I’ve spent some time recently sorting through my online writings, and it’s not easy, given my susceptibility to logorrhea. But I’m thinking it would be useful to summarize a few things.

First, I have links to all of my recent essays and the various sites at which I have written over the years on my home page, so please check that out if you’re interested. And I have reposted some older essays of mine that I want to preserve.

Second, I want to talk about this here site. My posts here are organized by tag, or mostly they are — I have never been as disciplined or consistent about tagging as I should be. But I’ve done some work lately to clean things up, which has been useful in part because there are some topics that I had been thinking of writing about that, it turns out, I have already written about. Quelle surprise.

Anyway, I’m thinking it could be useful for me to summarize the key themes of this blog by listing some of the most frequently used tags — though first, I should note that my chief general imperative at this stage of my career is rejecting the smooth things and heading for the rough ground.

• My major project these days is one I call Invitation & Repair.
• Another theme that’s on the back burner now but will come to the front one day is Mid-Century Modernity.
• Here I write on themes associated with my book How to Think — largely cognitive errors of various kinds.
• Here I write about whether there is such a thing as a “Christian intellectual” and, if there is, what sort of person that might be.
• It seems that I have written a good bit on that vexed term evangelical.
• I have posts on the Christian life and posts specifically on theology — though I’m not sure I do a good job of distinguishing those.
• I’ve written about Left Purity Culture (LPC) and race and racism.
• I’ve written too much about politics here, but let this one post stand for what I most deeply and consistently think about politics. The posts specifically on pluralism reflect something I think about a lot. Likewise my posts on ethics.
• Here I write about certain pathologies and absurdities of academic life, and here I write about the nature and character of the university more generally.
• I write sometimes about movies.
• There are some lovely images in my posts on architecture and drawing, many of which feature John Ruskin.
• In addition to Ruskin, I have posts on several thinkers who have been especially important to me over the years, including Rowan Williams, W. H. Auden, and Michael Oakeshott.

And finally, I have written some things that I want to revisit, for my own sake, on the uses and purposes of blogging:

• new uses for old blogs
• the blog garden
• control and surrender, architecture and gardening
• trying
• smooth things and rough ground 
• The Homebound Symphony (maybe the most important post of all) 

This has been a useful exercise for me because it reminds me that, when I look at this blog along with my published essays, I’ve said all I ever need to say about a great many subjects. I don’t have to revisit the “What is an evangelical?” question again. I have fully developed my Unified Theory of Wokeness. I have no new thoughts about the character of the university and where it’s headed.

Moreover, with the release of Breaking Bread with the Dead I have completed my Pedagogical Trilogy, which is to say, I have now related for the benefit of the public pretty much everything I have learned as a teacher. For the next year or so I will be working on my critical edition of Auden’s Shield of Achilles and focusing on teaching, which will be challenging. So this will be a good time for me to do a lot of slow thinking about what to do next. I’ve got some ideas — but I want them to simmer slowly on the back burner for quite some time.