So - What Did I Miss?

I sat down a few weeks ago to start back into blogging, but I found that I just couldn't. I had no interest, and less desire. To be honest, I was really close to throwing in the towel, but I decided to give it a few more weeks to see if things changed. And, while I can't say that I'm really back into the swing of things mentally, I've at least picked up a few new books that I'm actually excited about reading. I also cleaned out all of my unread items in bloglines, so hopefully nobody tagged me or flamed me or anything like that. If it's that important, feel free to drop me an email.

I've decided to hit the reset button on a few things. Basically, everything that was in process here, between the image of God stuff and my thoughts on McLaren and anything else I've let slide, is going on a perpetual hiatus. I may resurrect it someday, but for now I've moved on and I'm thinking about new stuff, so consider 2008 a new start here. I'm working on an absolutely fascinating book at the moment: Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. It's an amazing study of the social connectedness of Americans in the twentieth century. Now, I do think you have to be something of a data junkie to appreciate the book; it's full of charts and graphs and statistics. (My favorite chart in the book compares the number of times a person volunteers with the number of times a person gave the finger to another driver, broken down by the number of hours of TV the person watches weekly. I wish I'd have thought of that. In case you're curious - more hours of TV = less hours of volunteering, but more instances of giving the finger.)

I'm also losing interest in the whole emerging church thing. I'd call myself post-emerging if it didn't sound so smug and trite. But I think that a lot of the emerging church stuff has lost its initial thrust towards revitalization and has become more of a brand, to be honest, with goods to sell and an image to maintain. I just don't see the vitality that I found a few years ago, which is a shame but perhaps not all that surprising on some level. And based on some of the conversations I've been having lately I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment. I'm interested more in bridge-building and revitalization of the local church, so that's where I'm going to be focusing my energies.

So what's on my mind at the moment? Two things, tightly woven together: suburbia and economics. Bowling Alone has been an absolutely fascinating read, as it's served to validate a lot of what I wrote a few years ago when I started crafting my theology of the suburbs. And it's helped clarify perhaps some of the dynamics that I see, giving me new ways to discuss them. But I really needed the image of God emphasis to undergird the whole, so I actually think that my recent reflections are an integration of a lot of items that have been floating around here for the past several years.

This has been surprisingly refreshing - I'll have to try it more often.

Busy

It's been crazy for the past few weeks - my wife started teaching massage in November, which meant that I've been with the boys every night until about 10:30 or so. This, obviously, has left no time for blogging. Last week was her last class, fortunately - the schedule was just too much all around. Of course, with the holidays almost upon us, I'm being realistic - things should start to pick back up again after Christmas.

Tagged!

Michael Kruse tagged me several days ago, along with offering a generous recommendation of this humble little site. I confess that I've sort of been feeling like someone who has unexpected guests and hasn't been keeping up with the chores, but if you're stopping by for the first time, then welcome.

As the meme goes, I believe, I'm supposed to recommend several blogs that I think more people should be reading. Most of these I've been reading for some time now; I don't think that they'd qualify as lesser-known as per the original meme, but I think all of them are worth adding to your feed reader if you haven't already:

• James Mills - If James lived near me, I'd always be at his house raiding his bookshelf.
• Todd Heistand - Todd serves at a local church called the Well. He's a fellow Biblical grad who's trying to actually implement this whole "missional" thing.
• Todd Littleton - I met Todd during an etrek course a few years ago. He's thoughtful and balanced.
• Al Hsu - Al wrote one of the best books I've read on living missionally in suburbia.
• Bob Robinson - Bob puts together a great theologically oriented blog that offers a lot of substance.

Comments Issue

Comments have suddenly stopped working, and I haven't been able to track down the problem yet. If you've tried to post a comment in the past couple of days, my apologies - I hope to have it fixed soon.

UPDATE - The cocomments plugin was doing bad things. All better now - no more cocomments, no more problem!

