Below is a message from IMAGE Journal announcing the move of their blog to a new online home at Patheos (link below).
I’ve bolded the sentence that struck me as so true — and so self-revelatory. Something in here explains my formerly inexplicable aversion to blogs (specifically) and social media (more generally). I resist the notion that you have to be shrill (or loud, or incessant, or redundant) if you want to be heard. I just downloaded a book called “Platform: How to Get Noticed in a Noisy World” which probably sounds quite contradictory after reading that last sentence I just wrote. I thought “there’s stuff in here I should probably know and be doing” but I also bought this book reluctantly — something in that tag line just makes me bristle. Yet, I also derive some small hope from this quoted post that there’s a place for me out there too, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the “personal, exploratory language of art” and the bonae litterae.
-JM.
From the beginning, Good Letters posts have been finely crafted creative nonfiction essays, never polemical outbursts—a choice that reflects IMAGE’s belief that the personal, exploratory language of art can help offset the politicized shrillness of so much contemporary discourse. And where is this language more needed than in the public square? As we’ve put it in an explanatory paragraph on our new blog page: “For the humanists of the Renaissance, literature mattered because it was concrete and experiential—it grounded ideas in people’s lives. Their name for this kind of writing was bonae litterae, a phrase we’ve borrowed as the title for IMAGE’s blog. Every weekday, one of the gifted writers on our blogging team will offer a personal essay that makes a fresh connection between the world of faith and the world of daily life, spanning the gap between theology and experience and giving language a human shape.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2012/05/good-letters-words-made-flesh/
