Moratorium and Teaser

June 4, 2010

If you check in here with any regularity, you have no doubt noticed that activity has fallen off dramatically here since I've been traveling.  Since I will be continuing to visit relatives over the next couple weeks, and have my hands quite completely full with business, dissertation, and other responsibilities, I expect to be putting my posting here pretty much on hold till the middle of the month, though I hope there will still be installments of the VanDrunen review trickling in.  

But I can offer this exciting teaser--by the end of the month, I expect to be migrating this whole blog over to a new site, www.swordandploughshare.com, that will be not only a much better-looking, better-organized, and better-working blog, but indeed, I hope, much more than a blog.  So stay posted for the big move!

Travel Advisory

Please note: I will be off visiting cathedrals, abbeys, and the like for the next four days, so far as I know without internet.  So I won't be posting, but will probably still be writing up posts, which I will then disgorge onto this blog en masse next weekend.  Scary, I know.  Maybe I'll even put up pictures of cathedrals and abbeys...make this blog rather more colorful than it's used to being.

In the meantime, if you feel deprived (ha! don't worry, even I'm not that vain) you could listen to the recent Theopolitico podcasts...in this last one in particular, we achieved much more of the balance that I was hoping for, and we've been having some good ongoing discussion on the nature of coercion.  Still needs to have a lot of kinks ironed out, but hopefully it'll prove useful to some folks.  

Irksome Problems

You may have noticed that since the blog template switchover, there have been a couple of irksome problems: 1) the dates of the posts are not showing up at the top, 2) odd blank spaces keep appearing at the top of posts, 3) the font has been too small, or of oddly varying size.  To the first problem, I can find no solution except to start putting the dates in myself at the top of each post.  As far as the second and third, I have been wrestling with the blog demons all week, and they still seem to be getting the better of me.  But I'll keep experimenting, and find some solution.  Think of the constantly-changing font as an extra incentive to read this blog--you never know what you're going to get each time you peek in...it's like a fortune cookie. :-)

Voila!

Alright folks, the new layout is basically here!  There's a few bugs still, but I'm reasonably satisfied and I hope you are too.  You may notice that when I changed the template, the expandable post summary code (the part that makes it say "Read More") disappeared for all posts.  I've fixed it manually for the first few, and will gradually go back through and fix it, but for now, older posts appear in all their overlong glory.  The upside is that the new way of doing the expandable post summaries won't share the bug of the old way--that it says "Read More" whether or not there is any more to read!


A brief note on the rationale...a couple months ago it struck me that my blog sounded rather violent--"Target Practice" was the title, and the tagline said it was "an arena for lobbing shots at anyone who I disagree with" or something obnoxious like that.  Given that I have in the last couple years come to feel strongly about the Christian opposition to violence (again, I'm not a pacifist, but Christians today are so far from pacifism that we need to lean in that direction to achieve any kind of godly balance) this seemed rather out of character.  It also (despite what I remember as my resolute intent at the time) comes across as rather brash, obnoxious, yea, even arrogant.  While "lobbing shots" (do you "lob" shots??) may happen here from time to time, and indeed will be necessary from time to time, it is scarcely the point, which is to constructively seek harmony and growth in the Church and our societies.  


Plus, the whole blog was looking rather stale and ugly to me...hence the total makeover.
(Special thanks to Donny Linnemeyer for helping fix a few bugs.)

Under Construction

I'm making some wholesale changes to my blog, which was hideously outdated and out of character. Unfortunately, I'm running into some serious obstacles along the way.

So things are a bit messed up right now. I hope to get everything tidied up soon, and I hope you'll enjoy the new look.