that the weblog has no photo because we (my family) have no camera and have not managed to take a decent picture with my smart phone. Sometimes a cigar etc.