I'm Not Dead Yet

I feel fine - I don't want to go on the cart!

Anyway. What a crazy few weeks - and I don't think things are going to settle down until September. Things will be sparse around here until at least then. But that's a good thing too - I've been taking some time off from the blogosphere. I'm about ready to max out the unread posts listing on bloglines - at least I think I am, as the last time I hit 999 unread items it just started dropping the oldest. No joke. I guess it decided that there was no way I could dig out from under that, and I didn't even try.

Time away is good. I think that, being immersed in the whole blogging subculture, it's easy to start to believe that the blogosphere is as real as, or even more real than, the real world. At least that's how it can feel to me, and that's a bad thing. I hit a point about a month ago when everything started to sound the same, when it seemed like everything that was being said had already been said at least a dozen times before. That's most definitely not a good thing.

In the meantime, I've had a chance to catch up with some old friends. I got together with a couple of guys that I've known for ages a few weekends ago, and it was a blast - basically it was an entire weekend of beer, pipes, and board games. And a bit of God talk thrown in - one of my friends is recently back from the mission field with some really rough leadership-related experiences under his belt. Same old, same old - guys in suits who think they know better than the practitioners in the field. But that's not my story, so I'll say no more. Reconnecting was awesome, and I came from behind to win at Settlers of Catan (we were playing Cities and Knights, if that means anything to you) so that was just the icing on the cake. I got humiliated at Tide of Iron, though, so it all balanced out. (In case you're wondering, we also got in games of Carcassonne, Wings of War, Nexus Ops, and War of the Ring. ;)

A minor renovation at home that's nearly complete, an eight year old's birthday party, a wedding, a family vacation, and our twelfth anniversary are all on the plate for August. I'm not done with my current series of posts by any means, but things will remain sparse around here for the next month or so. I can say, though, that I'm feeling more like writing and thinking than I have for some time. Maybe there's something to be said for this real world thing.

Feed Issues on Bloglines

For some reason, Bloglines has decided to join Technorati in the ranks of Websites That Hate Me™. None of my feeds have been updating on bloglines, even though they appear to be fine everywhere else. The folks at bloglines are supposed to be working on it for me but it's been several days now and no luck. In the meantime, if you're a bloglines user, I've set up a new feed through feedburner - you can subscribe to that feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/theopraxis/. It appears to be working just fine. Although, if you're a bloglines user, I suppose you probably have little chance of actually seeing this post. Crap. Well, for everyone else, the existing feeds aren't going anywhere but feel free to jump on the new one just the same. ;)

Mostly Back

So technically I suppose I'm back, but I spent half of this evening debugging an issue that was preventing pages from loading on the site. On top of that, I feel like I got punched in the gut - I'm guessing it's something I picked up from the small one. In lieu of a full post, I'll just point you towards an article I did for The Porpoise Diving Life and attempt to get some thoughts pulled together tomorrow.

Blogging on Empty

Things have slowed to a crawl around here, which is always an indication that I've hit a wall. I'm processing a few things at the moment but none of them are interesting enough (or well-formed enough) to warrant a post. I've taken a break from theology reading - I realized about a month ago that I hadn't read a non-Tolkien fiction work in far too long, so I'm working my way through Roger Zelazny's Amber series at the moment, which is a rather unique sort of fantasy writing. I think I need to do the same with my writing. I'm stale and I need to recharge. I'm taking an extended blog fast for the remainder of February. I'll be back on March 1, hopefully rejuvenated and refreshed.

Back

My hand is healing nicely - many thanks to those of you who dropped by. The burns have healed much more rapidly than I had expected; I'm able to function normally with no pain and only a small amount of discomfort. I still don't have 100% of the feeling back in my fingers where the most severe burns were, but I expect that to return soon.

