It seems like four out of five times I begin to write a blog post, I ask myself, why?
My reading for enjoyment has picked up quite a bit the past two months. But instead of writing a book review on something hardly any reader will read, I find it more exciting to pick up the next book.
I still monitor church news, but I find that the endless commentary on teens in MAGA hats, the Cuomo-Dolan feud, the Fr Michael White-parentswithkids feud, and new pastoral letters on music is hardly relevant to my ministry or spiritual life. Teens continue to do dumb things. Daily. Likewise politicians and bishops, parents and pastors, musicians and people who don’t seem to understand music. Um, so what, except for the people directly involved.
I was thinking about a five-years-ago, ten years, or fifteen years feature. But whenever I turn the clock back, for every good essay from Neil or the occasional word from me, there are nine posts that strike me as more bloggy than relevant.
It might be that inspiration will strike and I’ll pick up the pace somewhat. But that’s not likely to happen to the tune of 150-post months.
So, there’s your bloggy update. More tomorrow. Or maybe not.
Catholic Sensibility 
“It seems like four out of five times I begin to write a blog post, I ask myself, why?”
I understand that feeling. It’s why I resisted many invitations to blogging from others over the years: I knew that topics about which I was interested in writing were largely not of interest to most other folks (I do test this belief a few times a year in non-blogging contexts, and experience continues to validate it, shall we say). This is in part because things that interest me seem to assume a sensibility that is alien to the self-awareness of most other folks. (Then again, I’ve been a lifelong synaesthete and didn’t even know it was a different “thing” until I read Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” in college, and I definitely have a premodern enchanted cosmic sensibility, and a love for the way writers like Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor (among others) grasped the odd ineffable joys and perverseness of human reality, which very much run against the grain of what our culture wants us to give our attentions to.)
It’s easier for me to engage others in their writing about things that interest them.