This summer I took a semi-intentional break from blogging. This was partly just a dry-spell in post ideas that turned into an extended hiatus, but it was also time for a gut-check for me. When I started blogging back in '09, I didn't really have a long term plan for the blog, and I was starting to wonder in '012 if I'd said all there was to say about God, life, faith, love, words and spirituality.
Enough people mention terra incognita to me off and on that I know there's somebody out there reading this. But I reached a point this June where the only thing I could think of when I sat down at the dashboard was: why bother? And so I didn't for a while.
Google tells me there's a name for this malaise. At least, enough hits turn up when I type "blogging fatigue" into the search engine that I know I'm not alone. So I decided to take a breather. If you love something, they say, let it go. If it comes back to you it was meant to be.
It did come back to me. Sometime around the end of July, I started to find renewed inspiration and purpose for this site. However, rather than jumping right back in with the usual promises to do better - writing cheques I couldn't cash and all - I thought I'd just start writing without the pressure of posting for a while and see where that got me. A month or so later I've got enough posts on deck that I feel confident to announce the "relaunch" of terra incognita with a guarantee of regular posting through to January. (Given the price of this blog, I'm even prepared to make that a money-back guarantee.)
For those who have been with me on this journey since the out-set, let me thank you here for your patience as we grow to serve you better.
For those of you who are visiting for the first time, a word about this blog. terra incognita is Latin for "unknown country." It's a reference to the way Jesus leads us into unknown territory (literally or spiritually speaking) whenever we follow him in faith. You can think of this blog as a giant spiritual connect the dot, where we try to draw lines between 1) stuff I see going on in the Bible, 2) stuff I see going on in the world, 3) stuff I'm reading about, and 4) stuff I love about art, culture, media and literature.
I hope you'll pick up a crayon and join me.
Back in the Blogging Saddle
Announcing a New Blogging Project
Still working on that post on "Faramir and the Weight of Glory," but in the mean time, let me tell you about a new group blog I'm participating in called the conneXion. It's a project some of my friends and coleagues in the FMCiC are working on, and you're warmly invited to check out its debut over at: http://fmcictheology.blogspot.com/.
Monday Morning Media Round-up
Happy Monday, everybody. In the intrepid spirit of terra incognita I've been exploring some new media these days, and finding no shortage of gems. Like a cyber-Marco-Polo, I offer below some of the very best of my travels for your discriminating consideration:
From the Airwaves:
Seeds, Hey Rosetta!
I heard a track from Hey Rosetta!'s new album on CBC Radio Q, and 15 seconds in I was mesmerized. The whole album has lived up to the promise of that first 15 seconds. While I've wanted to compare it at times to Mumford & Sons, Radiohead, and Arcade Fire, there's something going on here that defies comparison. Every song is an organic, constantly evolving mini-world that becomes something new every 30 seconds. The songwriting reminds me of that line from Heraclitus: "You can't step into the same river twice." Neither can you step into the same Hey Rosetta! song twice, it seems. Oh yeah: and the production is near-flawless.
Unconvinced? Check out one of my favorite tracks from the ablum and tell me I'm wrong:
From the Blogosphere:
Experimental Theology
I stumbled across this blog on the blog roll over at this side of sunday. Richard Beck is a theologian/experimental psychologist at Abeline Christian University, and his work at Experimental Theology combines these two disciplines in fascinating and enlightening ways. I only wish I had the time to explore all the topics tagged in the sidebar (among which are series with tantalizing titles like "Alone, Suburban and Sorted," "The Theology of Humour," "The Theology of Ugly," and "Game Theory and the Kingdom of God").
Strech your mind and heart and check this blog out; and for a starter that's as light as it is heavy, I'd suggest you begin with his playful and masterful analysis of the theology of Calvin and Hobbes.
From the Tube:
The Century of the Self (part 1)
This four-part BBC documentary by award winning film-maker Adam Curtis traces the fascinating and often chilling story of Freud's influence on the shape of American culture. My friend Jon Coutts had posted a link to another Adam Curtis doc. called All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and after watching it I was hungry for more. A few Wikipedia searches and youtube clicks later, I was watching this one. I'm only 1/2 through it, but already my mind is surging. Give it a watch.
Battling Blogger's Block
When I started terra incognita two years ago, I never expected that 275 posts later I'd have run out of things to say. For the last three weeks, however, I've been lugging around a blogger's block the size of the Rock of Sisyphus. Every idea that comes to me seems over-done or hardly worth the effort, and that plain old green header kept staring me down every time I sat in front of the screen. Enough hits come up when I google "blogger's block" to suspect this is a common malady, and will run its course in due time.
