One Year Anniversary of The Value of Saintliness!
Well, it’s been just over a year since I began this blog, and if traffic continues as it has been, I will hit 10,000 views by the end of the month. This have given me the opportunity to reflect on the blog, my purpose in creating it, and some of my favorite posts over the year.
When I created the blog I had a burst of creative energy and was able to write several pieces a week. Now I don’t have the time to maintain that type of work, since I’ve created several other blogs this year as well, including Aristotle’s Revenge, and have begun to work on my Master’s thesis. My purpose in starting the blog was to create a forum to discuss psychology and religion, with a perspective that was largely scholarly but slightly biased in favor of spirituality in general (I don’t argue that any one particular religion is best, but rather that spirituality, broadly defined, is a good thing). This is sort of a blend between my two other favorite psychology and religion blogs, Epiphenom (which is very scientific and secular) and Experimental Theology (which is Christian and discusses more advanced theology). I wanted to provide some resources in which I feel that I demonstrate that psychology does not necessarily mean the end of faith, but wanted to do it in a scholarly way, without sacrificing the fact that some aspects of religion are not positive.
Here are some links to a few of my favorite posts that I’ve done over the past year. A few of them involve psychological research:
Spiritual Meditation and Pain Tolerance
Child Abuse: Leave God Out of It!
Some of my favorites were simply discussions of religious issues based on psychological perspectives:
The Catholic, Mormon, Atheist, and Islamic “Threat”
Atonement Theories and Psychology
Some involved one of my favorite Christian religions, Eastern Orthodoxy:
On My First Visit to an Orthodox Church
As A Man Thinketh: Fr. Meletios Webber on Addiction, Psychotherapy, and Hesychasm
I’ve also written some controversial posts that drew both arguments and discussions. The first one was picked up and reposted by John Dehlin (Mormon Stories, etc.), the other involved a philosophical debate with an engineer:
Know Your Tools (and Their Limitations)
Finally, the most popular post I’ve written that has driven the most traffic to my blog was a brief overview of several visualizations of Christian History. I created it partly because I couldn’t find anything like it, and it seems that many people find it a useful discussion (I’m pretty proud of it myself):
Visualizations of Christian History
I can’t wait to see where the next year takes this blog. Hopefully I will still have periodic insights into psychology and religion that I can post here. Since I’ve had more success with this blog than my other ones (generally), I’m also considering purchasing a dot-com for the website. It’s not too expensive to do that, but I would have to offset the cost with ads, and I’m not particularly keen on that, so we’ll see. Thank you so much to all my regular readers who find value in The Value of Saintliness, and please subscribe or stay tuned for more psychology and religion posts in the future!
