Some questions

La Shawn Barber who is doing some preliminary research for a project asks bloggers to answer the following questions.

1) How long have you been blogging?

Two years and five months.

2) Do you believe you’re addicted to blogging? Please explain, and be honest. It is habit-forming, I must confess. (If I decide to use your response, I may have follow-up questions.)

No I am not addicted and the fact that my family and tried held a blogging interdiction last week does not mean anything. Seriously though blogging is seriously habit-forming and the level of addiction is hard to determine. As a Christian blogger trying to determine how much you are attached to something for reasons that are not a good is something that must be constantly looked at. To determine how much you write to have people soothe your ego compared to how much you write because of the love of writing and the pursuit of truth. As someone who had never intended to spend anytime writing I was surprised to find how much writing helped me to clarify my own thinking. Writing to an audience requires some self-dicipline since tenuous arguments will easily be exposed in your comment box or by another blogger. If circumstances require that I give up blogging either because of time constraints or it interfering with my faith life; I would probably have to keep writing in some format even if no one was to ever read my thoughts.

3) Have you ever taken a hiatus? If so, for what reason and how long?

I took off one week from blogging to visit my mother just before she died of cancer. Since then there might only have been a couple of days where I did not post at all.

4) Have you ever thought of giving up your blog? Why or why not?

During that one week period of blog absence I considered giving up blogging and did initially. This was partly out of frustration with blogspot and partly out of worries for my prayer life. This did not last long as I started my current blog using Movable Type on my own server space. Since that time have not seriously thought about quitting. I worked to more fully implement prayer with blogging. That with all the reading required for punditry and parody there is really ample motives for prayer instead of just being upset at the latest scandal or continuance of the culture of death. For me blogging is a great humbling experience. Blogging has helped me to more fully understand just how much I don't know. As a former atheist stretching his wings in the faith, blogging has helped to show me just how little I really know. Some who go through conversion experiences and become hungry for the faith will spend a period of a years devouring everything they can read on the subject. This massive input of knowledge can lead to a false view of equating pure knowledge with understanding or wisdom.