About Patrick Sweeney...

Thanks for reading my blog.  I will be updating this page and sharing more information with you as I have the time.

I'm a Catholic.  I don't like labels, so don't call me conservative, liberal, traditional, or any common label.  I looked around for some good names, and they were all taken, so I gave myself a label, which I like, because I picked it.  "extreme" simply means that I'm faithful, serious, and willing to take risks to share in the mission of the Catholic Church.

I volunteer.  I'm a lector, usher, catechist, speaker etc. basically whatever I'm called on to do.  So I give my time, talent, and treasure to the parish, diocese, or whoever calls on me in the Lord's name,

I came to blogging by reading Mark Shea's blog (he is a full-time author and evangelist) and Rod Dreher (senior writer for National Review).  I don't have those credentials.  My day job is developing software for a Wall Street firm, so some discussion of technology and financial markets will find its way into the blog.

I was born in, grew up in, and now live in New York City.  I'm the son of Irish immigrants and that experience will be in the blog too.

The pictures in the left column of the blog are: Brooklyn Prep High School, and a picture that I thought comes very close to my current appearance.

In between college (1974) and working at Digital Equipment Corporation (1976) I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo, West Africa, a small country which is a former German (through 1919)/French (through 1960) colony.  My task was to build a string of single room schools and hospitals in isolated areas using materials donated by the United States with local labor  (My former boss Kelly Morris has a page that explains this in detail).  In the middle of my second year I contracted malaria and related to that a detached retina, so I was blind and near death and then evacuated to West Germany (U.S. Army 97th General Hospital) and spent a few months there getting healthy enough to the return to the United States.  Every few years someone in Togo lets me know what's been happening to the people I helped and who helped me.  The Peace Corps still has volunteers in Togo.

added October 3, 2003

This blog is my own point of view on current events and themes in popular culture. There are a lot of blogs out there. Here's what different about me: I'm not involved in a full-time Catholic ministry. I'm a Wall Street information technologist, a software developer. I live with my wife and our two kids, now 10 and 17. We have a son who is 21 and a college senior. So I'm connected to that strange and wonderful world of teenagers.

As a blogger I'm fully engaged in the popular culture. I'm not shy and I'm sending stuff off to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and letters to the editor, and I've even called to get on WABC talk radio. I won't be corrupted by the popular culture and no one in my family will be either.

So some people have sort of a Catholic bunker mentality, like living as far away as one can from a big city. I'm in the middle of the world's capital. The Pope comes to my neighborhood when the Pope wants to address the world where the world is meeting. Another big aspect of this geography is the constant reminder of the 9/11/2001 which is fading from the memory of many Americans.