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U p F r o n t
UBIQUITOUS QUESTION MARKS
By Karl Keating
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Last year (or was it the year before? I can't remember now) I became one of the "experts" at the EWTN web site. I've been a little embarrassed by the title, since I consider myself a fairly well read amateur and not an expert, but that's a matter of public relations that I'll leave in EWTN's hands.
When I first was asked to handle the apologetics forum for EWTN, I thought, "Why not?" The (uncompensated) task would be little more than an incidental, just a few minutes a week. After all, how many people could be browsing the "experts" section? Well, quite a few, as it turns out. Most months I have been answering between two and three hundred questions at the EWTN site, and, behind the scenes, I handle another hundred or so that either aren't proper questions (some people just like to vent) or are inappropriate for public display.
Admission and gripe: A few people seem to have too much time on their hands; they send multiple questions each week. Most of those questions I don't bother to answer, and I feel no guilt about it. I don't envision the forum as a crutch for those too lazy to do a little reading on their own. It's for people who likely have searched for an answer and haven't been able to find one. Them I am pleased to assist. The others should get library cards.
Anyway, I estimate I process, in one way or another, up to four hundred questions monthly for EWTN. (Sometimes I wish I had made arrangements to be paid on a piecework basis. Now let's see-at two dollars an answer, in a year I could earn .)
The EWTN questions aren't the only ones I receive electronically. Lots of people send me questions by e-mail. I handle about two hundred a month that way. And then there are the questions that come in the old-fashioned way, on paper. They're in third-no, make that fourth-place. Beating them out in quantity, I suppose, are the questions I answer on "Catholic Answers Live."
When the radio program began, last January, I decided that Tuesday would be "my" day. I began by working up discrete topics for most of my weekly appearances-papal infallibility, Mary's perpetual virginity, the inspiration of the Bible-but quickly saw how time consuming that was. I found that I more enjoyed the occasional "open forum" question-and-answer session: easier to prepare (no preparation possible, actually, since there's no telling what topics questions might be on) and, it seemed, of more interest to the audience. So, for the last few months, I've turned Tuesdays into nothing but Q&A days. As I tell the listeners, only partly tongue in cheek, I'll take any question on any non-controversial topic-which leaves out politics, sports, and soap operas. But anything on religion is okay. On most shows about twenty questions get answered.
In sum, I answer about seven hundred questions a month. I never thought it would come to this. For me, the question mark has become omnipresent. I just can't seem to escape it.
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