All of that to explain the aesthetic overhaul here at terra incognita: out with the old, plain-Jane green header and white-washed colours, in with a whole new theme. This was partly an effort to inject some new life into my blog; but more to the point it was a blatant exercise in procrastination (my hope was that the blogger's block was ice, and by stalling a bit it would simply melt on its own). My first effort at re-design included a theme called "Dark Ritual," but my son, after asking cautiously if I wanted his "honest opinion," told me that when he saw it he felt like he was sitting down to read the "morbid thoughts" of a "teenaged-girl Twilight Series fan" (as though there were other kinds of Twilight fans). I squinted my eyes and tilted my head and realized he was right. This is effort two.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy. More to the point, I hope it serves its purpose and inspires some new blogging enthusiasm. Nothing like moving the furniture around to get a new lease on the place.
10 Lessons Learned Blogging
The other day I was talking to a friend who was thinking about starting a blog but didn't know if, or where to start. After the chat I was still mulling over some of the lessons I've learned in the last year and a bit of blogging (real practical lessons, mind you, not philosophical epiphanies or lead-in-to-a-joke kind of lessons).
In what follows I defer completely to those who have been doing this longer, but here are some practical rules of thumb I've found helpful.
1. Decide why you're doing it before you do. In my experience, blogging can be a sort of love-hate experience (especially if you're committed to items 2-5 below). The blog, in one sense, is never satisfied. Unlike a paper, or a sermon, or a story, it's never "done," and next week the post you just spent hours crafting will feel kinda stale and you'll have to start all over again. Knowing why I started doing this, after all, helps on those days when it feels it would be easier to just pull the plug.
2. Keep them short. This was a real tough one for me, starting a blog straight out of seminary and all, but the discipline of keeping my blog posts to around 500 words has (I think) improved my writing generally. It's curious, but I find writing a 500 word post harder than a rambling 1100-er. Go figure.
3. Keep it coming. This is a tough one too, but I've found that consistent posting is a really helpful discipline (he says after eight days of silence....); it develps the habit of regular writing, and once you find the groove, it makes the general experience of blogging more pleasant.
4. Plan ahead. Keeping a running list of possible post ideas as they come to you really helps with #3, especially when that computer screen is staring you down, a week since your last post, and you still don't know where to start.
5. Write ahead. This helps a lot with #3, too. I took a couple of weeks a while back and hammered out ten or twelve short back-up posts which I keep on file for those weeks when the well's dry or I don't have much time to put down the bucket.
6. Take breaks. Rather than just letting things peter out, I've tried to take intentional hiatuses (hiatai ?) from blogging when I find my creativity or energy is flagging, setting a specific stop-and-re-start date for myself. The few times I've done this I find I come back blogging with renewed enthusiasm.
7. Use Dropbox. Dropbox is an easy-to-use online file sharing service and about the quickest way I've found to include additional content (files, word documents, pdfs, video games, etc) in your posts. Just put it in your dropbox and then include a link on the blog. Done.
8. Use videos for podcasts. When I started I wanted to embed audio files in some of my posts. Doing some research I discovered this is a lot more tricky than it sounds. I found lots of ways to embed audio using html code, but the problem was it didn't always work, depending on the browser you were using. Often it "forced" the music which is really annoying. And you always needed off-site hosting. The simplest solution I've come up with is to convert my audio to a video file, setting it as the sound track to a blank black screen. You can then upload it simply and cleanly straight to the blog using the "add video" feature, and Blogger's video driver takes care of the rest (because I prefer the way it looks, I go in after and adjust the dimensions of the driver in the html code, just to make it more resemble an audio file).
9. Have regular "features." Another one for the sake of #3. Keeping a few "regular features" (e.g. a "movie of the month," book reviews, etc.) helps you with built in post ideas for when the idea-pickings are scarce.
10. Keep lists. Lists are among the most fun, illuminating and interesting posts to write, especially when it's been eight days or so, and you're still staring blankly at the sceen . (Take my post on the 10 lessons I learned blogging, for instance.)
Blogging in the Echo Chamber
A while ago I began a little online social experiment: I started clicking that "next blog>>" link which Blogger so conveniently supplies in the navigation bar of my blog (see above), just to see what would come up. After all, I reasoned, if terra incognita is indeed all about exploring uncharted territory, it wouldn't hurt to meet some of my undiscovered nextdoor neighbours in that neighbourhood called "the blogosphere."
But as I did so, I started to notice that every time I asked Blogger for a "next blog>>", I was taken to a blog that contained some Christian's random musings about being Christian, with a "life verse," the name of some church somewhere, or phrases like "Journey with Jesus" in the header.
(For example, these are the blogs I discovered after five consecutive clicks just now:
1. Learning the Faith: "This blog will serve as an outlet for all of the many wonderful things that I am learning regarding Faith and Religion." (Author's life verse: 1 Peter 3:15-16)
2. Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer in Christchurch. (Blogger Father Clement is a Catholic Priest living in New Zealand)
3. The Jesus Narrative. A place where "Christians talk about Jesus."
4. Grafted by Grace. From Blogger Kim Morgan's profile: "I have been grafted by grace into the good olive tree. (Rom. 11:17) I have lived a life that was less than glorifying to God, (James 1:21), but His Word set me free to become the woman he created me to be."
5. Outside the Boxes. A blog that "contains reflections from a fellow journeyer as he reflects on some of the places his faith informs his daily experiences to help you find those places in your life where that happens as well.")
