Resident Theologian
About the Blog
I joined Micro.blog!
Why I joined + thoughts on Micro.blog > Twitter et al.
After years of hearing Alan Jacobs sing the praises of Micro.blog, I created an account this week. Not only that, I’m able to host my micro blog on this website’s domain; so instead of eastbrad.micro.blog, the URL is micro.bradeast.org. In fact, I added “Micro” as an option on the header menu above, sandwiched in between “Media” and “Blog.” In a sense you’re technically “leaving” this site, but it doesn’t feel like it. In this I was also following Alan’s lead. Thank you, ayjay “own your own turf” dot org!
Now: Why did I join micro.blog? Don’t I already have enough to do? Don’t I already write enough? Isn’t my goal to be offline as much as possible? Above all, wasn’t I put on earth to do one name thing, namely, warn people away from the evils of Twitter? Aren’t I the one who gave it up in June 2020, deactivated it for Lent in spring 2022, then (absent-mindedly) deleted it a year later by not renewing the account? And didn’t regret it one bit? Don’t I think Twitter and all its imitators (Threads, Notes, et al) unavoidably addict their users in the infinite scroll while optimizing for all the worst that original sin has to offer?
What, in a word, makes micro blogging (and Micro.blog in particular) different?
Here’s my answer, in three parts: why I wanted to do this; how I’m going to use it; and what Micro.blog lacks that makes it distinct from the alternatives.
First, I miss what Twitter offered me: an accessible public repository of links, images, brief commentary, and minor thoughts—thoughts I had nowhere else to put except Twitter, and thoughts that invariably get lost in the daily shuffle. I tend to call this main blog (the one you’re reading right now) a space for “mezzo blogging”: something between Twitter/Tumblr (i.e., micro writing and sharing) and essays, articles, and books (i.e., proper macro writing). I suffer from graphomania, and between my physical notebook and texting with friends, I still have words to get out of my system; minus all the nonsense on Twitter, the reason I stayed as long as I did was that. (Also the connections, friends, and networking, but the downsides of gaining those things were and are just too great, on any platform.)
Second, I am going to use my micro blog in a certain way. I’m not going to follow anyone. I’m not going to look at my timeline. I’m not going to let it even show me follows, mentions, or replies. It’s not going to be a place for interaction with others. I’m not going to dwell or hang out on it. In a sense I won’t even be “on” it. I have and will have no way of knowing if even a single soul on earth reads, clicks, or finds my writing there. It exists more or less for one person: me. Its peripheral audience is anyone who cares to click from here to there or check in on me there from time to time.
What am I going to be doing, then? Scribbling thoughts that run between one and four sentences long; sharing links to what I’m reading online; sharing books and images of what I’m reading IRL; in short, putting in a single place the grab bag of “minor” writing that pulls me daily in a hundred directions: email, messages, WhatsApp, even Slack (once upon a time). E.g., right now I’m enthralled by the NBA playoffs, but not only does no one who reads this blog care about that; my thoughts are brief, ephemeral, and fleeting. But I have them, and I want to remember what they were! So now I put them there, on the micro blog.
I don’t, for what it’s worth, have any kind of organizational system for note-taking, journaling, or any such thing. I do keep a physical journal, but it’s mostly a place for first-draft brainstorming; it’s not much of an archive. I don’t use Drafts or Tot or Notes or Scrivener or even an iPad or tablet of any kind. Nothing is housed on the cloud; nothing is interconnected, much less interoperable. I’ve always toyed with trying Evernote—I know people who love it—but it’s just never appealed to me, and I don’t think I’m the type who would benefit from it or use it well. My mental habits and ideas and writing instincts are too diffuse. At the same time, I love the idea of a one-stop shop for little thoughts, for minor scribbles, in brief, for micro blogging. That’s how I used Twitter. I ultimately just got fed up with that broken platform’s pathologies.
So, third, what makes Micro.blog different? In a sense I’ve already answered that question. It’s not built to do what Twitter, Threads, and Substack Notes are meant to do. There’s no provocation or stimulation. There’s no hellish algorithm. It doesn’t scale. It’s not about followers or viral hits. It’s self-selecting, primarily because you have to pay for it and secondarily because it’s not a way to build an audience of thousands (much less millions). It’s for people like me who want a digital room of their own, so to speak, without the assault on my attention, or the virus of virality, or the infinite scroll, or the stats (follows, like, RTs) to stroke or shrink my ego, or the empty promise that the more I post the more books I’ll eventually sell. No publisher or agent is going to tout my Micro.blog to justify an advance. It’s just … there. For me, and max, for a few other dozen folks.
