Last night, in the midst of an IM conversation with The American Conservative’s associate editor, Michael Brendan Dougherty, I interjected that I had to go. Metro was running with major delays again (have they been on time yet this month?) and I was coming dangerously close to missing my connection with the older-fashioned trains of the Virginia Railway Express that ultimately take me out to the boonies where I live.

Mr Dougherty, gentleman that he is, made an offer I couldn’t refuse: “Want a ride?”

His office being just a mile or two from my own, we had been discussing getting together for nearly a year, through e-mail exchanges and brief bouts of instant messaging. We’d never actually met, but I had been following him since he was a blogger and aspiring writer, and he would occasionally check in on my writing as well. To be honest, I believe that Mr. Dougherty is simply a better writer than I am (though we share a penchant for a certain sort of narrative style) and his success as a writer at the ripe young age of 26 - four years my junior - is an impressive (and enviable, in my opinion) accomplishment. I firmly believe he is one of the most promising new political writers on the scene, and others agree. He’s even had his share of journalistic fame.

So I was happy to discuss the topic du jour with him - “How Catholic is Too Catholic?” It’s a question that writers like he and I face, the internal compass trying to decide if we are Catholic writers or writers who happen to be Catholic. Speaking for myself, I’d prefer the latter, though admittedly I spend more time on topics surrounding my faith than I do on just about anything else. It’s a doggedly central part of my thinking, and one that always makes easy blog fodder. Add to that my recruitment into the Inside Catholic team, and I could easily get pigeonholed, despite the fact that I’d like to branch out quite a bit more broadly in my writing. I am a man of many interests, and not all my work needs to be an overt or implicit exposition of my Catholicism.

We discussed this and a number of other topics on the way to my house, where Jamie had cooked up a simple but delightful Chinese favorite: tomato beef over jasmine rice. Invited to stay, Mr. Dougherty graciously accepted, and we made a nice evening out of it, progressing from dinner to cookies (Kiana’s specialty) to my probably quite badly made Gin martinis.

Without a doubt, Michael Dougherty is the nice guy, snazzy dresser, and all around decent fellow that everyone says he is. The Internet allows us to know the writers that we read or the people we correspond with electronically only to a point - a 2-dimensional look at a 3-dimensional person - so it was a pleasure to finally make his acquaintance in person.

At the end of the evening, the question lingered: “How Catholic is Too Catholic?” We had covered a lot of ground, discussed theories, and shared preferences, but ultimately came out of the discussion without a conclusion.

The fact remains that the balancing act between being a paleoconservative, traditional Catholic individual, and being a writer whose work can sell anywhere (and whose views won’t somehow wind up getting them blacklisted or in trouble at their day job) is a tough one. There’s a lot to be said for being able to hold strong views that don’t alienate you from a culture hostile to those views, and the key is the way you construct your arguments and your public persona. Information is always available on the constant-cache of the Internet; and any ill-conceived rant a writer posts or publishes in a moment of youthful angst can be held against them years in the future.

We’re the transparency generation, playing with a different set of rules than those info-warriors that came before us. In some sense, our peers are more accepting of others’ missteps (after all, they probably put up those drunken photos on Facebook that nearly got them fired that one time) than our parents’ generation would have been, but are also more aware of how to find our mistakes, should we have been rash enough to make them public.

And trust me - if you make your name doling out opinions that are in the political and cultural minority, you’re more likely than not to have some real doozies. My philosophy is, you have to adapt and survive, and if you know your record shows a lack of brain-mouth discretion in the past, you can’t hide from it - you have to carry that baggage with you, and try to thin out its impact as you go.

I suppose we couldn’t settle on an answer because, in the end, there really isn’t a simple one.

Filed under: A Writer's Life For Me, Catholicism, Fame/I'm Gonna Live Forever, Politics, The Blogosphere