MetaCatholic

I pinched the imaginative title for this post from Tim Bulkeley, who asks the same question. It struck me as a good question to ask as a newbie. (After various false starts I seem to have got the bug, and this blog is now entering it’s third month – a long way to go yet) I don’t disagree with his rewards of blogging:

social - in reading and writing blogs one “meets” so many interesting people …

intellectual - one also meets, and I hope shares, such interesting ideas

surprising - when by email, phone or face to face on meets someone who actually reads what one writes (now that’s seldom happened to me as a result of print publication!)

But there’s more to it for me than that. Kevin Wilson, noting a difficult personal time, said of his blog:

Right now this blog is about my only connection to biblical scholarship, so I plan to keep blogging, especially because I enjoy it too much to stop.

As someone who is engaged in (very) part-time doctoral study fitted round a more than full-time job, (and I’ve had to suspend my registration for a year or two) I share Kevin’s sentiment in large part. For those of us not on a campus or in a college of some kind, it provides a kind of online common room. Unlike newsgroups or whatever, you can not only choose which conversations to join in, but to a large degree who you talk with. You can keep up with areas that don’t fall directly within your own sphere of study. You can bounce ideas around and nothing really hangs on being right or winning an argument. And sometimes someone who really knows what they’re talking about drops by and sparks off a whole new train of thought.

There are added benefits as the common room conversation decamps to the pub. You can half-articulate thoughts that would never make it to paper, and find out in the process whether your argument stands up. And occasionally you can just go wildly off-topic and have a good rant which some poor soul somewhere may find amusing.