It’s a strange New Year’s resolution: to blog more.  Come to think of it, even New Year’s resolutions are strange.  Perhaps that’s grist for some future blogging.  Why “to blog more?”  Because writing is a discipline, and a worthwhile one.  Writing well is kin to thinking well.  Writing encourages thinking all the way through the matter.  Writing is an appropriate response to one’s reading.  Why “to blog more” and not just “to write more?”  Blogging is public, or potentially public.  By offing up my writing to you, I am offering and asking for conversation.  Conversation is also a worthwhile discipline, of course. So I am starting afresh: to blog more.

Over the next year (or more) I will have a couple of reading projects that I will be reflecting on.  First, I will be reading through the Bible.  There are always new discoveries in this strange world we call the Bible.  Second, I am working my way through Karl Barth’s “Church Dogmatics.”  I won’t finish it this year, to be sure, but I am on the 10 page a day plan (or so, I’m slightly behind at the moment!), and am just a few hundred pages in. Third, I want to interact with the reading I do outside of the above titles, whether books or web-articles and other blogs.  Finally, you can expect some miscellaneous posts: pictures, recipes, etc.

There is an old and well worn illustration about the stagnant pond that never receives new water:  the moral of the illustration is that if we never receive anything new our intellectual life will become stagnant.  It’s a very touching tale, and probably true; but its doesn’t describe the world most of us live in.  We have a plethora of inputs: movies, news, the internets, church services.  Our intellectual lives are characterized by input, but are often lacking output:  we consume and consume but rarely create or respond carefully to what we consume.  This is my resolution: to respond, in writing.  to blog more.  Thanks for reading.