And anyway, I’m giving it a 30-day free trial. No commitments made just yet. I already like it enough that I expect to fork over $5/month for the privilege. But we’ll see.
Either way, this is all one long way of saying: See, I’m no Luddite. I use Squarespace and Instapaper and Firefox and Spotify and Libby and Letterboxd and now Micro.blog. I might even get to ten whole quality platforms one day.
Clearly, I don’t hate the internet. I’m just picky.
2023: blogging
The year in blogging, with links galore.
I published about 70 blog posts in 2023. That’s about one every five days. Sometimes a post is just a link to something I’ve written, or perhaps a quote. I used to do a lot more quotes from books and excerpt-links to stuff I’ve read online. But even the 10-20 minutes it takes to do that can be a timesuck at work, so I’ve backed off that habit.
Below, I’ve organized what I wrote on the blog this year into ten categories. Clearly, I use this blog primarily for two topics, church and technology, alongside other topics that intersect with them, such as politics, writing, and academia. Some of these should have been turned into essays, instead of dashed off in the half-hour before class; oh well.
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10. I wrote about Ahsoka, about how awful most Marvel TV shows look, and about the all-time best series finales for TV dramas.
9. I wrote about fantasy: how every epic fantasy series is finally a comedy (never a tragedy, and always a theodicy—whether or not the author is theistic, whether or not the fictional world features gods or divine justice), what it was like returning to Osten Ard (you should visit if you haven’t!), and how Chuck Klosterman’s decade-old theory about the NFL’s popularity applies to J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter.
8. Call this the miscellaneous bucket. I wrote about Calvin, election, and the zombie problem; Christianity East and West as a love story; how to define the little word “culture”; fitting punishment and penance for people whose “cancellation” is justified; how Christianity might be understood as a kind of conspiracy theory (let the reader understand); and an approach to reading widely in Christian tradition: twenty texts for twenty centuries.
7. I wrote about politics a lot less in 2023 than in years prior; I’m not sure why. In any case, here’s a reflection on Christians and politics (in response to Richard Beck), a brief set of thoughts in response to Reeves’ Of Boys and Men, and a long piece thinking about Catholicism, Protestantism, and why intellectuals convert to the former not the latter.
6. I wrote two posts on the Churches of Christ: one attempting to define them in a way that excludes other evangelical groups (spoiler: I failed) and another following up on the attempt.
5. If others write about kids these days, I write about church these days: about young Christians and their reading habits (or lack thereof); about the divide between biblicist and catholic Christianity; about ecclesial and societal decline; about the church’s reputation in a hostile culture; about reasons why people leave church; about catechesis, catechesis, catechesis; about a “loosening” over the last generation; about generational differences in church leadership (this one was good, I think); and about why you can’t die for a question.
4. I wrote about digital technology: about A.I. fallacies in the academy, about smartphones in the church, about the tech-church show, about living in a tech bubble (NB: it’s sarcastic), and about quitting social porn. I also sketched a digital decision tree for church leaders as well as outlining how to be efficient and timely with email and how, as a professor, to use one’s hours in the office. Finally, I wondered whether it’s possible, wise, or both to find a way to limit one’s entanglement with Silicon Valley’s Big Five—to whittle one’s investment and time down to a single company, thereby expanding into and dwelling within a single digital ecosystem while divesting from all the others. I went with, am going with, Apple. Will report.
3. I wrote about life in academia: about prestige scholarship (not what you think it is), about two ways of reading, about naming the errors of our influences and authorities, about publishing widely, even promiscuously, and about the smartest people I’ve known in my life. I also expanded John Shelton’s map of academic theology across the last three generations.
2. My longest and most heartfelt post, written for students and readers near and far, was about whether and how to get into a theology PhD program. I hope this one has legs; I think it can be helpful to young Christians considering the academic life.
1. By far the most-read blog post from the year was my typology of four tiers of Christian publishing. It keeps popping up online, in my inbox, at conferences, in conversations with publishers. I’m glad people have found it useful. I followed up with applying the tiers to preaching; acknowledging my debt to James Davison Hunter; giving advice(!) about writing for a Tier 2 audience; and pointing out the most popular names and authorities in evangelical Tier 2 writing (and how and why to avoid them).
