Category: Housekeeping

Daily Diary, 1/6/2025: Top Posts of 2024

Happy 2025, and welcome back! I had a nice and mostly relaxing holiday break, spending time with family in Iowa and Kansas. That also included a break from most writing. But, I’m back, and feeling refreshed, and ready to get back to things. So, to kick off 2025, here’s a quick look back at the most reads blog posts of 2024; I did the same thing over on my Substack, too, which you should read and subscribe to. Enjoy!

the icy, and beautiful, Mississippi River, looking east towards Wisconsin from the bluffs north of Dubuque, Iowa.
  1. No Right to Forgive: Deconstruction, Protest Atheism, and The Crucified God
  2. The tension at the heart of existence, or why Peter Thiel is not a Christian prophet (The Politics of Charity, Part 7)
  3. The Ten Commandments in Louisiana
  4. The effectiveness of the church, or what liberation theology gets wrong (The Politics of Charity, Part 2)
  5. heresy, and our wild, untamed God
  6. God never calls us “filth”
  7. Democracy in America: An Endorsement Against Donald Trump
  8. kenosis and humanity
  9. Justice and Charity (The Politics of Charity, Part 8)
  10. No Right to Forgive, Part 2: Krisis and Questions; and No Right to Forgive, Part 5: To Endure the Cross (tie)

Mathoms and commonplace books

As is almost always the case, I find Alan Jacobs’ reflections on the blog as Mathom-house a wonderful short reflection, and helpful in thinking about what I want this space to be. If you are subscribed to my Substack (and if you aren’t, why not?), you know that I’ve taken to writing longer essays over there that post on Fridays, along with a podcast episode. But I still have this space, and while I’m not active here right now, I keep thinking about the proper role for it. I like this idea from Jacobs:

But often I read something, find it possibly intriguing, but don’t know quite how to respond. In that case it becomes for me a mathom: I have no immediate use for it, but I am unwilling to throw it away. I have always been uncertain what to do about such textual mathoms, and have tried several different strategies over the years, none of which have really worked for me, for reasons too tiresome to explain. 

The best answer has always been available to me: post the passages to this blog, and tag them accordingly so they can more easily be found later and linked to related writings.

I think that’s what this site is going to become, for now. I read a lot of articles and essays that strike me as important, but I don’t necessarily have something to say about now, or at least not enough to essay about. So, I’ll share the relevant passage here, similar to the series of Excerpts I’ve long posted here, sometimes with a few thoughts, and call it good.

Writing and Notetaking

One of the major impediments to my writing consistently (besides time, and energy, and inspiration, and…) is my note-taking and organization. I don’t really have a system for how I keep track of ideas and things I want to revisit and the like. I read articles on Substack and through an old school RSS feed, and in the New York Times and my Apple News app, and just randomly on the internet; but if one of those things piques my interest, I don’t have one spot where I can put them all, and attach notes (I’m often struck by a point while reading, but it doesn’t stick or come back if I don’t jot it down or attach it) or review them. And so I get a lot of ideas, but there is no way for me to systematically capture those ideas and revisit them later and then get them formed into something that allows me to write, either in short here, or at length on my Substack.

I am, however, trying to remedy this, and to establish a durable, user friendly system. Alan Jacobs has written multiple times about his system, and most importantly for me, he advises that you make a system, and you stick to that system for a substantial amount of time, in order to develop habits and really determine if something does or does not work for you. That’s what I’m doing. Here are the broad outlines of my plan, which will hopefully make this space and my Substack more fruitful:

  • using Google Keep to save articles and capture immediate notes
  • Once a week (likely Mondays) going back through those saved notes, organizing them, and begin to prepare them for writing
  • On that same day, going through my handwritten notes and books I’m reading for other notes and ideas
  • Publishing blog posts semi-regularly during the week
  • Publishing two Substack newsletters per week: one digest of blog posts and current reading, one longer essay (this may be more semi-regular than weekly)
  • Once a month, reevaluating and purging remaining notes that haven’t been published

I have no idea if this system will work. The biggest thing is going to be the weekly work of curating and collating. I’m hopeful that this will help better capture the ideas that come and go rather quickly, and give me some guardrails that allow me to shepherd ideas towards the page more consistently.