About The Blog

Welcome! This is my blog, which has existed in one form or another for more than a decade.

The blog has its origins in 2006, when I began blogging as an undergraduate traveling abroad for successive summer internships in Uganda and Russia, respectively. Later, as I approached the beginning of my Master’s of Divinity program at Emory University in the fall of 2008, I decided to create a blog dedicated to ongoing reflection on what I would be reading and learning. I called that blog “Resident Theology.” I maintained it for nine years: three at Emory plus six at Yale, where I earned my PhD.

In the summer of 2017, as I transitioned from doctoral studies to teaching theology at Abilene Christian University, I created a new blog to mark the occasion: “Resident Theologian.” I’ve now maintained that blog for four years, which amounts to 13 years of blogging about theology, and 15 years total. (Approximate word count for that decade and a half: 750,000.)

I see this blog as a more or less direct continuation of “Resident Theologian,” since nothing in my employment or professional life has changed; hence why all the posts from the old blog have been imported here. This is merely the new and, I hope, permanent home for my occasional and sometimes more than occasional blogging.

Once upon a time I wrote massive posts that were more like rough essays than spontaneous musings. I don’t do that anymore, though I also avoid the sort of para-tweeting that certain blogging styles, including so-called “micro blogging,” can approximate. I think of my own approach as “mezzo blogging”: small- to medium-sized posts that serve to stimulate or catalyze thoughts, my own or others’, that are too inchoate to publish, too minor to publicize widely, but too substantial to leave in a notebook or my own brain. It’s a public means of thinking out loud in the presence of others. And since, like so many others, I learn what I think by writing it out, this blog is the rough sketch or first draft of all that I think, or at least think I might think.

Most of my favorite blogs are now extinct (or transmogrified into newsletters), though two—Alan Jacobs’ and Richard Beck’s—are still alive and well. No topic, for them, is verboten, just as no post is the final word—on anything, including their own opinions. Most often I write about what I’m reading, provoked to comment or elaborate or nitpick or ask questions. But really, anything’s fair game; though nothing is sillier or more boring than flame wars and internet controversies. So don’t expect much of that. The point of a blog is to resist the Twitterification of the internet, not perpetuate it.

Hence: No comments, at least for now. But if you have a thought, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading.