{"id":9,"date":"2008-06-25T17:30:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/welcome-to-pontifications.html"},"modified":"2008-06-25T17:30:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-25T17:30:00","slug":"welcome-to-pontifications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/welcome-to-pontifications.html","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to “Pontifications”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, the name has changed–from the equally sanctimonious (and tongue-in-cheek) “Benedictions”–but the blogger has remained the same: David Gibson, author of the “Benedictions” blog that covered Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the U.S. in April.
\nYou all helped make the site (and the visit) a success, and Beliefnet has asked me to stay on with a redesigned blog to provide an ongoing forum for Catholic concerns and conversations. To that end, we also broadened the blog’s mission to include not only church news and intrigue, but also faith and culture and the wider world of the past, present, and future as engaged, embraced–and often eschewed–by Catholics and Catholicism.
\nSo now we are “Pontifications”–no less fallible than before, and no less interesting, I trust, with posts in the spirit of oldies from “Benedictions” like the one on the Catholic League’s Bill Dononhue<\/a> or the post on that other alien, E.T<\/a>, who the Vatican astronomer says may also have a soul.
\nBut with you help I’d like to make “Pontifications” more even informative, interesting, and just plain enjoyable. As you’ll see below, I like to include everything from the sublime (the Pope’s Risotto<\/a>) to the ridiculous (denying a church wedding to a parapalegic <\/a>because he is impotent), as well, of course, as the tragic and the maddening–in the case of the response to the Myanmar cyclone<\/a>–that should galvanize us to pursue justice as well as charity.
\nAnd while the blogosphere is too often a clearinghouse for mudfights and whining, I hope we can also provide a modicum of consolation and inspiration, which will likely come in the words of others, like the Jesuit priest Tom Reese, whose Pentecost homily <\/a>from back in March conveys the Spirit better than I ever could, and bears re-reading throughout the year.
\nThe blog can be found on Beliefnet’s Catholic page <\/a>(where another Jesuit, Father Jim Martin, has an essay <\/a>on the Father Pfleger\/Barack Obama dust-up) and it can also be found in the index of the site’s other blogs<\/a>.
\nAs my spiritual mentors in the Society of Jesus would say, AMDG. Ad majorem Dei gloriam<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, the name has changed–from the equally sanctimonious (and tongue-in-cheek) “Benedictions”–but the blogger has remained the same: David Gibson, author of the “Benedictions” blog that covered Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the U.S. in April. You all helped make the site (and the visit) a success, and Beliefnet has asked me to stay on with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic"],"yoast_head":"\nWelcome to "Pontifications" - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/welcome-to-pontifications.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Welcome to "Pontifications" - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yes, the name has changed–from the equally sanctimonious (and tongue-in-cheek) “Benedictions”–but the blogger has remained the same: David Gibson, author of the “Benedictions” blog that covered Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the U.S. in April. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}