Rethinking His Religion: A Southern Catholic's Awakening (Great read)

[Are_grits_groceries]

This man attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie, feeling that church deserved such respect. I kept a certain distance from him. I’d arrived at college determined to be honest about my sexual orientation and steer clear of people who might make that uncomfortable or worse. I figured him for one of them.

About two years ago, out of nowhere, he found me. His life, he wanted me to know, had taken interesting turns. He’d gone into medicine, just as he’d always planned. He’d married and had kids. But he’d also strayed from his onetime script. As a doctor, he has spent a part of his time providing abortions.
<snip>
I’m struck more than anything else by how much searching and asking and reflecting he’s done, this man I’d so quickly discounted, who pledged a fraternity when he was still on my radar and then, when he wasn’t, quit in protest over how it had blackballed a Korean pledge candidate and a gay one.

Because we never really talked after freshman year, I didn’t know that, nor did I know that after graduation he ventured to a desperately poor part of Africa to teach for a year. College, he recently told me, had not only given him a glimpse of how large the world was but also shamed him about how little of it he knew.
<snip>
He grew up in the South, in a setting so homogenous and a family so untroubled that, he said, he had no cause to question his parents’ religious convictions, which became his. He said that college gave him cause, starting with me. Sometime during freshman year, he figured out that I was gay, and yet I didn’t conform to his prior belief that homosexuals were “deserving of pity for their mental illness.” I seemed to him sane and sound.
<snip>
(great story at the end)
more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/bruni-a-catholic-classmate-rethinks-his-religion.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

There is hope.

[glowing]

1. Is there a wonder Rick Santorum attacked college kids? It tends to enhance one's

world experience. Also, traveling to other parts of the world and seeing how other people live under differing systems is also a good eye opening lesson. More Americans should travel and have a chance to as young adults to attend college or roam a bit without being saddled to enormous debts.

I actually wish as part of a govt initiative that every senior year student be allowed to live abroad in an exchange of some sort. It would help them to figure out who they are and what the world looks like outside of their world view. It certainly helped me to live with a family for a few weeks in Spain outside of Madrid. Its interesting to hang out with other people of your age in different places. It takes no time at all before everyone is asking questions of how the other one lives and how to swear properly in a different language LOL. (teacher's don't teach you that one.)

[tex-wyo-dem]

9. What you said...

" actually wish as part of a govt initiative that every senior year student be allowed to live abroad in an exchange of some sort."

I couldn't agree with you more.

This was actually part of the reason JFK established the Peace Corps, to give young people the opportunity to experience other parts of the world at the same time help others less fortunate.

JFK was a very forward thinking man.

[GoCubsGo]

2. Thank you for posting this.

The man in this article reminds me a little bit of myself. Ironically, my departure from the Catholic Church and religion, in general, started at a Jesuit University. And, it ended down here in the Buybull Belt. No trips to Africa, but it was the same inconsistencies and hypocrisies sent me packing. It was the Jesuits who got me to start thinking for myself and questioning, and the fundamentalist evangelicals that opened my eyes to all the other garbage associated with religion. I'll never forget being in a grocery store one Sunday morning many years ago. A man was commenting to the seafood counter clerk how she would "never get to Heaven by working on a Sunday", clueless to the fact that she was there because people like him were shopping on Sundays. I guess only heathens are supposed to operate the stores on Sunday?

I wonder what ol' Frothy Santorum would say about the fact that the good, Catholic Jesuits corrupted me at one of their universities, along with many of my classmates. I am kind of surprised he went to a public college instead of a Catholic one.

[CanonRay]

3. "how much searching and asking and reflecting he's done"

Seems to me this is the key...most RW people I know NEVER engage in this kind of thought. Their ideas are set in 10 layers of reinforced, bomb-proof concrete. The few, a very few in my estimation, actually examine their lives, change their ideas.

[izquierdista]

4. Their ideas are received ideas

As in received wisdom. What is revealed from a higher authority. There is never any opportunity to observe, experiment, or confirm for oneself. To do so would be to use scientific thinking, which is the opposite of religious thinking.

[CanonRay]

5. Good point!

[SJohnson]

6. Excellent Read!

Thanks for posting - really good

[arthritisR_US]

7. My only regret with reading this is

that it ended. Absolutely wonderful to read, what a beautiful man. Well written and well worth the read! Thank you

[Dawson Leery]

8. I know of two women like this:

One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled.

She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”

A week later, she was back on her ladder.