Resident Theologian
About the Blog
2024: blogging
A rundown of the year on the blog.
Counting this one, I published a total of eighty-three posts on the blog this year. At least half were themselves just news, updates, or links to pieces published elsewhere. In other words, not a lot of original writing in this space. Which makes sense, since any half-baked ideas I would have blogged about in the past became columns for Christianity Today.
In any case, here is a rundown, loosely categorized, of what I did write on the blog in 2024.
10. I annotated an old-fashioned blogroll of one hundred writers I follow.
9. I wrote about Antoine Fuqua’s “real movies” and Alex Garland’s seriously misunderstood Civil War.
8. I wrote altogether too much about Star Wars: three posts on The Acolyte, another comparing Catholic Jedi to Protestant wizards, and a long series of twenty-three thoughts on The Phantom Menace.
7. I loved Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem and thought Percival Everett’s James powerful but flawed.
6. I fell in love with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, but noted the absence of religion and imagined a similar book called Theological Amnesia.
5. I wrote about the church and the Eucharist and the desire and search for both.
4. I wrote about disenchantment and reenchantment and the search for both.
3. Theologically, I wondered what idols promise; I argued what biblicism can’t get you; I outlined the metaphysics of historical criticism; discussed the unspoken Name; elaborated Protestant subtraction; and proposed a sort of fallacy: “no true cessationist.”
2. In terms of miscellany, I wrote about the NBA, ancient illiteracy, second naivete in biblical scholarship, the reception of C. S. Lewis among American evangelicals, and forty examples of my “tiers” of writing.
1. This year on the blog I wrote the most about digital technology: how it’s the greatest threat facing the church today; why I changed my mind on podcasts; what it costs not to be on social media; what it means to write with or without a “platform”; how boys are affected by video games; the simple principle governing screens and distractions; the dangers of screentopia; how social media is bad for reading (and we all know it); what unites the best books about technology; a taxonomy of tech attitudes; and the Bartleby rule for the “necessity” or “inevitability” of adopting new technologies.
An old-fashioned (annotated) blogroll
A list of the 100 living essayists, journalists, and bloggers I always read, no matter what.
“Navigating the vastness of the Internet can feel like getting marooned in the middle of the ocean, both terrifying and sublime in its overwhelmingness.” That’s Franklin Foer in World Without Mind. He’s right. But if there’s too much to read on the internet, how to triage for the best?
One way is social media. Another is Substack. Still another is print magazines (not dead yet!).
Alongside these, my preferred mechanism is the RSS feed, which is basically a personal blogroll: a live feed, perpetually updated, of the authors and publications one wants to be sure never to miss. In principle infinite, in practice finite. Years ago a colleague asked me how I decide what to read and who my favorite contemporary writers are, and ever since then I’ve meant to draw up an old-fashioned blogroll in response to her request. Better late than never. At least it’s annotated!
To be sure, stellar newsletters with links to the best stuff are not hard to find: Arts & Letters Daily, The Browser, Prufrock. If I don’t know a writer by name or don’t keep up with a given publication, resources like these are usually how I happen upon new things, in addition to friends sharing links.
Short of grab-bags and random links, though, it’s nice to have a list of one’s own. Below I’ve drawn up a list of the writers whose work I make it a point to keep up with. I limited myself to one hundred names. Initially I organized them by category, but I opted just to run them in alphabetical order. Bios and links are meant to be helpful but, as will be clear, are sometimes tongue-in-cheek.
A few ground rules first. The listed names fit the following criteria: (a) living writers whose publishing output is (b) regular, (c) popular, and (d) accessible online. These aren’t academics whose primary work is found in scholarly journals. Nor do they mainly write books while occasionally putting out an essay. Nor still is the following list exhaustive, as if I didn’t enjoy, appreciate, respect, or follow those unnamed.
For example, Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson aren’t here, but their age is advanced enough and their essay output minimal enough that it wouldn’t make sense to include them. (They’re not exactly “online,” either.) My friend Ross McCullough is my favorite theological writer going, but I can’t induce him to write anything popular more than once every few years. I used to read Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher but slowly drifted away, even as I continue to keep an eye on their work. I’m delighted when Abigail Favale and Erika Bachiochi emerge from their scholarly dens to write popular essays, but lately it’s too rare an event by my calculation to add their names to the list. I subscribe to Robin Sloan’s monthly newsletter, but he’s a novelist with the best newsletter around, not an essayist pumping out regular pieces. I laugh whenever I read Andrew Ferguson and learn whenever I read Noah Millman, but I’d be lying if I said I keep up with everything they write. Maybe I should and maybe I will, but time is short and you can’t read everything.
