The Pietist Schoolman

Year One of The Pietist Schoolman concludes today.

365 days, 420+ posts, about 33,000 views, and nearly 12,000 spam comments after that first post, I’m struck that blogging has indeed helped with the three things I hoped to accomplish: to get some feedback (though I’d love to have more comments, the cliché that “1% of readers comment” seems right for this blog, as most others) and start some conversations; to engage in “intellectual spring cleaning” and think aloud more than I’m prone to do; and to work on writing. (Not sure if I’ve become a better writer as a result, but I’m certainly a more consistently productive writer.)

But it’s also done some things I didn’t expect, like form some friendships (or, at least, mutual admiration societies) that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise. (At the same time, it’s been just as interesting to encounter online versions of people that I already knew “face-to-face”; they often surprise me, as — I hope — I do them.) And a year of blogging has helped crystallize my growing conviction that my vocation as a scholar is much less centered on the academy than I ever would have thought in graduate school. I like that blogging not only lets me make connections with world-class scholars in history, religion, and other fields, but that it lets me talk about history, Christianity, education, and a lot of other topics with people as diverse as pastors and librarians, former students and total strangers, my mom and… well, my dad.

And, in that respect, I like how Jana Riess talks about the blogger as a “curator of ideas.” In a post offering her top ten blogging tips, it’s #1:

At a museum, a curator is a person who chooses exhibits, researches them, carefully marks them, and presents them to the world. A museum curator knows her niche audience. As a blogger, you will come to know yours too, though this takes time. One of the best things you can do as a curator is to try different “exhibits” and see what people respond to most.  Whether you are pointing readers to new books, other people’s posts, or what was on Colbert last night, you are custodially managing information and ideas for your readers.

To this point in this blog’s life, I’ve often violated her next guideline (“Remember that your blog is a community, not a soapbox”), since I’ve spent the year trying to develop a certain voice and audience. But I hope that I was listening as often as I was shouting, being opinionated without seeking to stop conversation. And it’s a good goal for year #2 of The Pietist Schoolman to see this space become more of a community, a public square where people from divergent backgrounds and possessing differing interests come into contact with me, with each other, and with some of the ideas that I have the opportunity to curate. (And perhaps I can talk a few acquaintances and readers into guest blogging in 2012-2013…)

But that’s in the future… This morning I’m just profoundly grateful that so many of you have taken the time to read this blog — whether once, or on a regular basis. There’s a lot out there in the blogosphere, and only some of it is about Justin Bieber, so it’s humbling that you would think it worth your while to pause and read a few hundred or thousand words from me out of the zillions you could choose from!

For the record, the most popular posts in the first year of this blog were…

1. Tolkien, Lewis, and the Memory of War
2. In Celebration of Students
3. “Do college professors work hard enough?”
4. Micah 6:8 in Christian Rhetoric
5. Save the Date: Pietism Colloquium at Bethel
6. The Best National Anthems: Introduction
7. “The Right Kind of Peace”
8. “The Capital of the Movement”
9. What If?
10. Nevinson’s War
11. “You say pietism, I say Pietism”
12. The Pietist Impulse: Missions
13. The Best National Anthems: Honorable Mentions
14. The Best National Anthems: Brazil
15. Unhappy Valley
16. John Piper: “I think I’m a pietistic Calvinist”
17. The Pietist Impulse: Germans
18. Why Are There No Holidays in August?
19. This Day in History: John Brown’s Body
20. Evangelicals and “Dominion” (part 1)
21. Registration Open for the Inaugural Bethel Colloquium on Pietism Studies
22. This Day in History: The Worst of Sinners
23. The War of 1812 (un)Remembered
24. The Best National Anthems: Also Rans
25. The Pietist Impulse: Scandinavians

Some lessons from that list…

1. 

   World War I is more popular than I’d have imagined: half the spots in the top ten went to entries in my summer 2011 series previewing my travel course on the Great War. And lesson 1a: if you include a picture of a gruesome combat wound in a post on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, you’ll get lots of hits.

2. But for the most part, popularity is unpredictable… As far as I can deduce from looking at Google queries, #2 is #2 because it includes a brief summary of a student presentation on the history of Hutterite communities in her home state (along with a photo of Hutterites from a neighboring state). And #4 is as high as it is because someone thought (correctly) that it would make good fodder for a Fundamentalist discussion board. (I wonder how many of those readers stuck around to read posts like this one…) And apparently (#14), I’m big in Brazil.
3. It helps a whole lot if after you devote a couple thousand words to criticizing someone (#11), they not only write you a complimentary e-mail and comment, but post a link on their own, much more popular blog.
4. It also helps when bloggers of the stature of Scot McKnight, John Fea, Chris Armstrong, Jared Burkholder, Matthew Cantirino, and others are nice enough to point some of their readers your way. Thanks to all who linked to one of my posts!