A few notes about the future of this blog

Topics I plan to write about in the future of this blog, LORD willing:

-kingdom hospitality
-missions (abroad & at home)
-building & maintaining relationships
-womanhood
-manhood
-the family
-children
-discipline
-organization
-cultivating a gracious spirit
-thrift
-book reviews & notes (ee! the thought intimidates me!)
-brief writings about books & articles most beneficial in my life


You will notice these areas are closely related (e.g., many of the topics listed are characteristic of the godly woman, and thus fall under "womanhood"). And though I certainly don't think I should spend more time studying housekeeping or thrift more than the character of God, I have recently been greatly impressed by how lacking I am in these areas. So I thought keeping a blog would help me to retain wisdom I find, be thoughtful, think systematically. . . and ultimately live a life that brings more glory to God and increases my ability to minister to those I encounter.

Right now the plan is to keep some types of theological discourses, if blogged at all, on another blog. In some ways I don't like this idea, as in reality there is not a sharp dichtomy between theology and day-to-day life (nor between one area of theology or life and another). Rather, we live out our theologies (albeit imperfectly, of course, due to sinfulness, human ignorance, and an inevitable level of syncretistic thoughts). Yet I think this blogging approach may just work, even without sharply defined boundaries. Furthermore, I think this may be more conducive to keeping me on track in certain studies and helping and repeat visitors (should I have any) be able to access the blog they think they will be most interested in at a particular moment. And certainly there are many books sufficiently robust on a certain topic that do not try to be anything like a systematic theology, all the while (to use a Lewis euphemism) "tracing the suns rays back to the sun." (I guess you can consider this my apology for the blog's intended focus!)

In many ways, I expect the blog to evolve a lot through trial, error, and rethinking. Yet hopefully my tendency to tear down and rebuild continuously will not, as it much too often has, prevent me from really going far in any one direction.

You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows now exactly what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things that we know for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic who comes after. I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all. [. . .] You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before. Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility--Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. (emphasis mine)

The debris of my efforts to constantly reanalyze and redesign remind me of the G.K Chesterton quote. Oy! Shipwreck ahead?!