Tracing the evolution of the dispatch from November until now is a lot of work for me and so I imagine it would be a lot of work for the average reader. And I, in bad form, got out of the habit of writing this end-of-the-month summary posts to help folks catch up, so I’m listing one now that covers every article of the last several months for the benefit of readers who would like to go back and see how the present slate of different serial installments got to their present point.
Let me briefly remind the reader that I have committed recently to shorter posts—especially, the free stuff is now shorter, with the current Monday series being a running commentary on the Book of Wisdom or Divine Wisdom, also called Wisdom of Solomon, taking the Greek text and writing a student’s companion commentary that elucidates different features of the grammar, the content, and the context. Thursday posts remain more dedicated, substantial pieces, but I have also limited myself to the size of an email for each of them, after a winter of progressively ignoring email limits to chase certain ideas in long-form essays. I will offer at the end some kind of guide to the logic behind what will be published on Thursdays.
Articles
Anyway, here’s what’s been published since November 1 and the end of the “Spirit and Imagination” series that was fairly consistent through October:
November
“A Clarification on the Historical Jesus, Christology, and Ethics”
“Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? If So, How—and How Could We Know?”
“Zephyr IV: More Fall 2023 in Review (Though Less Than Last Time)” in Zeitgeist Zephyrs
December
“Jesus’s Resurrection as Postmortem Vindication for a Righteous Martyr”
“Christus nascendus est” in Homely Homilies
“Zephyr V: The Boy and the Heron” in Zeitgeist Zephyrs
January
“What the Greeks Gave Us: A Review of Adam Nicolson’s How to Be”
“Zephyr VI: Our Flag Means Death” in Zeitgeist Zephyrs
February
Announcements
First, I’d like to announce that Rob De La Noval and I have, at long last, submitted our edited volume Anime, Religion, and Theology to the good folks over at Lexington Press & Fortress for the Pop Culture & Theology series. The book experienced a number of delays mainly related to the changing life circumstances of both Rob and myself: I first inquired if he wanted to join me in getting the book running two day jobs ago, and in the meantime, my child grew into a toddler, he got a new professor gig—you know how these things go. Anyway, working with and getting to know Rob better as my friend has been the main benefit of producing the book, but it’s also been a lot of fun to help edit and sharpen some really brilliant essays that are now in the book. Hopefully, this will add to ongoing conversations around anime as a culturally meaningful art form, whose ongoing popularity in Western societies should not be ignored, especially for the ways that anime is now introducing young people to serious philosophical and religious ideas they are not encountering in traditionally religious spaces.
Second, I’ll be in Italy for about two weeks next month for a professional development event around spoken Latin and Latin teaching. My goal is to have stuff written and ready to be sent-out while I’m gone, but it’s totally possible that I will drop the ball; should this happen, I hope that the reader takes no offense. (If anything, you might be happy to hear from me less!)
Third, ongoing restructuring of how this dispatch is run: with a shorter, free Monday series taking the place of a full-length article, this makes Thursdays the new place for all ongoing series (“How to Think About…”, “Appreciations,” “Zephyrs,” “History and Theology,” “Ethical Cosmopolitanism,” and more to come). These have been sporadic in appearance to this point, and while I’d like to tell you that some kind of systematization to their release schedule is on its way, it simply isn’t coming any time soon. I continue to write this rag on the principle that it is a space for me to explore whatever’s capturing me in the moment, not necessarily to pursue anything in so linear or rigid a manner as a typical publishing schedule demands. And my sense is that this makes for better content, because I tend to write my best stuff when I’m really jazzed by an idea. I am, for example, proud of the pieces written and linked above on Daoism and Confucianism, as well as the one on the Son of Man; these were each written during weeks where these things were big on my mind, and the only way to clear my mind was to write. So, I invite the reader for now to consider these series less as linear releases and more as ongoing possible topics of conversation within which I am always free to release new entries as the spirit moves me (or even grooves me). I also invite the reader to comment below or correspond privately on what kinds of things they are most interested in seeing articles on. Are any of these serials more important to you than some others? Are any less enticing, or completely unappetizing? Anything I’m not writing about that you’d like me to be? Let me know.
One goal I do have is to make sure that the other columns—Public Polyglossia, Zeitgeist Zephyrs, Homely Homilies, and Errant Epistulae, to this point—see more action than they have to this point. Minimally, to the tune of about once a month, or at least once every other month. I also may add more columns for things like book reviews or dialogues, which I took a stab at writing with the Apollonios and basically liked the process of.
