Hi! It’s been a while since my last posts. I’ve been hibernating since finishing the joint PhD in January. Then, a few weeks ago, I got a new job in Texas and moved halfway across the continent. My writing energy is now returning by necessity.

I’ve had a hard time planning out my posts, because I’m still figuring out what I want to be on the internet. My ultimate purpose is to make thoughtful arguments as a public Christian intellectual. I want to create at the same intellectual level I would as a college professor at a research university, but make it public, practical, and accessible.

The problem is: PhD-level output takes a lot of production time. In the collegiate world, a publishable article takes at least a semester of work. In the internet’s time zone, a semester might as well be a century.

I want The Orthodox Snake to be a place readers go for thoughtful content, with good arguments and even citations included. But I also want readers to see regular content updates. I don’t want to leave people wondering if I died, or worse, gave up, for months after every post. That’s not good for the brand.

Yet posting clickbait or posting endless “responding to” posts isn’t the solution. I want to make the opposite of clickbait. I also hate debate through any medium, partly because I’ve yet to see a public debate wherein someone actually changed as a person.

I also find the “response” label adds an expiration date. To find value in your piece, the reader must have studied someone else's argument and be invested in that first. You’re writing for a subset of someone else’s audience. And most of the views on any content are going to occur shortly after release, while it’s still new. So response pieces have small windows of value: you have to wait for other content to drop, then you have a couple weeks, at most, to get eyes on your content.

It’s pretty easy to stumble upon a good essay. How many of the Great Books are just great essays? But nobody ever “stumbles upon” a good response piece. Unless you’re a research specialist whose job it is to check the new literature for any responses that require a counter-response.

I don’t think it’s wise to build by response. That’s not the formula for great works. Besides, I have a website now. I don’t have to wait for some tenured scholar to start a dialogue on a topic I care about. The initiative is mine now.

So the answer to more content isn’t response-posting. And hell no to clickbait.

What are other options for a lively internet presence?

Well, I want my work to be accessible. And that starts by being an accessible person, by acting like the real me in my online activities. In real life I do much more than philosophize. Writing and reading get maybe an hour a day lately.

If my online persona makes it seem like all I do is scholarship, then it’s a mask, not the real me. And I don’t want my brand built on a mask. Eventually, that would be as alienating as a corporate job, and for the same reason: one aspect of my life would consume the others.

It’ll be good to incorporate my whole life into my online life, rather than pretend my whole life is Scholastic philosophy. I may have Scholastic philosophy on the brain, but it's not my whole life.

I want The Orthodox Snake to fulfill my life, not just my intellectual research. I’m trying to be a whole person here, not an argumentative machine.

So I’ll be supplementing my intellectual essays with some simpler things, like reflections on life and the occasional update. I won’t fill the internet with trash though. Anything I publish will still be edited, thoughtful, and maybe even fun to read.

I’m learning to take greater creative freedom in writing. And greater initiative. I’m trained to consider a 25+ page monograph as the only valuable kind of writing. But monographs don’t work in the internet agora, so it’s a great time to break that mindset.

What’s your approach to consistent content? How do you balance quality with quantity?