reasonably worthwhile blog posts from last year

It occurred to me recently that I do a lousy job of keeping track of my own blog posts — I regularly forget that I have written about something, and occasionally I discover a post that it would have been useful to me to remember. So I’m going to start keeping better records. As a beginning, here are the posts I wrote in 2018 that I want to remember:

What a book I’m reading with care looks like
A talk I gave at Duke on living with the “repugnant cultural other”
“You can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion; the opposite’s true”
The kids are all right — sometimes; see more on the same theme here
On rhetorical Leninism, a concept further developed here
Why I am a “sad compatibilist”
A story from my past about “everyday people”
The higher selfishness and the long defeat
Excerpts from a talk I gave about the seeds of Christian renewal
Karl Barth and social media
Tolkien and the fleeting glimpse of victory
How my fellow evangelicals move the biblical goalposts
The sky island of West Texas
What you can be in Trump’s world: a mark, leverage, or a loser
Christian colleges and viewpoint diversity
Education and one’s station in life
Social media as our Ministry of Amnesia
Eno on control and surrender, architecture and gardening; and then, as a follow-up, the blog garden
How I learned not to make room for the devil
How I became nostalgic for liberal proceduralism
Wondering who in our time will take the Profumo Option
How vocabularies become exhausted
Gradually and then suddenly
Money, circulation, and Adam Roberts
We need Daniels, but how do you get them?
The instrumentalist chain
Remembering Doc
Enough with the Christian language policing
You can write well without dumbing down
Announcing Breaking Bread with the Dead
How I drew my mental map of politics
Maintenance is better than innovation
Why so many academics write from the position of power
Why “cultural Marxism” is a nonsense term
Trump is not inarticulate, he’s asyntactic
Why I’m thinking of giving up teaching digital literacy
What I wrote to someone who wants to be a writer
Christians, pagans, Jews
Something I’d love to write about the late history of modernism
Supporting religious freedom — but no bigotry!
Epistocracy
What to do when you think a writer is wrong