Hello and thanks for visiting my site! My wife, Suzanne, and I are life-professed Lay Dominicans, and I built this site as a way to live out my vocation to bring people to Christ, especially through meditation and contemplation on his Word.
The youngest of eight children, I was baptized into the Catholic Church at eight days old. Being Catholic has always been at the core of my identity, despite those teenage and young adult years when I strayed from the Church and certainly from the life of virtue! But the greatest blessing God has given me is my wife, Suzanne – also a lifelong Catholic. She and I embarked on the journey to deepen our faith lives and commitment to Christ around the year 2016.
I had been a longtime musician at St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Newman Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, since I started graduate school in 1997. This parish is run by Dominicans from the Western Province of the US, based in Oakland, CA, so I had grown to love the thoughtfulness of their homilies and the overall charism of the Dominican Order.
For years, I had been transitioning away from the high-energy praise and worship music we had been playing in the early 2000s, towards a style more integrated and respectful of the movements of the liturgy. When some Polish Dominicans were assigned to St. Catherine’s, I really made this transition under their guidance, and was introduced to some fantastic chant and Dominican liturgical stylings from their 800-year-old tradition.
So, around 2016, I had already been infused in the Dominican charism for about 20 years when the pastor asked if we would be interested in helping a new Lay Dominican chapter start in the parish. Suzanne and I went on a week-long silent retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, and our hours of chanting the Divine Office with the Benedictine monks and contemplating the scriptures really brought us to the conviction that belonging to a third order was the right thing for us.
After our years of initial formation, we both took on leadership roles in the chapter – Suzanne as prioress and me as Formation Director. I loved helping new initiates learn about the Dominican Order and delve more deeply into the scriptures and their faith. (See one of my multi-year study syllabi here.) During this time, I launched this blog site, initially entitled “Discerning Dominican,” and now I have added to it with some resources to help those wanting to learn more about being a Lay Dominican.
I hope that you find something useful or thoughtful on this site that spurs you onto a deeper relationship with God and the Catholic Church. May you be blessed by the Holy Spirit in your life!