That’s not even to mention friends and acquaintances whom I try to read as much as I’m able but don’t (yet) read enough of, like Matt Milliner and Kirsten Sanders and Chris Green and Kyle Williams and Ian Olsen and Alex Sosler and Alan Noble and Ben Crosby and James Wood. Or ballers like Onsi Kamel and Matt Burdette and Justin Hawkins and Rachel Roth Aldhizer who need to write more, more, more. Or once-yearly bangers like Matthew Rose and Patricia Snow and Zena Hitz. Or writers I hugely enjoy but can’t quite keep track of, like Ian Marcus Corbin and Matt Feeney and Samuel Goldman and David Samuels and David Polansky and Park MacDougald and Sebastian Milbank and Derek Thompson. Or old standbys I guiltily don’t read enough of, like Nicholas Carr and Mary Eberstardt and Jamelle Bouie and Oren Cass and Niall Ferguson. Or old lovable know-it-all academics like Philip Jenkins. Or old souls like Joseph Epstein and Stanley Fish, Peter Brown and Jackson Lears who’ve written so much for so long that I could barely make a dint in it. Or Ben Thompson and Jesse Singal and Ed West, who seem to write more daily than I can read in a week.
For those names that are on the list, therefore, their inclusion means that their author page is in my RSS feed, that I subscribe to their Substack, that I constantly scour the internet for their latest publication, and/or that I crack open a magazine the moment I see their name on the cover. To be clear, I don’t love or agree with all of them. A few might qualify as hate-reading, or at least facepalm-reading. Nevertheless I do find myself reading them—to see what they have to say, or to see how they say it. Everyone on this list has either style or substance, and many have both.
One last way to put it: These are the writers I’ve learned to read because the editors I trust continue to commission and publish them—Matthew Walther at The Lamp, Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis, Jay Tolson at The Hedgehog Review, Jon Baskin at The Point, Matthew Schmitz at Compact, Rusty Reno at First Things, Matthew Boudway at Commonweal, Anne Snyder at Comment, Peter Mommsen at Plough (all of which, by the way, arrive in my mailbox). These are the gatekeepers, together with their many fellow editors; they know what’s what, and most of what follows is just picking favorites from the murderer’s row of writers they have the regular pleasure of publishing.
Oh: And I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone. If your name is missing, I’m sure that someone is you.
Sam Adler-Bell – leftist journalist and freelance writer, hate-hate relationship with the Right, co-host of Know Your Enemy podcast, bylines at the New York Times and New York Magazine and The New Republic
Sohrab Ahmari – co-founder of Compact, author of Tyranny, Inc., bylines at First Things and The American Conservative
Matthew Lee Anderson – ethics prof at Baylor, founder of Mere Orthodoxy, writes The Path Before Us newsletter, author of Called Into Questions, former co-host of the Mere Fidelity podcast, bylines at Vox and First Things and The Dispatch
Helen Andrews – conservative journalist, former editor at The American Conservative, author of Boomers, bylines at First Things and The Lamp and Compact
Jon Askonas – politics profs at CUA, winner of the Emerging Public Intellectual award, bylines at Comment and Compact and The New Atlantis
Jon Baskin – founding editor of The Point, former editor at Harper’s, author of Ordinary Unhappiness
Richard Beck – psychology prof at ACU, long-time daily blogger at Experimental Theology, author of Hunting Magic Eels
Jeff Bilbro – English prof at Grove City College, editor of Front Porch Republic, author of Words for Conviviality
David Brooks – come on, let’s not pretend you don’t know who he is
Joseph Bottum – man of letters, poet, onetime editor of all the magazines, Catholic and conservative intellectual, author of An Anxious Age (a masterly book but criminally under-read), bylines at The Washington Free Beacon and First Things and Commonweal
Josh Brake – engineering prof at Harvey Mudd, wise guide to all things A.I., author of The Absent-Minded Professor newsletter
Elizabeth Bruenig – staff writer at The Atlantic, formerly at the New York Times and The Washington Post
Matt Bruenig – wife guy, lefty data policy guru, fellow Texan, righteously angry, founder of the People’s Policy Project, blogs at his website, bylines at Jacobin and The Nation
Sonny Bunch – film critic for The Bulwark, writes the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood newsletter
Timothy Burke – history prof at Swarthmore, author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, writes the Eight by Seven newsletter
