Ten years ago, I was nearly 30 and over $90,000 in debt. I had spent my twenties trying to build an interesting life; I had two degrees; I had lived in New York and the Bay Area; I had worked in a series of interesting jobs; I spent a lot of time traveling overseas. But I had also made a couple of critically stupid and shortsighted decisions. I had invested tens of thousands of dollars in a master’s degree in landscape architecture that I realized I didn’t want halfway through. While maxing out my student loans, I had also collected a toxic mix of maxed-out credit cards, personal loans, and $2,000 I had borrowed from my father for a crisis long since forgotten. My life consisted of loan deferments and minimum payments.

Like so many other lost children, I had fallen into a career in IT. The work was boring, but led to jobs with cool organizations—a lot of jobs, because I kept quitting them. As soon as I had any money in the bank, I’d quit and go backpacking in Southeast Asia. My adventures were life-changing experiences, but I was eventually left with a CV that was pretty scattershot.

My luck securing interesting jobs dried up. In 2001, I ended up living with my dad for four months and working at a banking infrastructure company in suburban Pittsburgh. I should have taken that as a warning that I needed to get it together, but I thought it was just an aberration. It was not.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Personal Finance • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Europe • Croatia • Middle East • Iraq

If religion, ethics and a moral conscience are banished from informing the public realm, "then the crisis of the West has no remedy and Europe is destined to collapse in on itself" and risk falling prey to every form of tyranny, he said in an audience with Croatia's political, religious, cultural, business and academic representatives.

Free and just democracies thrive when citizens' consciences have been formed by love and Christianity's "logic of gift" in which the good of the whole human family is sought after, not narrow self-interests, the pope said June 4 in Zagreb's ornate Croatian National Theater.

"The quality of social and civil life and the quality of democracy depend in large measure" on all citizens possessing and exercising a conscience that listens, not to subjective feelings, but to an objective truth that recognizes one's duty to God and all human beings, he said.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Europe • Croatia • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI has celebrated Mass, focusing on family values, before tens of thousands of people in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.

He spoke of the "disintegration" of the family, and urged couples not to give in to a "secularised mentality" of living together instead of marrying.

He later visited the tomb of a controversial wartime cardinal.

This is Pope Benedict's first visit to the staunchly Catholic nation and he has received a warm welcome.

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Filed under: * International News & Commentary • Europe • Croatia • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI