John Mark Reynolds Notes

John Mark Reynolds said he was going to talk about focus and motivation. Like the notes on Al Mohler’s presentation, these are just the details I could jot down. They are not direct quotes, though they are my attempt to transcribe the essence of what was presented, often word for word.

John Mark Reynolds said…

The problem with virtual reality is that it is in fact reality. The real you will eventually come out. You can recreate yourself through a shiny website in self-declaration.

If you know nothing about theology, you can’t start a theology blog and suddenly become a theologian. You will just embarrass yourself.

Tolkein says we are “subcreators created in the image of God.” We can take things that have no value and give them value by naming them.

My daughter took a toy from the dollar store (it cost a dollar) and give it a name, Pumpkin. In doing so, she doesn’t create false value, but real value and meaning.

There is truth in the Velveteen Rabbit. You can’t love a rabbit and make it real, but you can create value where there was none before.

This is the power you have on your blog. You can’t recreate yourself or someone else. You can’t dehumanize anyone (except maybe yourself). But you can take an idea that is not a human being and give it more value.

You do not have the power to harm or change a soul. But you have the power to create a new story. What Plato calls a bastard reality. You can give things dignity that lacked it.

Jesus picked up a cup and it became the holy grail. One day before it was just a cup.

What we forget when we blog, is that we are naming a kind of reality and creating in our blog a narrative and a story.

Three Phases of Blogging: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven. Often we go through them all everyday as we blog. Or twice a day.

First, you woke up and you named your blog.

You create a middle reality the way Tolkein created Middleearth. Or Lewis created Narnia. Your blog is Narnia.

Good virtual space is coherent and touches real space. Things shouldn’t happen for utterly incoherent reasons. You can’t become arbitrary.

Some people believe in free markets no matter who it kills. Some people believe in ideologies more than they believe in real people.

As we blog, we are creating a middle world of ideas between the world God made and Nothing. If your middle world gets disconnected from the real world, it will move toward Nothing and Evil. Make sure your real life isn’t suffering for Narnia.
Good virtual space is coherent and consistent with real space.

If you get a divorce because you built a better Narnia, your virtual world will have the same flaw that let to your divorce.

This is the Christian who would rather win an argument on his blog rather than be charitable.

I have been blogging for as long as my kids can remember. Literally.

How is this virtual argument important and connecting to the real world? If you can’t answer that question, you will get into the long dark night of the blogging soul. And you will stop blogging.

Write less about self, more about an external idea that is demonstrated through self.

If you write about yourself, you will gradually discover that you are really boring.

Hell is the place where you get to say I to the IAM. So you get to be. Hell is the place where you get to be yourself with yourself forever.

Everything should be your self engaged with something else.

You need to interact with the external world, rather than force the external world through your narrow and limited vision.

You need to be functionally in a group blog by finding three or four bloggers who you are constantly interacting with and reading.

In old media, the goal of a magazine was to find a niche and publish to those people. Blogging is strange because it is somewhere between permanent (like a book) and temporary (like a conversation).

Blogs that fail are constantly dealing with the immediate. But a person is too boring to have a good immediate thought on a regular basis.

How can this form a successful blog? The Long Tail will eventually drive a successful blog. Don’t write things that are only of immediate interest.

Write more posts as if you are Penguin. They sell 40,000 copies of Jane Austen every year forever.

Blogging Hell is this attitude: “I didn’t write anything today so no one will visit.”

An interesting blog post is when you are wrong and you respond.

You will never escape the albatross of the bad post you wrote.

You are learning publicly. The only person who should be pontificating is Benedict. But you can learn publicly.

Where am I going? What do I know? How can I create a metastory on my blog that is going someplace?

Purgatory of blogging… it begins when you write a bad post. If you blog every day you will write a disasterously bad post every month if you are careful.

Most of us can blog or edit, but we can’t do both because we aren’t getting paid. Anything you read on Scriptorium has been written in 20 minutes and read through once.

Go through the purgatory of admitting and publishing your mistakes as publicly as you made them.

Rotate your blog around three pillar ideas:
1) Goodness
2) Truth
3) Beauty.

If you constantly ask yourself, is it good, is it true, is it beautiful, you’ll answer no, no, no. But you at least tried.

We need to believe in noble pagans.

Godblogcon is part of the blogworld not because we have something to say to them, but because they have something to say to us! Dante learned from Virgil.

Find a noble pagan that you can learn from. It will help you avoid becoming stale.

My goal is to see the face of God. No Christian lives for the sake of a task. If you blog for the sake of blogging, you will quit. Ask yourself, “Is my blogging proceeding by hope through faith in charity? Am I seeing the face of God through the experience of blogging.”

The tone of your blog should always be humility with hope. We’re not sure of what we think we know, but we are sure that there is something we don’t know that we can know. Have the temerity of hope.

Go forward in hope. And go forward in faith. There are somethings that you hope in more than others. Connect them to reality, which is so dubious.

If you are going to blog, read books. The worst new media relies on new media. More Churchhill. More Lincoln. Less Rush Limbaugh.

God doesn’t need our defense. Don’t destroy the thing you love in your attempt to defend the thing you love.

Step back from the world in holiness, not so we can abandon the world, but so we can see it.