Tara Isabella Burton – novelist and essayist, former religion reporter for Vox, author of Strange Rites, co-writes The Line of Beauty newsletter, bylines at Comment and Commonweal and Plough and the New York Times and The New Atlantis
Christopher Caldwell – polyglot monarch of conservative intellectual journalism, contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, author of The Age of Entitlement, bylines at Compact and The New Statesman and The New Republic and National Review and The American Conservative and Financial Times and The Spectator
Isaac Chotiner – interrogative journalist at The New Yorker, author of the Q&A column, formerly of Slate
Phil Christman – marvelous essayist, equally(!) midwestern and leftist and Christian, English prof at the University of Michigan, author of How to Be Normal, writes The Tourist newsletter, bylines at Plough and Commonweal and Slate
Clare Coffey – freelance writer, bylines at The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review and Plough and The Bulwark
Tyler Cowen – economics prof at George Mason, columnist at Bloomberg, author of The Complacent Class, blogs at The Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations With Tyler podcast
Matthew B. Crawford – research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, writes the Archedelia newsletter, bylines at First Things and The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review
Theodore Dalrymple – retired doctor, conservative essayist and novelist, author of Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, bylines at The Lamp and First Things and City Journal
Freddie deBoer – last true Marxist, disbeliever in word counts, freelance writer on everything under the sun, author of The Cult of Smart, writes the Freddie deBoer newsletter, bylines at Compact and the New York Times and Harper’s and n+1
Michael Brendan Dougherty – writer at National Review, author of My Father Left Me Ireland, regular on The Editors podcast, bylines at The Week and the New York Times
Ross Douthat – my own personal op-ed spirit animal, columnist at the New York Times, film critic at National Review, author of Bad Religion, co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast
Christine Emba – staff writer at The Atlantic, author of Rethinking Sex, formerly at The Washington Post
Edward Feser – philosophy prof at Pasadena City College, long-time blogger, author of Philosophy of Mind, writes for First Things
Angela Franks – theology prof at St. John’s Seminary, author of Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy, bylines at First Things and Church Life Journal and Catholic World Report
John Ganz – lefty interpreter of the Right, author of When the Clock Broke, writes the Unpopular Front newsletter, bylines at The Nation and The New Statesman and The New Republic
David P. Goldman – right-Hegelian journalist of economics and China, writer at Asia Times, author of You Will Be Assimilated, bylines at Law & Liberty and First Things and Claremont Review of Books
Ruth Graham – religion journalist for the New York Times
John Gray – intellectual virtuoso and prolific analyst of the post-Christian West, author of Two Faces of Liberalism, bylines at The New Statesman and The Guardian
Emma Green – religion journalist at The New Yorker, formerly at The Atlantic
Paul Griffiths – retired theology prof at Duke, author of Decreation, bylines at Commonweal and (once upon a time) First Things
Allen Guelzo – historian at Princeton, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, author of Fateful Lightning, bylines at First Things and The New Criterion and Claremont Review of Books
Jonathan Haidt – psych prof at NYU, author of The Anxious Generation, writes the After Babel newsletter, bylines at The Atlantic and the New York Times
Shadi Hamid – columnist at the Washington Post, formerly at The Atlantic, author of Islamic Exceptionalism, co-founder of the Wisdom of Crowds website and podcast, co-host of the Zealots at the Gates podcast, bylines galore
Mary Harrington – reactionary feminist, author of Feminism Against Progress, writes the Mary Harrington newsletter, bylines at First Things and UnHerd
David Bentley Hart – irascible genius unbound by institutional shackles, Eastern Orthodox theologian, essayist, and translator, author of The Experience of God, writes the Leaves in the Wind newsletter, bylines wherever he damn well sees fit
Sara Hendren – design prof at Northeastern, author of What Can a Body Do? (an all-timer), blogs at her website, microblogs at ablerism, write (wrote?!) the undefended / undefeated newsletter, bylines at the intersection of the built and the physical environment
Wesley Hill – NT prof at Western seminary, author of Spiritual Friendship, bylines at The Living Church and First Things and Comment
