Welcome to Standing on My Head!
This blog used to be hosted at Patheos, but I created my own site because I wanted to get away from the increased commercialism. I also wanted to return to the more personal and relational style that I first had when blogging. As the readership increased at Patheos we lost the personal contact. I had to close the comments box because there were simply too many comments to moderate and extremists were using my combox as their soapbox.
Having a subscription gateway helps us return to that smaller, more personal blog. The main blog posts will still be free for everyone to read. My archived material from Patheos is now here, and will also be free. However there is a donor-subscriber section. You can support this blog and enjoy extra content at two different levels. Check it out here to see what is reserved for donor-subscribers.
My blog, writing and speaking is my contribution to the New Evangelization. I encourage you to subscribe to help keep me blogging. Your subscription fee helps me pay for the design, maintenance, promotion and hosting costs of this website, and helps the Longenecker family budget.
Thanks again for visiting and God bless you.
Standing on My Head
“A scene is often most clearly seen when it is seen upside down.” G.K.Chesterton
The Magi and Other Magicians
Every good fantasy story needs a magician. Dorothy encounters the Wizard of Oz. Frodo travels with Gandalf, Harry Potter has his Dumbledore and Arthur his Merlin. A magus is a wise man, a shaman
Ideologies, Ideas, Idols and Insanity
It seems to me that the only thing more commonplace than religion is false religion, and the most convincing form of false religion is an ideology. What is an ideology? An ideology is an idee
Avoid the Drains
Some years ago I went to a seminar about relationships. The speaker’s mantra was, “Avoid the drains.” By “drains” he meant a certain type of negative person in your life. A “drain” is a
Offering it Up, Billy Graham, God’s Existence and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
Four articles are uploaded to the Archived Articles section of the blog today. For those who are new readers, about once a week I load three or four articles I have written over the
For 2019 Climb Aboard the Catholic Roller Coaster
My friend George Weigel has written a prescient article over at First Things predicting a bad year for Catholics. With those sobering but consoling thoughts in mind, I offer a few speculations about 2019,
Twelve Things I Like About the Novus Ordo Mass
Q: What's the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist? A: You can negotiate with a terrorist. The old chestnut used to be applied to the trendy former priests who became liturgy directors of