On another note, I have a new theory about communicable diseases. I suspect that most germs would quickly die out were it not for toddlers. I've taken to calling Ryan (my 13-month old) the Petri dish. Not only will he put nearly anything in his mouth, thus ensuring that he will catch the maximum number of bugs, but he has tiny sinus cavities, resulting in an endless stream of toxic sludge for the duration of his cold. Of course, I've been hammered by his latest catch for the past several days, which for me means that I can't breathe, I can't sleep, and I'm running a near-constant low grade headache. Still, that's beginning to improve as well, and I hope to be back up to speed within a few days.

All of that to say that posting should now return to normal. I'm continuing to think about the subject of scriptural tensions - I've been taking my time with these, because I find that they need a bit more care than I'm used to taking with my writing. This is, I think, fitting on some level, but it has meant that I've been working through this more slowly than I'd like. After this, I have a few book reviews that I've promised to do, and then I want to start to delve into the question of the gospel - what is it, how does it function in the NT, and what does it look like in our world? I also should have some updates soon on where we are with the church planting process - this has also been proceeding slowly, but we're starting to round a few corners and, if all goes well, it should be picking up steam soon.

Out of Commision

So I planned on posting something last night, but my plans got rearranged by a bit of a kitchen incident. I pulled a pan from the oven but decided it needed a few more minutes. This wouldn't have been a problem if I hadn't removed my oven mitt. I grabbed a 350-degree pan with my bare hand, resulting in second degree burns all over my fingers. Needless to say, typing is a bit of a chore at the moment, so I won't be posting anything for a few days. Be back soon!

State of the Blog 2007

It's sort of amusing to me that January elicits a flurry of activity around reflection, looking both backward and forward in a sense. It's amusing because a lot of us spend so little time doing this sort of thing throughout the year that I guess we believe we can do enough of it in a few weeks to make up for what we'll almost certainly begin to ignore by Groundhog Day.

Still, it's worth a look backwards now and again, and January is as fine a time as any to do so. It's been an interesting year here at the old blog, which by the way turns three this month, so I've definitely passed the honeymoon period. That in and of itself is something to think about, given that I'm still around and kicking, even though I break most of the cardinal rules of blogging: I write posts that are too long, I use language that's not always user-friendly, and I post irregularly. And, although I don't think I've ever posted about stats before, I'll say this - I have fewer daily visitors than I do rss subscribers, which I think is both amusing and wonderfully fitting. My hope is that you'll always find something stimulating, challenging, encouraging, or frustrating here to read, and I think I've done some of that this year, so I can't complain too much.

Still, my creative and reflective writing has tapered off dramatically, and I have to be honest and say that I feel the lack. I'd like to concentrate a bit more on bringing that style that I enjoy immensely to bear on my more theological and philosophical reflections, but I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet. I suspect that it might start with using fewer words like "hypercontextual".

I don't know what my best posts were this year - it's hard to separate them. They're like my kids; I love them all. Just kidding. Seriously, I've done very few isolated posts. This has been the year of the miniseries for me. My series on the suburbs has received the most hits, and I think it contained some of my best work, but I'm most proud of my bit on the imago dei - which means that it was the one that stretched me the most to write and represented something of a milestone for me, in the sense that it brings together a number of themes that I've wrestled with over the past few years into what I think is a pretty good synthesis.

But I'd also love to hear a bit from you - what brought you here? What posts do you remember from this year (or perhaps what do you wish you'd forget)? I'd love to hear what others think were the highs and lows of the blog for the past year - and I'd especially love to hear from folks who don't regularly comment. Any thoughts?

Problems with Commments?

Last week I installed a new anti-spam plugin after noticing that more and more spam comments had been making it through my filters. However, I received an email this weekend from someone who wasn't able to post a comment. If there are any others out there that have been receiving errors when trying to post comments, could you please send me an email? I'm trying to determine if I need to turn off the new plugin. Thanks!

UPDATE: Found the issue. I neglected to properly update the comment preview form, thus generating the error. In any event, if anyone continues to have difficulty, I'd absolutely appreciate an email to let me know. Thanks much!

