I come kicking and screaming into the blog-o-sphere. Estimates put the number of blogs in the world at well over 100 million, so it is difficult to see the rationale for another one. In my view, blogs are just one more way for like-minded people to communicate with each other while ignoring those who have a different point of view. That’s not good for any of us, and it, honestly, feels a bit dirty to participate.
Recently, I was selected as a Riff Fellow by the Veritas Forum. At our first gathering, we were encouraged to blog, not so much because there was any real need for it, but because regular writing for the anonymous public was a useful discipline for each of us to develop. As academics who traffic in the obscure language and interests of our respective guilds, we should stretch ourselves to communicate with a broader audience that may have problems breathing the rarefied air of the academy. So in an admittedly self-serving spirit, I am going to venture out into this unfamiliar and suspect territory.
The name of the blog is “unplowed ground,” which is taken from the words of the Jewish prophet Hosea. He said: “Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground.” I wish I could say that I landed upon these words on my own and realized how profound they are, but I didn’t. I came to embrace them when one of my first friends in college, Dirk Van Til, told me that if he ever wrote a first book, “Unplowed Ground” would be its title. That has stuck with me these last 30 years.
Dirk–thanks for planting a seed that has only slowly taken root. For any readers, I hope the ideas in this blog are, on occasion at least, like a hoe churning up fertile dirt.