I had thought that being out of chemotherapy, I would get more blogging done, but it appears I underestimated how much more work a full-time writing job would be in the months after treatment than it was before. Hopefully things will get better and the day will come when I can again write in the office, work on side projects, and fire off the occasional blog post. I've decided, though, to work based on where I am rather than where I want to be or used to be. (And by "decided" I mean that I try to decide this every day, with weekly encouragement from my counselor.)
So I started a crappy podcast.
The main advantage of the podcast is that it's hard not to finish an episode. Nicole and I jot down a few notes about what we'd like to cover, press the record button, and stop around the 15 minute mark. I have made a firm commitment to myself not to edit.
In the first episode, we introduced the podcast and talked about three stages many struggles might be divided into.
In the second episode, I wanted to share some ideas I've been kicking around about collective guilt and the notion of institutional repentance. But it turned out we had a lot to say, so the guilt piece turned into three episodes.
I'm planning to do future episodes on TV shows Nicole and I have binge-watched, on 19th century dime novels with Mormon characters, and on what it was like to teach Sunday school together with Nicole for two and a half years. I'm also planning to do an episode with my sister about overlap between my training in creative writing and hers in industrial design.
For those who enjoy the podcast (if any)...any suggestions for other topics you might want to hear about?
Great thoughts in all of these episodes so far. I would just like to add a caution on the idea of institutional repentance; I think there could be value in that, but danger as well. Anyone involved in evaluating the history of the LDS Church, deciding what needs collective repentance and what doesn't, would have to have the Spirit with them to a great degree (I'm not confident I could make that call myself). Otherwise it would be easy to take ANY baffling or uncomfortable aspect of our history, like plural marriage, and say, "Well, that doesn't make sense to me, so God must not have commanded it. Let's call it a sin."
ReplyDeleteRight. There's a difference between things that aren't right before God and things that are just in tension with our current culture.
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