How the world sees the church
A reflection on the church’s reputation. Should we expect or hope for our nonbelieving neighbors to think well of us? To see us as good news?
I’ve joked more than once on here that this blog is little more than an exercise in drafting off better blogs, particularly Richard Beck’s, Alan Jacobs’, and Jake Meador’s. Here’s another draft.
Last month Richard wrote a short post reflecting on a famous quote by Lesslie Newbigin. How, Newbigin asks, are people supposed to believe that the first and final truth of all reality and human existence is a victim nailed to a tree, abandoned and left for dead? He answers that “the only hermeneutic of the gospel,” the only interpretation of the good news about Jesus that makes any sense of him, “is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”
Richard then writes:
In a lecture this last semester I shared with my students, “I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’”
I pray for the day when our presence is proclaimed “Good News.” And this isn't just some vague aspiration, it's personal for me. Wherever I show up, I want that to be Good News, unconditionally, no matter who is in the space. And I push my church to have the same impact. This is the work, and really the only work, that should be occupying Christians and the church right now.
There’s a sense in which I couldn’t agree more with this aspiration. The body of Christ should strive to be, to incarnate, to offer the good news in the liberating power of Christ’s Spirit to any and all we encounter—first of all our neighbors and those with whom we interact daily. Yes and amen.
But there’s a reason Richard’s little post has been nagging at me from the back of my brain for the last six weeks. Here’s why.
It isn’t clear to me that the world should see the church and love, welcome, and celebrate her presence. It certainly isn’t clear to me that we should expect or hope that they do. The reason why is fourfold.
First, the only people who genuinely and reasonably see the church as a cause for celebration are believers. Think about it. Why would anyone unconvinced by the gospel be glad that the church exists? That she keeps hanging around? The only people plausibly happy about the church’s existence are Christians—and even many Christians are pretty ambivalent about it. Someone who loves and adores and honors and celebrates the church sounds a lot like someone who believes that Jesus is risen from the dead.
Second, what qualifies as “good news”? If I’m not a believer, I’m liable to find it pretty annoying to be surrounded by weirdos who worship an invisible Someone, follow strict rules about money and sex and power, and believe with all their heart that I should drop everything in my own life and sign up for their beliefs and way of life. Live and let live, you know? You mind your own and I’ll do the same. Yet Christian evangelism is a nonnegotiable, so a nonbelieving neighbor is sure (and right) to be perpetually low-key bored or bothered or both by the fact that the church “has the answer” for his life.
Third, the church is full of sinners. It’s a field hospital for sinsick folk, in the image of Pope Francis. The one thing about which we can be sure, then, is that the church is going to be monumentally, even fantastically dysfunctional. She’s going to cause a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration. That doesn’t mean we excuse in advance our failure to be Christlike to our neighbors. What it does mean is that the church’s appeal to her neighbors is likely going to be a lot less “What a beautiful community of Christ-followers—I love it when they’re around, even though they’re dead wrong about everything important!” and a lot more “What a motley crew of unimpressive failures—I guess they might even tolerate my own humiliating baggage, given what I can see about theirs even from the outside.”
Fourth and finally, Jesus wasn’t exactly “good news” to everyone he met. Now that claim requires some clarification. Jesus was the gospel incarnate. To meet Jesus was to come face to face with God’s good news. And yet if Jesus did anything it was turn off a whole lot of people. He elicited modest approval alongside a metric ton of opposition and murderous hostility. Not everyone saw Jesus coming and said, “Yes! Hooray! I love that guy!” Some did—and they were his followers. Plenty others said the opposite. We know why. Jesus confronted people with the truth: the truth about God and the truth about themselves. He forced on them a decision. And when they declined his invitation to follow him, he let them walk away, sad or sorrowful or resentful or angry or bitter. In short, Jesus was a sign of contradiction.
Pope Saint John Paul II borrowed that phrase, taken from Saint Luke, to describe the church. Like Christ, the church is a sign of contradiction in the world. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be happy about us—up until the point at which they join us. We should expect instead for them to ignore and resent us, at best; to reject and hate us, at worst. Not because of anything wrong with them. But because that’s how they treated Jesus, and he told us to expect the same treatment. They’re only being reasonable. If the gospel isn’t true, the church is a self-contradiction; of all people we should be most pitied. We should be mocked and scorned and excused from respectable society.