Another Reason to Use Firefox...

Some time ago, I signed up for a cocomment account. The idea is fantastic - it's a service that tracks all of your comments on various folks' blogs and compiles them into a feed that you can track via a reader or publish to your own site. It's a neat service and the interface on the site is clean and functional. The only problem at the time was that it was clunky to actually track the comments - there was a bookmarklet or some such that had to be activated when posting the comment, which meant extra clicks (which I detest). It also meant that you could only track a conversation if you've commented on it. Now, I'm often guilty of being a serious lurker, so that's two strikes, and I'm not that generous when it comes to tech - it needs to work, and work well, immediately with little fuss. I put the thing on the back burner and promptly forgot about it.

Tonight, though, I discovered that the fine folks at cocomment have created a fantastic plugin for Firefox that integrates the service into the browser. Now, whenever I visit a page with comments, I can with one click subscribe to that particular comment thread and have it show up in my bloglines reader. The threads are separated by entry, so it's easy to navigate and easy to drop once a thread has died. It also supports tags, which is another plus. And there's a second feed for conversations that you want to track, even if you're not currently commenting yourself. Beautiful. Firefox triumphs again. You can download the plugin here. If you're not using Firefox yet, go! Get a good browser! You'll thank me!

Technorati Tags: cocomment, firefox

Clearing My Thoughts

There are a few reasons that I'm a miserable blogger. For one, I get stuck on a topic and run it into the ground. I'm fine with that, don't get me wrong - when that happens, it's typically something that I'm muddling my way through, and this serves as a forum to get my thoughts in order and to put them out for input or critique. But on the other hand, I do at times tend to burn out on a topic. Spencer's book is a case in point. I actually have a few more thoughts that I think I need to pull together, but I needed to step away for a few days to clear my brain. I'm rarely as negative as I've been about that book, and it's not a place that I really enjoy. And there are some positives that I think the book brings to the table as well - for me, though, they're buried in a lot of other stuff that I find bothersome and, at times, disturbing, and not in a good sense. So I wanted to think about the positives as well, to offer some balance to what I've said thus far. So, my head is much clearer now, and I hope to finish my thoughts on the book this week.

On another note, somewhere along the line this blog became a book blog. And I'm fine with that too, on some level - I read voraciously, probably more than anyone else that I know personally, and a lot of what I've been reading recently has been quite formative. But a few months ago a friend of mine was busting my chops about the praxis part of theopraxis - he said it's more like "reflecting about reflective action". And there's just enough truth in there, jesting aside, that it stuck in my head and has been bothering me ever since. Truth is that, when I stepped out of youth ministry two years ago, I was so burnt out that it's taken me the time since to recuperate. And now that I'm itching to get involved again, I can't seem to find a niche. Spiritual journey makes for a fun metaphor, but it's a pain in the tail to have to experience - especially when the destination is rather vague. Bottom line - frustration is a lousy writing partner. Hence the books - at least interacting with someone else's work provides something of a nudge towards constructive thought.

As a blogger, I've always been much more a thinker than a linker. The downside to that is that, when your own thoughts aren't worth publishing, then there's not much to fall back on.

Error Messages

I think a side project I'm working on broke something on the server, because I'm getting error messages when I try to post comments. But the comments are still getting posted - they're just not being published. So if you try to post a comment and it errors out, I can probably recover it from the database. Apologies for the inconvenience; it should be sorted out soon.

Oops

Apologies for the half-finished post that popped up here - I was working on something in ecto last night but I apparently accidentally published it. It may or may not show up later; I haven't decided yet. It was the sort of thing that one writes to work out thoughts on an issue, but it never really came together for me, so there's a pending delete in its future if I can't get it to a place where I'm satisfied with it.