Dan Hitchens – editor at First Things, sharp-tongued and unsentimental observer of all things Catholic, bylines at The Spectator and The Critic
Peter Hitchens – surviving brother of Christopher, irascible conservative scribbler, columnist at the Daily Mail, author of The Rage Against God, bylines at The Lamp and First Things and Compact
Alan Jacobs – English prof at Baylor, OG uber-blogger, my self-assigned mentor and archegos, author of The Narnian, blogs at The Homebound Symphony, bylines at The Atlantic and Comment and The New Yorker and The New Atlantis and First Things and Harper’s
Samuel James – editor at Crossway, author of Digital Liturgies, writes The Digital Liturgies newsletter
Paul Kingsnorth – ex-pagan novelist, poet, and essayist, my favorite convert to Orthodoxy outside of my brother, author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, writes The Abbey of Misrule newsletter, bylines at First Things and elsewhere
Phil Klay – Iraq veteran, novelist and essayist, author of Redeployment, bylines at the New York Times and The Atlantic and Commonweal
Ezra Klein – columnist at the New York Times, founder of Vox, author of Why We’re Polarized, host of The Ezra Klein Show
Austin Kleon – fellow Austinite and thief, author of Steal Like an Artist, super-duper blogger, also writes a glorious newsletter
Sam Kriss – unclassifiable essayist, logorrheic in a good way, writes the Numb at the Lodge newsletter, bylines at Compact and First Things and The Lamp and the New York Times
Bonnie Kristian – editor extraordinaire at Christianity Today, author of Untrustworthy, writes the Bonnie Kristian newsletter, bylines at The Week and The American Conservative
Peter Leithart – president of Theopolis, author of The End of Protestantism, writes for First Things
David Leonhardt – pandemic worldbeater, writer at the New York Times, author of Ours Was the Shining Future, writes The Morning newsletter
Yuval Levin – everyone’s favorite level-headed institutionalist conservative, senior fellow at AEI, editor of National Affairs, author of A Time to Build, bylines at the New York Times and National Review
Mark Lilla – humanities prof at Columbia, author of The Once and Future Liberal, bylines at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times
Michael Lind – grumpy gumshoe pro-labor conservative, author of Hell to Pay, bylines at Tablet and Compact and The Free Press
Damon Linker – radical moderate, poli-sci prof at UPenn, onetime editor of First Things, author of The Theocons, writes the Notes From the Middleground newsletter, bylines at the New York Times and The Atlantic
Matthew Loftus – doctor in Kenya via Baltimore, bylines at Mere Orthodoxy and Plough and Christianity Today and the New York Times
Zach Lowe – NBA journalist, formerly of Grantland and ESPN, former host of The Lowe Post podcast, currently and unjustly a free agent
Kate Lucky – editor at Christianity Today, bylines at The Point and Commonweal
Tim Markatos – film critic, writes the Movie Enthusiast newsletter
Eugene McCarraher – humanities prof at Villanova, author of The Enchantments of Mammon, byline at Commonweal
Daniel McCarthy – omnicompetent conservatism-explainer, editor of Modern Age, columnist at The Spectator, bylines at the New York Times and The American Conservative
Esau McCaulley – NT prof at Wheaton, author of Reading While Black, writes a New York Times newsletter, byline at Christianity Today, host of the Esau McCaulley podcast
B. D. McClay – simply one of the best essayists around, Swiftie explainer, lover of perfume and anime, has the world eagerly awaiting a book, writes the Notebook newsletter, bylines at The Hedgehog Review and the New York Times and The Lamp and The New Yorker and The Paris Review
Jake Meador – editor of Mere Orthodoxy, author of In Search of the Common Good, bylines at Plough and The Atlantic and First Things
Russell Moore – editor of Christianity Today, author of Losing Our Religion, bylines at The Atlantic and the New York Times, host of the Russell Moore Podcast
Wesley Morris – film critic (the best when he wants to be), formerly at The Boston Globe and Grantland, now art and culture critic for the New York Times, former co-host of various podcasts
Gary Saul Morson – literature prof at Northwestern, master of all things Russian, author of Wonder Confronts Certainty, bylines at First Things and The New Criterion and The New York Review of Books
Samuel Moyn – law prof at Yale, author of Liberalism Against Itself, bylines at the New York Times and Compact and The New Republic
Adam Nayman – film critic for The Ringer, author of The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together
Grace Olmstead – journalist, localist, memoirist, author of Uprooted, writes the Granola newsletter, bylines at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and Mere Orthodoxy and Plough
