Ghost of Shlog Past

by Shaun Groves
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With 800-1000 unique visitors each day it’s obvious that most SHLOG readers now haven’t been around for most of SHLOG’s life.  Here’s a crash course in SHLOG history for anyone wanting to catch up.

  • The first SHLOG post ever was about Flannel and Spandex.
  • Then I entered an angry at Christian radio phase mostly because of the kind of experience I wrote about in How Does This Work Again? (reading this today is a little embarrassing but it’s part of where I’ve been so no use deleting it.)
  • I eventually learned a little more and mellowed a lot, emerged from that angry phase and tried to make nice in Changing Chuck, which made my former label a little nervous (ok, a lot), started some very good (and long) discussion here, got me some very kind mail from folks working on the radio, and – ironically – made a couple other radio types very angry.  (Did they read the same thing the rest of us did?)
  • I scored some major brownie points with Becky when I wrote Woman and seemingly doubled my female readership overnight.
  • But not everyone’s a fan of SHLOG and the critics came out, and all happened to be named “Anonymous”, when I questioned the meaning of the word free.
  • I’ve taken a few whacks at Event Church and even went too far once and made an entire city mad.  (Really regret that one.) It’s all been part, I think, of wrestling publicly with what to do now that Christendom is dead.
  • And we’ve had many great discussions about my being a pacifist, something I talked about for the first time ever in My King on Terror.  It’s an important topic to me because it seems essential to the whole idea of “standing apart as a witness”.  And I’ve tried to talk about peace making here as something pro-active and not passive at all, which then challenges me to do something myself.  Thanks for the challenges.
  • But the writings that seemed to make the biggest impact on readers were the Two Weeks Ago posts in which I chronicled what I guess could be called an emotional and spiritual breakdown.
  • SHLOG hasn’t all been brow-furrowing seriousness.  We made Bush sing, wrote a letter to Apple, and another, and went to Pump It Up a couple times. If only everyone shared my sense of humor.

    • You can find old SHLOG posts by using the search thingy to the right.  If I left out a past post you really liked (or hated) link to it in the comments here.  And thanks for reading all this time.

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