Why I’ve not been blogging
I’ve just been too busy. That’s the reason.
There are other reasons, or reasons behind the reasons. For instance, my sabbatical from teaching lasted from May 2024 to August 2025—a full sixteen months away from the classroom. During that time, I published two books, drafted a third, and kept up a publishing schedule of two to four essays/reviews per month. On top of that I did dozens of podcasts, mostly publicity for the books, but also more regular fare for Mere Fidelity. And I began traveling more than I ever have before, giving talks and lectures at colleges, conferences, and churches.
And then I returned to the classroom, without slowing any of that down. You can imagine how that went. September and October formed an airtight bottleneck of deadlines I barely met and in some cases did not. I’m out of that now, and mostly I’m recovering.
The obvious point is that I can’t keep up a sabbatical schedule of commitments while teaching a full course load of undergraduate classes. I was foolish to try to combine them without giving something up.
More than that, I’ve simply realized that in the 40-45 hours I give to work each week, besides teaching, grading, meetings with colleagues, and meetings with students, I have time for the following (in order):
Email
Reading
Writing
Podcasts
“Blogging” is distinct, because writing means either paid work or academic work that will pay for itself later, in other currency. If I have a spare moment to write—for that matter, if I have even the germ of an idea for anything that could be written of interest to others—then I’m going to give it to an essay, a review, an article, or a book manuscript. I can micro blog because it takes mere seconds, and I never develop anything essay-like over there. Here at the mezzo blog, by contrast, it’s difficult to justify the time, even 15-20 minutes’ worth. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which means that I’d always (without exception!) be better off reading than blogging. But in that case, as I’ve discovered in practice, the blogging will go by the wayside entirely.
What does that mean, then? For one, it means that I remain secure in my decision to stay off social media; for another, it means that I won’t be joining the Substack cinematic universe anytime soon. From the bottom of my heart I do not understand how anyone—by which I mean writers and academics—even owns an account on these platforms, much less gives them the time of day. If that were me, I would accomplish literally nothing: I would write nothing, read nothing, and do nothing but scroll, half-reading “notes” and tweets and suchlike, intermittently, in every nook and cranny of my days.
Since I would like to read and write, when I’m not doing other things, it stands to reason that I should stay off. So I will. Having said that, I’m going to give mezzo blogging one more try between Thanksgiving week and the New Year. If there’s just no way to squeeze it in, then this space may be reduced semi-permanently to a ghost town of occasional announcements and little more. If so, so be it. But I do love blogging, and I especially love reading others’ blogging, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t make it work again.
In the coming weeks, then, expect more posts. And if they don’t appear, then you’ll know what I’ll have already learned: in this season of life, there’s just no time for it.