Anyway - I'll try to keep the place more tidy from now on. ;)

New Look

Ok, so I got a bit creative today and decided to change the look of my site around. Granted, the time would have been better spent trying to catch up on my belated course reading, but there's only so much church history a man can take in one day. I'm still playing around with it - some of the templates still need to be tweaked, so you might see a few changes yet and a few pages like the comment previews are going to look odd for the next day or so. Overall, though, I think it turned out pretty well. Let me know what you think!

The Skinny on Blogging

One of the blogs that I most look forward to reading is Andrew Jones at tallskinnykiwi. Today, Andrew posted a bit about what to do in the end-of-year down time on your blog. Personally, I've had a bit of down time already, so I don't think I'll be taking more, although I keep toying with the thought of redesigning the site. I've had the same look for about a year and a half and would love to swap out for something new, but that's time that takes away from actually writing stuff, so it's never happened. Perhaps next year. ;)

One thing Andrew mentioned is cleaning up your site, including adding tags and fixing broken links. Technorati has a bit of an article discussing tags here. I've never actually used tags in my posts, at least partially because they're a pain in the rear to do manually. But that connects to something else Andrew mentioned - ecto.

Ecto is a nifty blog editor that I decided to treat myself to recently. I tried ecto a while back and initially thought that, while fun, it didn't give me much more than just entering through the MT web interface. However, I got a bit spoiled with the spellcheck (a fine feature, to be sure), so I thought if I came into an extra $18 at some point, I'd give it a go - it's cheap enough that, if I find that I don't use it, I haven't really lost much. Well, I've been playing around with it, and there's a heck of a lot more stuff here than I initially realized. First off, the link generator is excellent. I have a pet peeve about links opening in the same window - frankly, I find them irritating. I hate reading a post, clicking a link, and being taken to a different site. That means I have to navigate back to the previous site in order to finish reading the post, when all that's needed is a simple target attribute in the link itself to cause it to open in a new window. The problem with that is that I end up manually coding all of my links, because Movable Type (and, honestly, most blogging tools) doesn't ask for a target when building a link. Enter ecto - targetted links with a click of a button. Beautiful.

The other thing that I've noticed is that tagging and categorizing your posts in ecto is extremely easy. There's a list of check boxes next to my draft window that I can simply click to identify tags and categories. Fantastic! No more manual entry of tags means that I'll probably try to start using them in the future. If I get ambitious, I may even go back and tag my older stuff.

At any rate, those are my initial thoughts on ecto - well worth the investment, I think. Plus, they're currently offering 20% off, so you can pick it up for under $15 US.

One other thing Andrew mentioned is del.icio.us. Now, I'm no technophobe by any means - I like to believe that I'm pretty current with what all the youngsters are playing around with these days. (Back in my day, we didn't have this fancy-schmancy iner-net. You walked to the post office like everyone else. ;) So I created a del.icio.us account a while back, but then I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do with it. So, I'm publically confessing that I just don't get it. But I know some of you folks out there that read my humble little blog use it, so a little help here? I'm trying to figure out if this is something I should play around with a bit more.

Well, happy blogging to you all - I'll try not to make too much dust around here over the next week or so.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Blogging, ecto, del.icio.us

Favorite Posts of 2005

I've seen a number of folks putting up links to their favorite posts of the past year. I thought it would be an interesting exercise. I discovered that I like more of what I wrote earlier this year rather than later - I feel like I've lost something of my creative spirit, that I've been more academic of late. Ah, well - to all things a season, I suppose. At any rate, here are my five favorite posts of 2005:

This Thing We Do - I think this one set the tone for the year for me
One Step - a venture into something a bit more imaginative
Make Believe and Fairy Tales - honest reflections on scripture
Brand Name Jesus™ - this one is probably my favorite post ever
Dynamics of Power - not so much creative as provocative, but nothing wrong with that ;)

I don't know if I've said anything memorable enough for anyone to have a favorite, but if you do, I'd love to hear it. Also, if you blog, what are your most memorable posts of this past year?

