Hello world!

Welcome to my new blog. This is a successor to TheosBlog, which I maintained for over a decade until it disappeared in 2019 (I never did find out why that happened). All that now remains on the internet are some traces that can be found via the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine. Since then, I have made a couple of half-hearted attempts to start afresh. So here I am again, hoping that this time I’ll find the energy and enthusiasm to keep it going.

What can you expect to find here?

As the subtitle suggests, there will be a little bit of everything (at least, everything that interests me). But, because I am a member of the Orthodox Church, one recurring theme is likely to be Orthodox spirituality. Specifically, I find myself asking how we should express our faith in a ferociously complex (post)modern society.

Another recurring theme is likely to be how we should relate to the natural world. I have been actively interested in environmentalism since the 1980s and the topic featured heavily in my PhD thesis.

There may be occasional entries on physics and astronomy (my first degree was in astronomy, and I still try to keep up with developments). And from time to time, I will probably also have things to say about my personal interests (science fiction and fantasy, music, photography, orchids, fountain pens and calligraphy, genealogy). What won’t appear is very much about politics (certainly not party politics).

And, of course, I have the archives of my previous blogs to play with. Some of the entries were popular enough to warrant reblogging. In particular, I picked up an avid following of folk who were interested in what I had to say about Blackwell Idealist (a database manager from the 1990s, which I still use).

One final thought for the moment. I am quite concerned (no, I’m horrified) by the bitterness, argumentativeness, and destructiveness of too much of what passes for Christian (and Orthodox Christian) blogging. So I promise that I will not engage in culture wars here. I will try to follow St Paul’s advice and fill this blog with ‘whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report’ (Philippians 4.8, Orthodox Study Bible).