About the Authors

Thomas Baker is publisher of Commonweal. Born in Gary, Indiana, he began working on liturgy while part of the campus ministry at Princeton University. After graduation he began a career in business journalism and publishing in New York and later back in Princeton, while staying active as a liturgy-committee member and minister in several parishes. For 17 years, he worked in marketing and management for The Wall Street Journal, including heading the startup of The Wall Street Journal Online. His wife Sue McSorley, whom he married in 1979 and also met at Princeton, is an attorney, lector, cantor, and infallible critic of homilies; together they have three exceptional now-grown daughters (Kate, Meg, and Colleen). For the past 21 years, he has also served as a permanent deacon at St. David the King Parish in Princeton Junction, NJ, where he is a regular homilist, baptizer and RCIA catechist. He has even written a little book for Twenty-Third Publications about being a deacon, if you’re interested. (It’s also out of print, it seems.)

Frank Ferrone is Professor of Physics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Born in New York City, he became involved in liturgical music, and eventually liturgy, during graduate work at Princeton University. His professional career took him to Washington, DC, in 1976 as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, at which time he became involved with the vibrant expression of the liturgical arts at Georgetown’s campus ministry. In 1980, after completion of his postdoctoral appointment, he joined the Physics faculty of Drexel University. As an avocation, he became liturgical music director at the University’s Newman Center. It was there that he met Mimi Mahon, who had come to Philadelphia for graduate study in nursing at Penn, where she ultimately received her Ph.D. They married in 1983. Her flute, voice and general musicianship enhanced the liturgies at the Newman Center for many years and their two children Stephanie and Adam were baptized in its chapel. After moving to suburban Philadelphia, they joined Our Mother of Good Counsel parish, where Frank returned to the world of liturgical music and liturgy planning and evaluation.

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