After a month or so of clicking, it slowly dawned on me that this can't be entirely coincidental, that I should always discover a blog something sort of like mine whenever I asked for a "next blog." I started to suspect that there were forces larger than me at work here. And after a bit of investigation, I discovered them. From what I understand, the "Next Blog" feature is programmed to link you to blogs that are, some way or another, like yours. Apparently it matches words or tags or something, and finds statistically similar bloggers.
In a way, I guess, this is entirely intuitive. After all, if I'm after some interesting blogs, it's only natural that I'd want to read about people interested in the things I'm interested in: people who muse randomly about Christianity, just like me, people who read the same reads I read, people who like U2 like me, too.
And that's the problem, I think. It's all too natural, too intuitive.
I heard a social commentator on the radio talk about this intuition, our natural tendency to stick to only the most familiar strands of the world-wide-web. She said something about how social networking media are actually shrinking our social networks, because they use like-mindedness as the primary currency of relating. Then she said something about irony.
And then she named it all. She called it: "The echo chamber." An "echo chamber" is a social context where we exclude difference so that all we have to hear are our own ideas and opinions echoed back to us by faceless others who are statistically most likely to be like-minded.
So, as I do the lab-report for my little social experiment, I'm wondering about some obvious questions. Like, for instance: Is this maybe what we're all looking for in life, in a way? A convenient button we can click to rest assured we'll only discover people who are pretty likely, in the end, to be just like us?
And more poignantly: How do we try to make the church into an echo chamber like this? Do we "network" (so sad a term for human relating) only with those believers who are just like us? They don't necessarily have to, but do things like youth-groups and 50+ groups, or contemporary worship movements and traditional services at 9:00, or even those standard evangelical "statements of faith" that we use to identify what "kind" of Christian we are-- do these things function to make our experience of the Faith an echo chamber? And if we had a "next pew" button like my "next blog" button, that could ensure we're only sitting next to the spiritually like-minded, would we use it?
And if we did, what kind of a cheap substitute for that diverse, dynamic, multi-layered, mission-minded, multi-cultural, multi-tongued community of faith that Jesus wants to make us into, would we be settling for? If you're like me, and you got here by clicking for a "next blog," I welcome your thoughts on this one. If you're not like me, I welcome them all the more.
A blog by any other name
Terra Incognita was actually my second choice as a title for this blog. Originally I'd planned to call it "One Hand Clapping," because I thought that sounded all tongue-in-cheek-zen and esoteric and what not; it seemed like a good name for a blog about faith, words and spirituality. But when I googled "one hand clapping" I discovered that the name was already taken... and this by a po-mo-emergent-Christian-blogger-type whose theological interests included things like the intersections between ecology and faith and guys like N. T. Wright. Go figure. I followed Onehandclapping for a while, just to see if fools seldom differed, after all. We differed once in a while, but it is an interesting blog: I'd recommend it.
So I settled on terra incognita, a title that came from what was one of my favorite D. H. Lawrence poems, back in the pre-fully-devoted-follower-of-Jesus days. But I was curious today about who else might be using terra incognita as a label for their paricular creative endeavors, and, a few google searches later, I had a sizeable list of organizations and individuals exploring the "unknown regions" of their own areas of interest, passion or enthusiasm. For the curious (and for lack of better post-fodder) I offer my top ten here:
10. Terra Incognita (the album)-- the title of a 2009 album by rocker Juliette Lewis.
9. Terra Incognita (the RPG)-- a "roleplaying games [sic] of exploration, intrigue, and mystery, featuring adventurer-scholars whose exploits span the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries."
8. Terra Incognita (the novel)-- a novel by Ruth Downie about the Roman Empire in the time of Emperor Hadrian.
7. Terra Incgonita (the travelogue)-- Sara Wheeler's account of her 7-month journey to Antarctica.
6. Terra Incognita (the (other) blog)-- a blog about "Spirituality, shamanism, ethnobotany, visionary art, images & photos, roots reggae and other good listenings, bizarre & interesting things, cult movies, trips & travels, underground & counterculture..."
5. Terra Incognita (the documentary film company)-- a company that makes documentary films that "map the unknown territories of our current knowledge."
4. terra incognita (the arts organisation)-- "a British, not for profit, visual arts and curatorial organisation, that tries to challenge both the London art world and wider society with their proposals for other ways of doing things."
3. Terra Incognita (the museum exhibit production studio)-- an "interpretive design studio that produces interactive educational experiences for museums."
2. Terra Incognita (the eco-tourism outfit)-- a tourism company that promotes "responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people"
1. Terra Incognita (the screenplay (that James Cameron alegedly ripped off for the film Avatar))-- apparently James Cameron is being sued by a Vancouver reseranteur named Emil Malak, who claims he sent the screenplay of his 1995 novel Terra Incognita to James Cameron, and heard nothing from him. But when he saw the movie Avatar, he noted uncanny similarities to his work that couldn't be mere coincidence.