Something in the Works

via media is a new team blog in which I'll be participating. Bob Hyatt describes it this way:

I want to create a team blog where we can discuss theology and church praxis from an emerging church perspective that takes seriously the need to reform and reformulate, but at the same time is cogniscent of the inherent dangers of such an undertaking, and avoids discarding orthodox babies with American, evangelical bathwater.

I'll be joining Bob, along with John and Dave. Should be fun!

New Blogs

Maintenance

I'm going to be doing some work on the site over the next week or so. I'm trying to upgrade to the new version of MovableType, which (in theory) should be fairly straightforward. I did, however, want to put the word out in case things go awry. ;)

Breaking Fast

You know that feeling when you step back into your house after being away for an extended period of time? That's sort of how I feel. It was a good week - I'm glad I took it. For a full week, I didn't log onto the site, didn't check my counter, and didn't visit my reader (bloglines) at all. Well, maybe once or twice ;). But perspective is good, the blogosphere got along quite nicely without me, and I feel somewhat less compulsive about the whole thing, so I suppose it was time well spent, or not spent as the case may be.

I'm woefully behind on my daily blog reading - the list to the right, by the way, is always current and reflective of what I'm actually reading, even if I comment sparsely. It's not as extensive as some, but it's still a full plate for me; at this point, it will probably take a bit of time to get caught up. As far as this humble blog goes, Ross tagged me with a meme that I'll try to post in the next few days. I have a few books that I've been wanting to comment on, and I've been wanting to get back into some more creative pieces of late, something that I've done far too little of in recent weeks. I had wanted to get in on Steve's group blog through Foster's Celebration of Discipline, but I may have to forego that seeing the syllabus for my class that just began.

At any rate - it's good to be back.

Blog Fast

I'm going to take a week off from the blog. Actually, I've basically already started, but I wanted to put a quick note up to let everyone know I'll be back next week. Andrew Jones mentioned a few days ago about taking a blog fast to "purge our addiction to readership, hits and traffic," something that I'm sure nobody else struggles with ;). On top of that, I'm also trying to navigate where this thing is going. I haven't written a creative piece in far too long, and I think my writing is getting increasingly, well, abstract for lack of a better way to put it. I need to take a break to breathe some life back into my writing. At any rate, I'll be back next week.

Where I'm Headed...

The recent Pat debacle has me a bit burnt out on the subject of politics, so I'm putting on hold my continued explorations of Christian nonviolence. In truth, I think there's been a lot of good reflection on the subject this week already - Pat has demonstrated the absurdity of the most extreme kind of take on the subject, so I'm content to set the subject aside for a bit. I'm still reflecting on it as well and will no doubt revisit it later.

I want to spend a bit of time thinking on the subject of forms and structures of worship. This is prompted by my reading of Preaching Re-Imagined and will, in fact, start with my review of the book. As I mentioned in an earlier post, though, I think that one of the reasons that critics and advocates of the emerging church have difficulty engaging in dialogue is that there are some underlying theological assumptions that typically go unaddressed. I want to think through some of these assumptions as they relate to forms of worship and talk about what an emerging theology of worship might look like.

Gmail anyone?

I find myself in need of an additional email account, and I'm wondering if anyone out there might have any gmail invites still sitting around. If so, and you're feeling generous, could you drop me an email?

Server Errors

Just fyi - if you run into a server error when trying to post a comment, it's a known bug coming from a recent upgrade to the cPanel installation on the server. You can read about it here if that sort of thing interests you. Movable Type is working on a patch as we speak. What I've been noticing is that, in every case, the comment has been saved to the database but not published to the site. I'll be checking in frequently to make sure there aren't any stranded comments, so if yours doesn't show up after receiving an error, I'll probably find it in the system and update the site, but please feel free to drop me an email as well. Sorry for the inconvenience!

UPDATE: Looks like it's been fixed - please drop me an email if you're running into anything really odd. Thanks!