We’re only Christians, those of us who are, because we believe the gospel is true. I’m shocked when anyone has anything nice to say about the faith who isn’t already a fellow believer. As I see it, that’s the exception to the rule. So while we should strive to be faithful to Christ’s commission, to embody and enact the good news of his kingdom in this world, I don’t think we should hope or even try to be seen as good news. To be seen as good news amounts to conversion on the part of those doing the seeing. Let’s aim for conversion. Short of that, in terms of how we’re perceived I don’t know that we can expect much from our neighbors who don’t already believe.
Substack vs. blogging
What is the effect of Substack on writing? Is it the same as blogging, or are the two distinct forms? A post on why I’m still blogging, instead of writing for Substack.
Everyone has a Substack these days. Is that a good thing?
I’ve toyed with starting my own this past year. But I keep pulling up short. Here’s why.
Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.
Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative. It is inexpert, even when written by experts. It is off the cuff, even when polished and thought through.
And it is conversational, at its origins and in its form. It’s constantly linking, talking, referring, thinking out loud by bouncing ideas off of other ideas, typically found on other blogs. The so-called “blogosphere” really was a marvelous time to be on the internet. And it never died, though it shrunk, and its spirit lives on in various ways.
I understand how and why certain Substackers treat their new medium as a kind of Blog 2.0. But I don’t think it qualifies. Whatever Substack (along with its many peers and predecessors) is, and even if it is here to stay, it isn’t blogging.
I’m gratified to see Substack succeed, and I think all writers (and readers) should be grateful for its continued viability. The larger ecology of writers and writing has benefited tremendously from it. Writers are getting paid for their labor. Niche subjects are being funded by committed readers. I have more than a few friends who are finding and growing a readership by means of Substack. I subscribe to at least one or two dozen Substacks, and some of them make for essential reading.
But it’s not a blogging replacement, a blog-killer. And inasmuch as writers flock to Substack as the one real option today, I do think it has a certain distorting effect. For what Substack does is impose a certain discipline on its writers. The writing becomes formal, focused, and routinized. Writers produce at least one entry weekly, but typically two to three (or more) per week. Series abound. The word count is expansive. Not only are editors few and far between; quality, as in GRE grading, is tied to length. After all, it’s hard to justify subscriptions without regular, “meaty” posts.
Put charitably, it’s as though everyone is now a writer for Harper’s or First Things or the NYRB or NYT Magazine, only they produce copy at an outrageous rate. Put less charitably, the Substack-ification of writing makes an op-ed columnist out of everyone—except twice or thrice as prolific, minus the journalistic chops, and lacking in editorial oversight.
Hear me say: The net effect of Substack remains good. I don’t want it to go away. What I want is a diverse publishing environment, which includes but is not limited to Substack. Sure, it would be nice to lock in a concrete number of readers who chose to sign up for my newsletter. It would be lovely to start making one or two hundred bucks per month for my writing. It would be reassuring to my sensitive writer’s soul to know that, when I press “publish,” the post I’ve just crafted wasn’t just being launched into the void but into 50 or 500 or 1500 (or more!) inboxes the world over.
But my writing would suffer. I’d start writing like a Substacker. And I don’t want to write like that. I want to write books, journal articles, and magazine essays. And when I’m not doing that, I want to blog.
Kudos, then, and all good things to friends and colleagues who’ve found a home and an audience on Substack. As for me and my writing, however, we’ll stay here, on my own turf.
Welcome to the new blog, same as the old blog
Welcome, all! This is the new and permanent home of my blog, Resident Theologian, which used to be hosted at Blogspot. All the old posts have been imported here, and while I don’t anticipate deleting the old blog anytime soon, I may well do so at some point.
Welcome, all! This is the new and permanent home of my blog, Resident Theologian, which used to be hosted at Blogspot. All the old posts have been imported here, and while I don’t anticipate deleting the old blog anytime soon, I may well do so at some point.
There’s not much to offer by way of orientation: here’s the blog, same as the old, only housed on my personal site. If you want to know more about me, click the About tab above; if you want to know more about this blog, click the About the Blog link just below the blog title on the blog home page (how many times can I say “blog” in one sentence?).
What with the move, I’m hoping to ramp up my so-called mezzo-blogging this summer, perhaps as soon as next week. So stay tuned for that, and in any case, thanks for reading.
