On blogging

Caryl Johnston, From the Catacombs:

The posts on the Pope’s speech at Regensburg marked a beginning of something that culminated with yesterday’s post -- the start of a developmental process. In those posts I addressed the question of the Pope’s reference to Islam, but the issue of the real substance of his speech – about Western reason, the Logos – was deferred. It went underground, so to speak, only to emerge yesterday. While writing yesterday's post I became aware of a thread, or an inner logic, and looking back, I seemed to see one – at least dimly.

The Regensburg posts were followed by a couple of posts about Islam. This occurred at the time that I became acquainted with the “New English Review” and its stable of writers, with whom I carried on a brief and rather heated exchange. The "New English Review" people are haters, and reading their endless, vituperative and one-sided screeds against Muslims, as I did for a while, made me almost physically sick. I believe this experience sparked my inquiry into the Soul, which took effect in the post about the Christian Fathers in the Orthodox tradition. This post was followed by three on economy, atheism, and apocalypse.

There is no discernible pattern, perhaps, yet I felt that there had been a continuity in this series, in contrast to ones I had done earlier. Each post seemed to arise dynamically in some way out of the previous one. I hate to confess the smallness and insignificance of this insight, but so it is. Ours is the time of spiritual impoverishment, and if even a tiny insight can work its way through the mechanical, emotional, and psychic levels of our awareness to suggest a guiding thread, a deeper unity – well, then, such a thread, no matter how slight, must be our means of working out of the automatic reactions and impositions of our intellect.

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That's why "The River" is an excellent name for a blog, particularly one that includes inquiries into the soul.