The Pietist Schoolman

There’s a guest post up at The Anxious Bench today (on St. Ephrem the Syrian), so I’ll instead use this space to announce that I’m taking a break from Pietist Schoolman for a while.

As some of you may remember, I’m spending my fall sabbatical living in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and that transition is only a couple weeks away. So I need to spend some time getting things ready, and finishing a chapter for the new Pietism book. (Whose manuscript that should be submitted to the publisher about halfway through the sabbatical.)

But I also think that it’s a good idea to take some concentrated time off from blogging at least once a year. I first did this in 2014, meant to repeat the practice this time last year, but got caught up in writing rather popular posts about the sexuality debate in Christian higher education. All of which underscores that at least my first reason for taking an annual blogging mini-sabbatical is still a good one:

When you first start blogging, you don’t have an audience. Just the hope of one. (And your mom.) But it doesn’t matter: you’ve set objectives for yourself that have little do with how many eyes read what you’re writing.

But inevitably, if you start attracting readers, you start caring more and more about how many views, shares, likes, retweets, etc. you’re getting. You start predicting what will be read rather than contenting yourself with what should be written.

Anyway, I’ll be back here once we’ve got our feet under us in Virginia. In the meantime, I’ll be back next week in my usual Tuesday spot on The Anxious Bench. And you can always follow me on Twitter or Facebook for occasional commentary.