Accents and Recording Booths

Our friend Fr. James Martin has been recently imprisoned in a stuffy, soundproof booth, recording his modern classic My Life With the Saints. Over at America, he has a delightful post up about his adventures in enunciation and I am so happy to know that I am not the only person who really has no idea how to pronounce Mother Teresa’s birth name:

I didn’t know how to pronounce everything. The team had to clue me in on the most accurate pronunciation of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, aka Mother Teresa. And a few times my Philadelphia accent made it hard for the Midwesterners to understand a word or two. “What was that?”

As a girl from Lawn Guyland, I sympathize. There were a few times I had to stop myself in the middle of a podcast because I’d caught myself saying “cawht,” and stumbling over my own teeth. (Those podcasts may soon resume, btw. I may have solved my “noise” problem.)

Fr. Martin also has a piece up in the WaPo (prolific, he is) where he revisits the issue of Pope Benedict’s enthusiasm for the blogosphere, which some might recall he and I both talked about (rather lightheartedly) recently on NPR’s All Things Considered, which you can hear here.

What I like best about the WaPo piece, of course, is that it gives exposure to so many good religious blogs and sites, a few of which I did not even know about, and am glad to have visited.

Speaking of good blogs, where else but at Webster Bull’s Why I am Catholic would you find co-blogger Frank musing on the passing of JD Salinger by comparing him to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and even partially crediting his conversion to Franny and Zooey.

Oh, blogs and bloggers. They kill me. I love it all.