A Major Announcement Concerning the Blog

Effective immediately you will now notice on the upgraded blog page that when you hit the subscribe button you will now have two options. As always, there is a "free" option where you will continue to have access to all of my podcasts, as well as email notifications with links to my writing for The National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report, and a few other venues. So nothing will change in that regard and most of what I post will remain free, just as it is now.

But the second option that has been added is a paid subscription. The subscription is $8 a month or $80 for a year. This paid subscription option will give you access to a once a week long form theological blog essay of the kind I used to write all the time, as well as some occasional rantings and ravings on the news of the day. This move to paid subscriptions will allow me to be compensated for the amount of time that is required to produce the essays. I will never "monetize" the blog, putting the entire thing behind a paywall. I hate that. But the fact is, my expenses for the blog have grown exponentially and in order to spend the time necessary for the long form essays – time that could be spent writing for venues that help me pay my bills – I need to have some small compensation for the time spent.

I will also still have the tax deductible "donation" option with a link to our nonprofit, that helps pay for things like "SpesFest".

I started this blog about seven years ago now and it began as a series of long form essays wherein I opined on all manner of things. The focus was always on defending Vatican II and promoting ressourcement/Communio theology as the best hermeneutic for interpreting and properly retrieving the Council. The long form essays are the roots of this blog. But as the podcasts exploded and went viral, and as my writings for various online journals took off, the long form essays eventually vanished. I think that is a shame. And I want to get back to it. It is where I really get to be uncensored without worrying about the sensitivities of the various audiences I address in the other publications. But I need your help.

I am so bad at this. I hate asking for money. But I do promise you that if you go the paid subscription route you will be getting access to "unfiltered Larry", as my close friend Rodney Howsare calls it. I am a deeply flawed Catholic. But I would be even more flawed if I weren't a Catholic. And in my unfiltered essays I try to be blunt and brutally honest without pietistical sugar coatings.

I will be posting the first long form essay for paid subscribers tomorrow. The topic is the problem of evil (theodicy) and will eventually be a three part essay. Part one will set the table so to speak and then the downstream conclusions will follow. After that I will start a new series on the Modernist crisis wherein I will outline what Modernism actually is and what it is not. Whenever I post a new essay subscribers will get an email letting them know.

And one last thing. The old combox on my former platform rarely got any comments. One or two at most per article or podcast. And yet it cost me a bundle to keep the platform. So from now on only paid subscribers will be able to comment on my articles. I figured this is no big deal since so few commented anyway and it helps me to maintain some semblance of a combos despite the low numbers of commenters.

Cheers!

Larry