About
This blog exists to help people come home to the ancient faith of their grandparents and forefathers — and to share the spirituality of the Christian East, a tradition that has quietly held what much of modern Christianity has misplaced.
We live in a moment that is, by most measures, the most hostile to religion in living memory. A lot of us grew up without much of any of it. A lot of us were told the faith of our families was something to outgrow. And yet, somewhere quietly underneath all of that, the ancient truth the Apostles taught is still here — still being lived, still being taught, still on offer to anyone who would walk back through the door.
If you grew up without religion, or with religion that drifted away from you, or simply with a vague sense that your grandparents believed something meaningful but you never quite knew what — this blog is especially for you.
Three conversations that started this blog
The lady at the church I was visiting
A few years ago, in the middle of a long season of church-hopping, a kind woman at one of the churches I was visiting told me I should read the Bible, cover to cover. She said it would "get the Catholic out of me."
Fair enough, I thought. I hadn't picked up a Bible since my Sunday School days, more than twenty years earlier. So I did it. I read the whole thing. Then I read it again. I followed three different "Bible in a year" podcasts. I listened to every theological podcast I could find. I visited every church I could find in my area.
The result was the opposite of what she had hoped. I found myself coming back home — to the ancient truth of the Apostles, to the Byzantine Catholic tradition I had been raised in but never really seen, to a church much older and much richer than the version of it I had quietly left behind in college.
The conversation with my wife
A second conversation, this one with my wife. She mentioned in passing that her entire family had always been Protestant. I responded — cheekily — that if you keep going back far enough, they were all Catholic.
It was a throwaway line. But it's true — almost every Western Christian, given enough generations, has Catholic ancestors. The recent past has obscured a much longer story, one that belongs to all of us, whatever pew our parents and grandparents happened to sit in. Reclaiming that older story is one of the things this blog is for.
The woman cutting my hair
The third conversation happened while I was getting my hair cut. The stylist and I got to talking about religion, and she told me her own story. She hadn't grown up going to church. She knew almost nothing about God. She didn't really understand what being Catholic meant. But she knew her grandparents had all been Catholic — and she was looking for something. Something deeper. Something steadier. Something true.
This blog is for her. And for everyone like her — anyone who suspects that the ancient faith of the Apostles is holding something real. It's for the person who grew up with religion that the modern world has forgotten and watered down. It's for the person who grew up not believing, but knowing there is something out there, and that this something is worth learning about. It's for the person seeking a religion that embraces the existence of the soul, instead of quietly writing spirituality out of religion. If that sounds like you, then welcome home.
About the blog
The articles here try to do a few simple things consistently. Lead with what Scripture actually says — read the way the apostolic Church read it. Draw on the long, continuous tradition of the apostolic churches when it illuminates something. Show the shared unity of faith that the ancient Christians held in the Church that Christ Himself physically established. And to do all of this while answering the modern questions we all grapple with in our lives — like why do we die?
The Byzantine Catholic tradition has never been about scoring points against other Christians — and neither is this blog. We seek only what the apostolic churches have always sought: the ancient, shared faith. When the Eastern view differs from more familiar Western framings, the goal isn't to win an argument; it's to recover the older inheritance that all of us, somewhere in our family trees, came from.
A note from the author
I'm not a theologian, a priest, or a scholar — I'm a software developer who was raised Byzantine Catholic in the Eparchy of Parma (Ruthenian tradition), drifted in college, and stumbled home in my thirties. The articles here are an attempt to write down what I was looking for, but couldn't easily find, when I was coming back.
Where to start
If you're new and don't know where to begin, the curated path is the Core Faith series — a structured walk through the foundations of the Byzantine Catholic tradition.
Start here
Core Faith — Part 1: What Is the Byzantine Catholic Church?
The first article in a 9-part curated reading path through what the Byzantine Catholic tradition believes, how it worships, and where the deeper theology lives. Each article links to the next; you can read straight through or pause as you go.
If you'd rather browse, the articles page lists everything chronologically, and the topics page sorts by subject. The site also has an RSS feed.
Ready to visit a parish? Use the parish finder to locate a Byzantine Catholic church near you.
Thanks for reading. Welcome home.