Appeals
As always, I rejoice for the success of APD. This was an idea I hatched three years ago now as a way to keep my life of academic thinking and writing from atrophying as I began teaching middle school English as a pivot in response to the circumstances of COVID. I put it away briefly when teaching at a different school that I thought would take theological exception to the anti-dogmatist approach to matters of theology I take in this dispatch, and brought it back when my wife was stepping away from work and I knew that I needed to make all the extra cash I could to support her and our child. The summer that APD came back, in fact, I was working forty hours a week in a kitchen while I awaited the new school year at my current, new, and better job (really, the best my particular gig as a teacher of Latin and Greek gets). Every day was spent, basically, parenting, writing, and then doing manual labor, until it was time to take off my blue-collar laborer hat and put on my still-blue-collar-teacher hat in my nevertheless-white-collar-working-environment. (For those wondering, it’s the difference between an actually beaten up blue ball-cap and a brown corduroy ball-cap.) And over this past winter, in which I lost both my brother and my college mentor, APD proved fairly vital for working through some issues afflicting my mental health as a result of grief, especially those related to the afterlife. So for it to pay off as it has in the form of the publication’s readership and following is immensely gratifying for its own sake.
That success, which has seen APD become a Substack Bestseller, is something I am deeply thankful to all of you for. In our world of endless digital words (and my sins are red like scarlet on that score), we have forgotten that to have our words be read and engaged with by anyone is an honor, and it is all the more surprising and honoring to be paid for one’s writing. I did not expect that this dispatch, or online magazine, or very public window into my own mania, would become what it did, and I am continually reminded that this is a huge thing to have produced and accomplished.
It’s in that spirit of gratitude that I ask those who are not paying subscribers to consider becoming such, and that those whose subscriptions are up for renewal to consider renewing them. It’s just me that makes this. I don’t have outside help, and I do this during time that I might more profitably do other things for myself. The monetary support it produces has always provided the justification for continuing to do it, and to try to do it as well as I can: I never want to half-ass anything I write here, and I even want to keep expanding the platform, hopefully to some day making recordings of articles and other kinds of offerings more normal. If you read the publication, benefit from it, and even like it, and if it makes sense for you (and only if it does: please, do not pay for something like this if you cannot feasibly fit it into the budget that best supports you), please consider renewing your subscription. My prices are and will always stay as low as Substack allows them to be, which currently remains $5/month, $30/year, and $50/founding membership.
If you have money to pay for writing, you can theoretically send it anywhere, so why here? Here’s the only shameless plug I’ll make for myself, ever: no one else that I know of is doing exactly the thing I’m doing here. There are lots of, and increasingly more, competent scholars of religion and classics who are making their work accessible to a public reading, watching, and listening audience, and offering classes in that work for relatively cheap (didaskaloi.com is a good resource to check out in that vein, and so is M. David Litwa’s Patreon, and so are Let’s Talk About Religion and Religion for Breakfast). And, there are lots of theologians, of differing calibers (from high-ranking, deeply intelligent scholars in Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant circles who run Substacks or do interviews or occasionally run classes to scammy apologetics types), who continue to be very publicly visible on the Internet, some of whom may have secondary training as classicists, biblical scholars, historians, scholars of religion, and so on, but many of whom do not. (You should definitely subscribe, for example, to David Bentley Hart’s Substack, as Hart—a great patron and friend of APD—is both a theologian, a philosopher, and someone trained in religious studies and classics, but I’d avoid Catholic Answers and the Orthodox podcasts Lord of Spirits and The Symbolic Universe like the plague.) But very few people that I know are doing what I try to do, which is to attempt serious comparative work in scholarship of religion, biblical studies, classics, history, literature, etc., and then to take this seriously as data for philosophical and theological reflection; I know relatively few people who offer as much content as I do for free in this regard, too, or who do so with some kind of credentials. So, if you believe, as I do, that there’s also a need for someone who can be a competent guide to both sides of scholarship and faith, and that there’s a need for a place that people who are honestly wrestling with both general and niche issues in both to feel safe to do so, then please, consider renewing, upping, or making a subscription.
Curate ut valeatis,
David
Having dipped my toes into Lord of Spirits and the Symbolic World, I agree with your advice. They are particularly bad on world religions and universalism. The shadow of a certain ecclesiastical authority seems to limit them. Perhaps the authority of what DBH points to as the new evangelical style of American Orthodoxy.
More Homely Homilies! Good luck in your endeavours.