Updates for Fall 2024
Some Writing Aims, Next Book Club, and Everyone's Favorite Flash Sale
Summing up the summer, and gearing up for what’s next. In honor of the three-year mark, I’m discounting supporter subscriptions until August 15th. If you think what I do is worth supporting, I encourage you to help make it possible.
Taking Stock of Year Three
Technically, the three year anniversary of this little project is at the end of August, but with a brief family trip next week, and school starting very soon, I wanted to take stock of how things are going since August 2023:
—This year was bananas. After being named one of the featured Substacks, nearly 1,300 new people signed on in the course of a week. Thanks for taking a chance on this tugboat to glory. Let’s keep doing this.
—Even with taking some breaks, the 2-per-week average held pretty steady. We talked a lot about John Cassian and virtue, about empathy, suffering, homeschooling, Keywords of the Moral Life, Dorothy Day, bureaucracy, scarcity, and the very occasional hot-take adjacent piece. It was a really rich writing year, and one of the things I love most about doing this is to think in public with you, faithful readers.
—It was a year of gaining some clarity about the kind of writing that brings life to you and to me, and what kind of writing can be done without. Nearly five years ago, I gave up on peer-review essays (with the occasional exception), mostly because my job doesn’t require it, and they’re so rarely read. Peer review essays do have value because they’re analytic, careful explorations to draw together vast bodies of literature.
But the secret is that you can do that here if you want. And I do, just minus the fear of Reviewer #2.
The rule of thumb that I’m coming to is, if I hit “send” and can’t wait to write the next part, it was a good thing to have written. Write it in a voice you can live with, because the last thing I want to read is writing that I don’t hear my own voice in.
—I also gained more clarity about what isn’t worth my time to write about. Some of the most read pieces from the last six months have been current-event-adjacent, but not offering a hot take. No one thinks that my words are authoritative on a subject, and it’s frankly more useful to root current questions in old sources. So, no changes there.
But.
Going forward, I’m going to be doing more of these as short Friday exercises for supporters, embracing a “let it rip” mentality. I remain committed to cold takes, but cold takes apart from the heat of the moment become stultified: there is a necessary friction between past and present that makes ethics interesting, and merely describing the past excuses us from having to say something in the present. When I write at this intersection, it’s a combination of fear and exhilaration that’s hard to explain.
Next Up: Some Plans for Year Four
—The next large series that I want to tackle, having spent a lot of time with Cassian’s vices, is The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are the backbone of a lot of catechesis, and so, I want to spend a good bit of time working through the moral implications of the Decalogue. Buckle up.
—For supporters, having spent some time unpacking Dorothy Day’s basic ethos, I want to spend some time with two very different figures: Bruce Springsteen, and Thomas Aquinas. One of my reading goals is to read Aquinas’ Summa Gentiles, and I’ll bring you along for the ride. And one of my lost passion projects is a series of essays on the theological vision of the Heartbreak Kid. Who knows? Once the Springsteen ones are finished, I might dally in self-publishing these.
—I’ll be neck deep in more work on psychology and the moral life through a project with the Templeton Foundation, so look out for various pieces in that vein.
If you have other things you want to hear about, let me know here:
Forthcoming Work
This summer, I finished a reader of Howard Thurman’s work, forthcoming with Plough Media sometime in 2025, and began working on my next book, tentatively entitled Valley of Death, Bread of Life: The Christian Moral Life in Outline, which began here on Substack, graciously hosted by
. I’m also still hammering out details on a book I worked on for at least seven years, now titled Contesting The Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century, also due out Summer 2025.But til then, I’ll have a slow drip of other things coming out online. Next week, I’ll have a piece explaining how and why we homeschool coming out in Christianity Today online, and this Fall, I’ll have a review of the forthcoming movie by Angel Studios about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also with CT online. If it runs in the form I hope, it will be my Beethoven’s 9th of reviews, my true masterpiece.
Next Book Club
The next book club will be September 23rd, on The Things Money Can’t Buy by Michael Sandel. It was a squeaker in the poll, but that was the winner, and so, Sandel it is! You can find a copy at your favorite online retailer or library. Zoom details forthcoming.
That’s it for now. Think of me fondly while I’m sweating on the Texas coast.
You've been cogitating the Boss's theological shuffle as long as Texas' DMV has verified your Shiner Bocks. To say I've long anticipated these conversational renderings is an understatement. Bring 'em on.