Reading Max Lindenman never fails to give delight. I love that he's willing to struggle with reading Tolkien as a kind of Catholic assignment, one a convert to the Catholic church can't possibly fail to complete if he expects a decent grade in Catholic 101. And that he wonders whether Portnoy and other anti-heroes, who pointed a way for him through the wilderness of adolescence, taught him to bang his head against tradition, such that he--naturally!--became a Catholic in the period of JPII and BXVI so he could find a tradition to bang his head against.