Addendum: If you are receiving this post via email, then you either signed up to do so on the Home page, or were already signed up to receive posts via email from the old blog. If there has been an error, or you no longer want to receive these posts in your inbox, just click “Unsubscribe” below, and you’ll be taken off the email list automatically (and permanently). Thanks for your patience as I navigate moving the blog from its old environs to these lovely new digs.
An update
Blogging in 2019
I did write "real" things for other venues (more on those here in the next few days), but that is not what I'd been hoping for or planning when I revived this blog in a new form two summers ago. Teaching 10 courses in 12 months and welcoming our fourth child into the world had a lot to do with that; I very much doubt I had the time to give to writing the occasional post on here, much less a couple posts per week.
But in 2019, I'd like to get back into the habit—especially of the 2-3-paragraph, bloggy sort of reflection that this venue's made for. I'm prolix in writing and talking both, and drafting a blog post always sounds time consuming, even if in reality it would take fewer than 15 minutes.
So here's one resolution of many for the coming year: less deferring and time-wasting, more mezzo-blogging (somewhere in between lengthy posts and micro-blogging). As always, thanks for reading.
“About This Blog"
I've created an "About This Blog" page here (along with a page for my CV here). Here's what you'll find there:
My name is Brad East, and I am a theologian, professor, and writer. As of fall 2017 I will be Assistant Professor of Theology in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University. I will walk in December with my PhD in Theology from Yale University, having earned my Master's of Divinity from Emory University in 2011 and my Bachelor's from Abilene Christian in 2007. For more academic credentials, see my CV.
I've been blogging on and off since summer 2006. I began to blog in earnest when I entered my Master's studies in Atlanta in 2008, a practice that continued through my course work in New Haven, but tailed off after that.
Why pick it up now? And what do I want this blog to be?
I'm one of the lucky ones in the academy, getting a great job offer right out of doctoral studies. My blogging had decreased to almost nil in the meantime not only because of increased demands on my time, not only because I was beginning to publish in scholarly outlets, but also because, well, the kind of "writing in public" that blogging is—brainstorming, seeing what sticks and what doesn't, more transparent, less professional—did not recommend itself to an applicant on the academic job market. And I simply did not want to be an unemployed blogger not yet "officially" in the field. That's not a knock on those who fit that description, only to say that it wasn't for me.
But now that this new chapter is upon me, it seemed like a good time to re-enter this part of my life, and this part of the internet. Using a blog to spitball, share thoughts, respond to pieces online (appreciatively as well as critically), create contacts, mark down ideas for later—so on and so forth—is both ideal for my intellectual temperament and useful for my writing habits. My new job is going to take over my academic publishing for a while, and I don't want my writerly muscles to atrophy in the process.
So what is this blog about? What will it be? The dumping ground for my thoughts about theology, the academy, literature, politics, pop culture, the NBA, and much more besides. The blogs I most admire and read most often are those—like Alan Jacob's, Richard Beck's, Peter Leithart's, Derek Rishmawy's, Ben Myers's, Freddie deBoer's, Timothy Burke's—that are intellectually curious, even promiscuous; willing to hazard a half-baked idea in the service of a helpful connection or new idea; value breadth and depth in equal measure; avoid polemic as much as possible, and even in the briefest of posts say something of substance; stay breast of current events and commentary without becoming beholden to it, much less gripped by chronological snobbery; are conversant with pop culture without falling for the notion either that it is more substantive than it is or that it is the unifying theory of everything for our society today; etc.
That's what I aspire to. We'll see how it goes. Thanks for reading.
Reboot
Well, the dissertation is completed and submitted, and this fall I begin a new chapter in my vocation as a theologian and academic: Assistant Professor of Theology at Abilene Christian University. To mark the occasion, I am officially concluding the run of Resident Theology and starting up a new blog, very cleverly titled Resident Theologian. I plan on developing a much more rigorous posting schedule, hopefully 2-4 times a week, sometimes of normal-ish blog post size (whatever that is), sometimes quite small. I made countless connections and acquaintances and actual friendships through my former blogging life, and I want to re-enter that world beyond the occasional Twitter thread. I also want to form good writing habits through the discipline of short but common writing stints, and blogging serves that well.
So that's the idea. I'm in the middle of a move at the moment, so the posts may be a bit delayed, but I wanted to go ahead and get the blog up and going, so that it's here when fancy strikes. Looking forward to this new venture. Until next time.