Year End Review

As we gear up for a new year, let’s take a moment to look back at Religion & Story’s first year.

This is the 49th post for the blog, 48 occurring last year—one almost every week. There were about 2500 unique page views (a person seeing a blog post for the first time), meaning there was an average of 200 views per month. I’m pretty happy with that.

Now, the interesting part is how popular the different posts were. The highest was The Pilot with about 230 total views. Not a big surprise there. But following the original post, the most viewed—in order—are: Moral Movies, My Intelligence Hypothesis (Liberals, Conservatives, and Other), Cinema Pornographia, 50 Shades of Grey: BDSM vs. Submission, A New Star Wars, and then the two guest posts (thanks again Tommy and JP). Being shared on Facebook clearly helped these posts rack up views, but if I had to guess another reason, it would be because they all had movie themes. The least viewed post for the year, with under 20 views, was Theological Bifocals. That was a great post—y’all don’t know what you’re missing.

With this in mind, I’ve been planning the next year’s topics. For the story part of things, there will be more discussions of movies—hopefully as they are released and also looking back on some classics (anything before 1993 will be considered). For religion, I’m already in the process of writing a multi-part analysis and critique of the Restoration Movement and the history of the Churches of Christ. As election season is upon us and our nation becomes more polarized than it’s ever been, politics and liberal vs. conservative discussions will be increasingly welcome. And as always, Religion & Story will focus on theology alongside practical ethics.

I’m excited to explore all these topics and discuss them with friends face to face as well as in the comments section. I’m even more excited for some of the guest writers—next week being our first of the year with my good friend Stephen Mead.

Also, this is as good a time as any to announce that my brothers and I are attempting a biweekly podcast. It was my oldest brother Stephen’s idea, and the intent was to fill the present void of podcasts produced for the Churches of Christ—though our scope will go far beyond our own fellowship. Coincidentally, the title will be Religion and Story and I will post them on here, but the relation will be loose other than that. We are hoping to be regular with our episodes, but I can’t guarantee anything.

This is our first one, so go easy on us.