YIM Catholic began last August as a personal soapbox for yours truly. I was uncomfortable standing outside my church shouting conversion stories, so I took my soapbox on-line. If anyone wants a good summary of why I converted, it\u2019s right here<\/a>. Frank joined up in November, and his personal story of trying to prove the Catholic Church wrong\u2014only to find that it is right\u2014continues to unfold in the series \u201cTo Be Frank.\u201d Chapter 1<\/a> starts in the oddest of places, the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Books. Most recently, Chapter 7<\/a> credits a more common conversion link, Thomas Merton\u2019s The Seven-Storey Mountain.<\/i> For Frank\u2019s story, click on \u201c2BFrank\u201d in the list of topics to the right.<\/p>\n By the time Frank was on board, I had begun to develop a new phase in my own YIMC writing. I was moving beyond answers to \u201cWhy RU Catholic?\u201d (I mean, how many reasons do you want from me?!) to an ongoing meditation on my daily life as a Catholic: what I heard at Mass this morning, the crazy things guys said at men\u2019s group, the innocence and eagerness of my fourth-graders in CCD, books I\u2019m reading, stuff I want to share\u2014always through the lens of the fundamental question, why Catholicism makes sense.<\/p>\n To go through your day, every day, pondering just why you are Catholic is a blessed exercise, as I am finding.<\/p>\n But now a third chapter in the life of this blog suggests itself: While remaining a double-wide soapbox for Frank and me, it can be a forum for you as well. At least, that\u2019s the message I take from yesterday. Your comments suggest so many <\/i>interesting questions that concern and sometimes plague \u201cTiberians.\u201d So, beginning right here and right now, I\u2019m going to begin tweezing out some of these questions and posing them to the YIMC community at large (we few, we happy few).<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/S1rcRwUQipI\/AAAAAAAAA6s\/Z0qqh8CZXXU\/s1600-h\/ferryman.jpg\")
<\/a>This leads me to imagine a new function for this blog, as a forum for those moving in and out of Catholic Land, a sort of virtual brochure rack for those waiting for the ferry, in either direction: \u201cVatican City on $25 a Day,\u201d \u201cThe Papacy for Dummies,\u201d and so on. (Don\u2019t know about you, but I can imagine this movie poster thumb-tacked to the wall of the ferryman\u2019s shack.)<\/p>\n