‘Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus’
I stopped blogging here regularly about six years ago, when I was asked to be Head of School here in St Andrews. I’ve posted a few pieces since, mostly where I wanted a space to say something that seemed like it mattered urgently, as during lockdown. I’ve now stepped down from being Head of School, and have a bit more leisure to let my thoughts and interests wander, which was always the occasion for the (infrequent) blog posts I put up here. So it’s back. I don’t know if it will last–that depends on the worth I find in it, and the worth I see others finding in it.
Read MoreChanging a blog
Welcome to the new home, and the new design, of my blog. When I launched this blog, in 2007, I called it ‘Shored Fragments’. The name comes from a line at the end of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. I chose it because I loved the poem – I still do – because I loved the name – I still do – and because it captured what I thought I was doing in launching a blog. My original ‘About’ page spelt this out. For years I have been in the habit of typing up brief (500-2000 words) summaries of a thought that has struck me. These got saved on my various computers with filenames like ‘Fragment on Universalism.’ The blog was going to be a place to put them up in public, to invite others to help me to sift and refine them. It would be a collation of fragments that might later grow to something less incomplete. Nearly five years, and well over two hundred posts, on, I still post ‘fragments’ from time to time, but most of the posts on this blog do not fit that original description. Some still do, but they are definitely now the minority. Others are instead signposts – pointing to this or that post or event or publication that I find interesting. More are what I recently described in an email to someone as ‘sniper shots’, but perhaps would now think of as keyhole surgery: reading around a debate that interests me, I see an argument that is vulnerable to a brief, focused, criticism, and I write a post to critique it. These are complete pieces of writing, if short. I also reflect that, over time, I have been intentionally limited in what I post on this blog. I have deliberately restricted what I post here to theology; because of my interests, and because of the nature of the blogging medium, there has been a strong focus on Evangelicalism, and a more occasional but persistent focus on cultural criticism. (The comment about the ‘blogging medium’ is a reflection that blog posts have to accomplish their aim in less than (say) 2000 words; almost none of the thought that led to my Trinity book appeared on this blog because I had nothing of substance to say that was sayable in that space…) I am not going to change the name of the blog; perhaps I am being vainglorious, but it now seems too established to do that. It is time, I think, to change the description of the blog to reflect what it has become, and so with the new location and new design, I have a new account of what I am about on this site. In brief, the blog is an exploration of theology and culture from an Evangelical perspective. Part of this, of course, is a focus on what each of these words mean, with the contests over ‘evangelical’ being – at present – somewhat more prominent in my mind than the...
Read More‘Stirring dull roots with spring rain’
I’ve been thinking about Web page design recently, in connection with a couple of projects (one of which will go live in about a week, I hope; the other in the summer). I reflected that the design of this blog was not good in a couple of ways, and had been unchanged in over four years. So here’s a new design; I hope you like it… At the same time, I’ve added a couple of pages. ‘My writing’ and ‘My preaching and speaking’. Both are shameless marketing: links to places you can buy my books, or mp3s and even a DVD of me speaking. Comments on changes welcome; if you happened to be browsing this blog mid-afternoon, I apologise that the theme design changed repeatedly over one half hour!
Read More‘Vanity requires no response’
Just after midnight (GMT) last night, it seems, the view counter on this blog ticked from five figures to six. I have no idea, and not much interest, how 100 000 views compares to the average for a blog, or for a theoblog, or whatever. It suggests that there are a certain number of folk who find the stuff I post here from time to time interesting enough to come back, however, and for that I am grateful. (I noticed too a couple of weeks back the number of comments hit 1000, although over a quarter are mine; I am particularly grateful for friends who help me to refine and test ideas through that mechanism and others.) I’ve been blogging a little over four years, with two lengthy layoffs. Over the time, I’ve reflected more than once on what blogging is for, and gradually come to change my mind. Originally, I had this as a place to record undeveloped ideas that might in future go somewhere; I still do a bit of that, but more it is a platform, a place to offer ideas that might be of use or interest to the churches. I get to ‘publish’ (i.e., make public) ideas in a variety of ways, spoken, recorded, and written; whilst inevitably there is a coherence and even a certain amount of borrowing and development, I more and more think that anything, on any platform, should be considered as finished output, with the different audiences, the different styles, and the different lead-times, each platform offers an opportunity to find the right place for each thought to be placed. Anyway, thank you to all who have shared this particular journey so far with me. The title is another quotation from the Waste Land, from Tiresias’s cynical narration of her lover’s sexual conquest of the typist; in the context of my blogging, I suspect it is not true: had these words apparently disappeared into the ether, I suspect I would not have continued for four months. So in a sense this is your output as much as mine, and I am...
Read More‘Hooded hoardes swarming…’
Not quite four years ago, when I began this blog, I put a blogroll in the right gutter; it seemed the thing to do back then. I have been conscious for most of those four years that the blogroll was out of date, but unsure how to reform it. Recently, I deleted some dead links, but otherwise I have not changed it since the initial creation of the blog. My problem has been knowing what a blogroll is for. Two traditions are visible out in the blogosphere. The first is to list all the blogs one reads. That makes very good sense if your blog is somehow a record of your life. This site, for me, however, has never been a personal diary; there are important parts of my life never mentioned here (trivially, my love for cricket; centrally, my children). (That sentence is now no longer true. Oh well.) I have chosen on this site – my Facebook/Twitter feed is rather different, and I have had another, private, blog – to focus narrowly on theological themes. Of course, the themes are the ones I happen to find interesting, and so you will find much here about Baptist and Evangelical life, and pretty much nothing about radical orthodoxy or scriptural reasoning, but this is still a very limited record of one part of my intellectual life, not a personal chronicle. The 60-odd blogs that feature on my RSS reader are much more eclectic; some represent leisure interests; others are user blogs for software packages I use regularly; most are blogs of personal friends, some of which intersect with my subjects here to some extent, but which I read because of personal relationship with the author(s), not because of the subject. I have several friends who are, simply, much better bloggers than I am. Catriona, a fellow-minister within the Baptist Union of Scotland, blogs movingly, honestly, perceptively, and daily about her own life and ministry. Jim’s blog is a series of thoughtful, often profound, explorations of personal spirituality, and again is updated pretty much every day; I suspect in either case, however, interest in the blog will generally be the result of some level of personal relationship with the blogger; other than a degree of public acknowledgement (which is not to be dismissed, of course), I am not sure what including either in a blogroll on a site like this would achieve. The second live tradition is (to attempt) to maintain a list of, either all blogs on a topic, or all worthwhile blogs on a topic. This is difficult, commendable, and useful. Andy Goodliff does a great job for British Baptist blogs; Ben Myers a remarkably good job for theological blogs on a world scale. I’d never thought of trying to do similar, but recently Andrew Wilson, who maintains the excellent New Frontiers theology blog, asked me (in a lunch queue, as I recall) where to look for British theo-blogging. It struck me at once as a good question – online theology, at least in the Evangelical tradition, circles around American debates, and our ways of thinking and doing are different in significant ways from those on the other side of the Atlantic. It also struck me that there was no good place to go for an answer. So, this is what I want to start doing with my blogroll on this site: a list of active blogs, offering worthwhile theological discussion, from a British – actually, I’ll expand it to European – perspective. I’ll put up another post, lacking all the meandering justification, asking for nominations, and start to construct the list. Two of us, at least, will find it...
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