Louise Perry – journalist, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, writes the Maiden Mother Matriarch newsletter, bylines at First Things and The New Statesman
Brian Phillips – staff writer at The Ringer, formerly at Grantland, author of Impossible Owls, bylines all over
Jeff Reimer – editor nonpareil at Comment, bylines at Plough and The Bulwark
Adam Roberts – best SF writer alive, supposedly moonlights as a lit prof in London, author of The Thing Itself, writes the (new!) Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion newsletter, byline the Internet
Alastair Roberts – digital lector, adjunct senior fellow at Theopolis, co-author of Echoes of Exodus, blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria, co-writes The Anchored Argosy newsletter, co-host of the Mere Fidelity podcast
Becca Rothfeld – book review critic at The Washington Post, editor at The Point, contributing editor at Boston Review, author of All Things Are Too Small, writes the a fête worse than death newsletter
L. M. Sacasas – best tech writer alive, associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, FL, author of 41 Questions: Technology and the Moral Life (forthcoming), writes The Convivial Society newsletter, writes elsewhere but really just subscribe ASAP
Fred Sanders – humbly wry polymath, theology prof at Biola, author of The Triune God, blogs at fredfredfred.com
Leah Libresco Sargeant – journalist and freelance writer, author of Arriving at Amen, writes the Other Feminisms newsletter, bylines at the New York Times and First Things and The Lamp and The New Atlantis
Matthew Schmitz – co-founder and editor of Compact, former editor at First Things, bylines at the New York Times and The Atlantic and The American Conservative
Ari Schulman – editor of The New Atlantis, steady hand at the scientism-critical ship, bylines at National Review and the New York Times
George Scialabba – my favorite living lefty essayist, author of Only a Voice, bylines everywhere but especially Commonweal and The Baffler and The New Statesman
Matt Zoller Seitz – film and TV critic for New York Magazine, editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, my first-read for all things cinematic, co-author of TV (The Book)
Alan Sepinwall – TV critic for Rolling Stone, co-author of TV (The Book)
James K. A. Smith – philosophy prof at Calvin, former editor of Comment and Image, author of Desiring the Kingdom, bylines at First Things and The Christian Century
Justin Smith-Ruiu – the artist formerly known as Justin E. H. Smith, everything prof somewhere in Paris, author of The Internet is Not What You Think It Is, meta-writes The Hinternet newsletter, bylines at The Point and Tablet and elsewhere
Jonathan Tran – ethics prof at Baylor, author of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, writes for The Christian Century
Eve Tushnet – saint in the making, tragicomic Catholic queer writer and journalist, author of Tenderness, writes The Rogation Dragon newsletter, bylines at Commonweal and America and The Lamp and First Things
Matthew Walther – trad Cath prose stylist bar none, editor and founder of The Lamp, author of a biography of Saint John Henry Newman (forthcoming from Yale UP), bylines at the New York Times and First Things and elsewhere
Tish Harrison Warren – priest at local speakeasy Immanuel Anglican Church, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, writes (wrote?!) for Christianity Today and the New York Times
Audrey Watters – ed-tech Cassandra (and therefore to be trusted), author of Teaching Machines, blogs at Hack Education, writes the Second Breakfast newsletter
Myles Werntz – ethics prof at ACU, author of From Isolation to Community, writes the Taking Off and Landing newsletter, bylines at Mere Orthodoxy and Christianity Today
Alissa Wilkinson – film critic for the New York Times, formerly of Vox and Christianity Today and Books & Culture, author of Salty
Rowan Williams – Welsh wizard, former archbishop of Canterbury, author of On Christian Theology, bylines at First Things and The New Statesman and The Guardian
Andrew Wilson – teaching pastor at King’s Church London, author of Remaking the World, blogs at Think Theology, writes for Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition, sometime co-host of Mere Fidelity
John Wilson – lovable curmudgeon and devotee of books, former editor of the much lamented Books & Culture, bylines at First Things and The Hedgehog Review and elsewhere
Molly Worthen – history prof at UNC, recent convert to Christianity, author of Apostles of Reason, bylines at First Things and the New York Times and Christianity Today
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.