{"id":575,"date":"2008-04-19T08:52:44","date_gmt":"2008-04-19T08:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/three-years-ago.html"},"modified":"2008-04-19T08:52:44","modified_gmt":"2008-04-19T08:52:44","slug":"three-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/three-years-ago.html","title":{"rendered":"Three years ago…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember?
\nMy blog archival page from April 2005, in which I was liveblogging the election, and readers were reacting – it really is great to read<\/a>. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to temptation and delete the blog to save my $4 a month I still pay to Typepad!
\nBlog post from the old blog about the 1-year anniversary.<\/a>
\nThis is what I wrote at that 1-year anniversary and it still applies:<\/p>\n

There are enormous problems in our Church and in our world. Some of us wish there would simply be some concerted head-knocking to take care of it all. But Benedict knows history, and he also knows what is at the heart of our problems: we have turned from Christ. Even in our Church, our fundamental problem is that too many of us have argued ourself out of serious, commmitted belief in Jesus Christ, modulating and contextualizing it to the point of emptiness. Too many of us have put ourselves at the center of this enterprise rather than Christ. Too many of us have simply sold out to whatever culture that surrounds us, letting it be our Lord, not Jesus Christ.
\n\u00a0
\nI have no great statements about his impact on the Curia or the bishops’ conferences or liturgical life or diplomacy. What I have heard over and over this year is a wise father gently, surely re-grounding us in Scripture and the witness there, as well as in the voices and art and holiness of Christians through the ages, articulating what we know is true about the strains, temptations and deserts in our lives, weaving it all together and in rather startling simplicity, pointing us to Jesus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0
\nAnd if you listen to his homilies from this week…that is still exactly what he’s doing.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember? My blog archival page from April 2005, in which I was liveblogging the election, and readers were reacting – it really is great to read. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to temptation and delete the blog to save my $4 a month I still pay to Typepad! 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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