New Beginnings
Reviving a derelict newsletter; some updates; future directions
Hello to all my readers, both long-suffering and new. I haven’t posted here in a while, largely because I was busy finding a job and then moving. I’m happy to report (for those not yet in the know) that I’ll be starting this fall as an assistant professor in the new Honors College at the University of Tulsa. I’ll be doing one of the things I like doing best—introducing college students to some of the best literature ever written—and this will probably give me a lot more fodder for this newsletter. But now that I’m settled in here, I’ll also have time to do some writing this summer before the school term begins.
During the term, I’ll be doing a running series revisiting the works that I’m teaching as I talk about them with my students. My teaching load is half works from antiquity that I know extremely well and half works of the early modern period that I’ve studied before but don’t know nearly as well as the ancient material, so it’s going to be a fun set of contrasts. There’ll be a lot of stuff I love (Homer, Sappho, Plato, Milton) and some stuff I hate (Seneca, Locke), and maybe those categories will get shaken up a bit. There will probably also be entries about my new life in Tulsa, which is a lovely city so far despite my being very much a fish out of water.
In the next week or so I’ll have a belated Pride piece about my favorite bar in the world and why I’ve repeatedly felt God working there. I may also talk about weddings, since I’ve been to some good ones lately and there was recently a spate of internet discourse about the relationship between alcohol and hospitality in that sphere. I’m also working over some ideas about self-sufficiency, its various forms, and the contradictory feelings I’ve had about it; perhaps they’ll cohere enough that I can justify writing about them. All this is to say that you can expect steadier posts from here on out. I appreciate both my free and my paying subscribers; right now there are only a couple of posts that are paywalled and I don’t anticipate paywalling anything else for at least several months. If I can continue writing steadily during that time then I’ll reassess, but for the foreseeable future you can expect to be able to see every new post no matter what you’re paying. Special thanks to those who believe in this thing enough to pay for it; you’re the real MVPs, and your ongoing contributions successfully guilted me into writing again. I’ll do my best to make it worth everyone’s while.