Keeping a blog has done several things for me. The first is that it’s one of the few modes of writing that you publish instantly, and get an instant response. Not everyone wants that, but I like the sense of keeping in touch with what interests readers, and what they think. The second is that long ago someone said to me, “If you want to be a writer, write every day. Doesn’t matter much what you write, but you have to do it all the time.” The blog gave me a way of writing one short piece every day about what was going on around me. Readers bugged me if I didn’t write. And after a few months I had a message from TallSkinnyKiwi, one of the granddaddies of blogging, that said “I like your blog better now. You seem to have found your voice.”

The voice matters. When I started the blog eight years ago I was writing academic papers, lectures, supervision reports and committee reports. I knew more about theology than was strictly necessary, and I could write things down that made sense, words in the right order, delivering the information. That’s what I had been trained to do. But in the process I had lost my voice; in fact, one adviser in particular had criticised me for writing “too much like a book” and insisted I rewrite some materials in a strictly technical style. The blog helped me to recover and develop a voice again.

But you know what? Before the blog I had been published – a chapter or two in a book here and there. But the blog itself actually won me two publishing contracts. I didn’t have an agent; I didn’t send a manuscript to anyone. The publisher came to me and said “We want somebody who writes like you.”

So there you go. Now I write weekly instead of daily on the blog because I spend a lot of time writing books in the voice I developed here. Right now I’m finishing a manuscript for the book of 2011. When it’s done I have to decide what to write for the one after that. Any thoughts?

Biblical illiteracy in the UK is pandemic in popular and high culture alike. Enter Maggi Dawn, Cambridge college chaplain and star blog babe, to give us an education in this fabulous and fluent book, which takes what used to be well-known Bible stories, re-narrates them, and then shows what the arts have made of them down the ages… this is a book for the beginner. But the cognoscenti too will learn a lot from it, while preachers and Bible study leaders will find it a valuable resource for illustration and illumination…

Mark Meynell at Quaerentia:

One of the things I always recommend to people when they are reading a new thinker is to take careful note of the context into which that person wrote. Context isn’t everything. But it can illumine why someone wrote in a particular way. For instance, the neo-orthodoxy of the 20th century was not only a reaction against the anthropologically centred liberalism of the 19th century, it was also a response to a world at war. Theology, like everything else in Europe, was never the same again after 1918.

What qualifies something as theology, then? Is it the method, or the style, or the terminiology? Julian of Norwich was the first woman (in fact the first person) to write a surviving work of theology in English. Why write in English? Was it a cultural statement, an issue of accessibility? No, it was an accident of history; as a woman she was not schooled in scholastic Latin or in the Medieval Disuptation. SO she wrote in the language she knew, and in a form that, at the time, would not have been recognised as “proper” theology. What qualifies her book as theology is that it looks in depth at the character and being of God, and the consequent understanding of who human beings are in relationship to that God.

Context is important, then. But context isn’t everything. Sometimes the value of reading an old book is not so much to see its context, but to see what things rise above context; what is enduring from one age to the next. C S Lewis was a champion of reading the classics (unsurprisingly, given that he was a Medievalist at Oxford where they strongly resisted the study of literaturea as a “proper” subject until surprisngly late). Never read two “new” books in a row, Lewis advised – always read an old one in between, or read at least one old for every two new. Why? because

“…Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

This morning I woke from a strange Alice In Wonderland kind of dream, in which I was lost in a world of books. I smiled as I drank my morning tea from a mug that is inscribed with words from Little Women – “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain”. Every girl should have a mug like this.

When I started blogging seven years ago I wasn’t writing books. Since then I’ve written a lot of articles and three books. A couple of days ago I mentioned the conception of another book. This writing of books is becoming a new habit. And there isn’t time to blog in the same way I used to. No more the daily blogger. It’s become too many plates to spin. Time for a new plan.

Here’s my new blog strategy. I’ll post one  decent length, thoughtful post about something that matters, something seasonal. One a week, on a Tuesday morning.In between I’ll put up little top-ups as they appear. But once a week there will be something here worth reading. Stop by once a week and here it will be. I’m not giving up blogging. just concentrating my energies.

Thank you for reading. See you on Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that.

My Lent book for 2010 is called Giving it Up. It’s a book of 47 short chapters, so you can read one every day through Lent. This is the theme: most people associate Lent with giving something up – like beer or coffee or chocolate. But if you really want to understand and know what the whole “God” thing is about, there is something much more important that you have to give up – it’s your existing concept of God, all the ideas about God that you’ve accumulated, often unconsciously, from all over the place.

People in the Bible had to do it (like Moses, for instance). All kinds of early Christians had to do it (like Gregory of Nyssa, St Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, for instance). Various characters in the history of the Church have recorded how they had to give up the idea of the God they didn’t believe in in order to become a believer. These and others feature in the book, along with some other Lent challenges, Bible stories and contemporary reflections.

It’s available in various bookshops and direct from the publisher. If you click here to order it via the Amazon UK or USA links below, you will also be supporting this blog. Thanks for reading!

I like finding out about the origins of words and phrases – someone noted the other day that I rarely preach a sermon without mentioning the etymology of at least one word. One of the most entertaining sidelines of my research on S T Coleridge was discovering how many of the words and phrases in the English language had been coined by him.

A recent book called Scapegoats, Shambles and Shibboleths is an alphabetical account of words and phrases that come from the King James bible. It's great fun, and would make a good Christmas present.

]]> http://maggidawn.com/scapegoats-shambles-and-shibboleths/feed/ 1 http://maggidawn.com/angels-and-announcements-2/ http://maggidawn.com/angels-and-announcements-2/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:42:15 +0000 maggi dawn http://maggidawn.com/?p=2058 I’m going to lead a quiet day tomorrow in Ely, based on themes from my Advent book, Beginnings and Endings (and What Happens in Between): Daily Bible Readings from Advent to Epiphany