All I Have Needed

Several years ago, when I had been blogging here for about a year, I wrote a post about the importance of hymns and hymnody as a somewhat neglected or overlooked avenue into the history of American thought and culture.

As most readers here know, that’s not the book I’m supposed to be writing now.  I’m working on the book about Western Civilization and how it ceased to exist when some English professors at Stanford changed a syllabus in the 1980s.  Western Civ, we hardly knew ye!

And I am writing that book, in painfully brief increments.  I have a great editor at UNC Press, Brandon Proia, with whom I check in about every six months or so, and who always assures me not to worry, to find whatever works for me, trust my process, it will all come together, no pressure, do what I need to do.

He’s very kind.

So that’s the book I’m writing.  The manuscript grows at about the same rate as a stalagmite on the floor of Tuckalechee Caverns, but with far less beauty.

My only other obligatory writing until recently has been my regular posting here at the blog. Do you know I have been a blogger here since January of 2012?  That’s not quite nine years ago, but it might as well be a lifetime.  I am not the same person I was. Who knew you kept growing throughout life?  Surely, by my late forties, I should have been finished. But no. On I go, becoming, becoming, becoming.

In the becoming, though, we do well to circle back to the things that brought us this far.  One of the things that brought me this far—that brought me through graduate school and through the dissertation writing process and through the job search and through the heavy teaching load (5/5 last year, 6/6 this year)—was writing way too many things in way too many places.

I will never forget one esteemed USIH scholar, a regular at our conferences, telling me, “If you were my grad student, I would not let you be blogging.”  Believe me, my advisor did not want me to be blogging either.  But if that was something he thought he could “let” me do or not do, he was wise enough not to try and stop me.  You would have heard the hullaballoo from space.

So the way I made it through my last major writing project was not by focusing my entire attention on the one manuscript, but by churning out blog posts here and at my personal blog and in journals and in password protected blogs and everywhere else I could think of to put words while also putting words on the project that “counted.”

Writing begets writing.  That’s something I learned about myself.  Very late in life for a writer, I have learned that I don’t have too little time or too little freedom to get my work done. I don’t have too many projects; I have too few of them.

Thus, it is with great delight that I tell you about the new projects I am working on.

First, I am now a regular contributor to Arc Digital, an online opinion magazine published in partnership with Medium. I don’t have a “lane” or a “beat” there; my editor, Berny Belvedere, simply encouraged me to write about what interested me. As it turns out, that’s mostly history, religion, and philosophy. Checks out.

Next, I am starting a little magazine. On Substack. Called The Mudsill. I will be paying contributors, at first using the income from my writing for Arc Digital, and then (I hope) via our magazine subscribers.  If you want to sign up for the mailing list, you can do that here.  I’ll send out an update tomorrow describing our launch plans in more detail. My goal is to get this launched on January 1, with a tip of the hat to William Lloyd Garrison and the prayer for a year of bounty and blessing and health and safety for all.

Perhaps most thrillingly, I am embarking on a new project with a colleague from USIH, David Mislin. We first talked about doing this together on the last morning of the 2017 USIH conference.  And we got busy with other things.  And then we got back in touch about it.  And then we set it aside, because life and work and everything else was in a royal roil for both of us. But now, thanks to many prompts over the past couple of years, we are very much moving forward with our project.

What is it, you ask?

We are examining traditions of hymns and hymnody in America as a lens into American thought and culture over the longue durée.

Just writing that out, just putting down that marker here, brings so much joy and energy to my soul.

And, amazingly, telling my editor at UNC Press about these side projects that I am working on while I still have my eyes fixed on the main project brought some joy and energy to our conversation.  “Having too many irons in the fire has worked for you before,” he said.  “I am excited.  You know your process; dive into it and don’t worry about it.”

So that’s where I am with writing, at the age of not-quite-52, having first come to this blog as a commenter in the winter of 2011, then joining as a blogger in 2012, then taking on the role of editor-in-chief in 2018.  I will be stepping down from that role in August 2021, and I will be stepping back from blogging here at that time.

What a gift it has been to be able to write here and to learn here, and to have such patient and brilliant readers.  All I have needed as a scholar and a teacher and a communicator and a colleague and a friend has been available to me here in this virtual space and in the real-world gatherings this space has opened up.

The title of this post, “All I Have Needed” is, of course, a phrase from a hymn, my very favorite hymn.  The song is “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and if you’re going to hear it at all you might as well hear it from these lovely, earnest young choristers hailing from a Mennonite or Moravian tradition, performing at the Shenandoah Christian Music Camp in the summer of 2016.

Enjoy.