More Site Stuff

I noticed that bloglines is picking up duplicate posts for some of my recent entries. I think it's because I rearranged my archives - some of the posts are linking to current files, and some to the previous names of those files. I'm hoping that it will rearrange itself as things progress - I double checked the feed, and it seems to be working fine. Additionally, it's confined to the rdf feed; the Atom feed doesn't seem to be having any problems.

At any rate, my apologies for the inconvenience to those of you reading on bloglines. If it's really annoying, try the atom feed for now - it seems to be working well. I'm hoping to actually write something soon, as opposed to all this maintenance stuff. I save a ton of money by doing my own upkeep instead of going with typepad, but at times like this I wonder if it's worth the headache!

Fixed?

I think I've got everything working relatively well again. There are a few small bugs that I'm having trouble with, including a slight glitch in the comment moderation template, but most everything should be functional. If anyone runs across something that's doing odd things, could you do me the favor of posting a comment or sending an email? I did quite a bit of reworking the archives (although you shouldn't really be able to tell much difference on this side) and I can't be sure I've tested everything.

I hate this crap. It takes up my limited time cleaning up someone else's mess when I'd rather be writing. And just so that some moron can get a higher google rank? Argh.

Site Issues

Something screwed up on my site and crashed the server again last night. It could be another spam attack like I had in January, but nothing showed on my log files. I've disabled comments for the moment until I can get it fixed...

New Beginnings

Although it wasn't by design, it's good to take a step away from things that are important to you at times so as to see them more clearly. If you are like me, becoming personally invested in a thing colors your lenses, so to speak, preventing you from evaluating them clearly. So it is with this blog. Having some time away gives me a bit of a perspective on where I am with the site and where I want to go. Also, in keeping with the grand tradition of laying out goals for the new year which one has no intention of keeping, I'm feeling somewhat evaluative lately (although my intentions certainly are to follow through). So, with that in mind, I want to share some of my reasons for continuing to write and what I'd like to talk about in the near future, and invite you to come along for the journey.

In honesty, I almost decided to stop doing the site after the spam attack. It was an absolute mess. But one positive thing came out of it - I thought again about why I started to do this and came away with a new sense of purpose. I started this site to engage in conversation with other people who are thoughtful and invested in doing God's deeds and thinking God's thoughts, and I've made some great friends doing so. I also wanted a place to think out loud and have others who would tell me that I'm either onto something or on something, so to speak. Finally, I wanted to write regularly so as to improve my writing skills. I think that theopraxis has, for me, become all of these things, and I would miss it dearly. So where to go next?

First, I want to get back to Mark. I stopped at the end of Mark 4, not on purpose but rather because Real Life overwhelmed me at the end of last semester. I'd actually like to be more regular about it, so expect to see an excerpt from Mark every Monday. If we finish Mark (when I did Mark with my youth group it took eight months), I'll move on to something else - I'm currently leaning towards one of the prophetic books, but that will no doubt change.

Other things I'm thinking about that I want to spend some time on include a discussion on the nature and role of theology and an approach to Scripture. I also hope to continue to write creatively and imaginatively as the occasion warrants.

That's quite an agenda I think! I'm looking forward to writing more, conversing more, listening more, and learning more, and you are welcome to be a part of my journey.

Comments

It appears I still have some tweaking to do with my Movable Type configuration. I can't figure out how to turn off comment moderation. For the moment, if you submit a comment, it won't be displayed until I manually approve it. I don't want to leave it that way, but I don't have time to figure out what's wrong at the moment.

Back

I think I've gotten everything set up correctly. It took much longer than I thought and not everything in the interface is displaying correctly, but at least I can post! Back to writing, thankfully...

Spam

What a week. My dog chewed my laptop power cable, so I've been without a computer for about a week. On top of that, I was hit severely by comment spam this weekend, which ended up crashing the server. I'm back up for now, but I've removed the comment utility as a temporary fix until I can get the site upgraded. It's very discouraging. I won't be posting anything until I get this fixed. Be back soon.