After several years of posting on a daily (or near-daily) basis, I'm going to scale back my presence on this blog, moving to a weekly pattern. The quotes, photos, and prayers will be going away, at least for a little while (reasons for this shift can be found below). Nevertheless, a few things will remain the same:
- I will continue posting new sections of my Evangeliad poem, partly because I've found that keeping a scheduled posting habit has kept me moving on the project, and it likely has at least a couple more years to go. Those poems will now be posted near the end of each week.
- Sermon podcasts will no longer be posted directly to this blog, but you can easily access them by going to my church's website (calaisbaptist.org), and clicking the "Sermons" tab. There is a permanent link to the church website on the sidebar of this blog (if you're viewing the desktop version of the page).
- I will also occasionally post essays, though not on an every-week basis. Essays were one of the staples of this blog a few years back, and I had moved away from them because of time constraints, but I found that I greatly enjoyed the handful of essays I wrote after coming home from my England trip. Every once in a while, then, you can expect to see an essay (and maybe, just maybe, a new hymn!).
Two main motivators are driving this shift: first, my schedule has changed significantly in the past two years, making an every-day posting habit difficult to maintain. I'm now working part-time teaching classes and writing books in addition to my pastoral ministry (in fact, I have a new book manuscript under contract right now, and it will command much of my time until December). Reducing the time given to the blog will enable me to take one small thing off the mountain of little demands that make up my life. At the same time, it will also free up the blog to highlight some of the projects that develop on a more sporadic basis.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I'm committed to radically cutting down the amount of time I spend looking at digital screens this year. This week marks two years since the beginning of my oblate novitiate (and nearly a year as a full monastic oblate). I'm working to bring some of the practices of my life more in line with the wisdom of the monastic tradition, which is characterized by patience, listening, and leaving margins of silence and contemplation in one's daily life, to more readily recall oneself to the awareness of God's presence. The ubiquity of screens in our modern life--from smartphones to laptops to TVs hooked up to streaming platforms--tends to work the other way, filling up all the available margins with an incessant stream of articles, shows, games, posts, and trivialities. I'll still have to use my computer for necessary research and communication, and I'll still engage in watching an occasional show, movie, or sporting event as a communal activity with others, but that's where I'm drawing the line. For the next year, I'll be reducing my exposure to screens down to just two roles: necessary tasks and communal hospitality.
Cutting back on some of my blog-posting schedule will enable me to stay away from the computer more consistently, and the creative pieces that I'll continue to post--poems, and the occasional essay or hymn--are things that can be entirely composed elsewhere (by hand or with my gloriously old-fashioned word-processor, which features nothing but a four-line text display). So look for (at the very least) a weekly Evangeliad post, and an occasional extra piece every now and then. I'll of course have weeks during vacations where I'm not posting anything, and I'll probably not announce those breaks formally anymore; just look for the normal posts to resume in a week or two weeks' time if there's a gap. I'll also certainly continue using the blog to keep readers apprised of new books and articles that may be coming out shortly, so keep an eye out for that.