My “buffer” has been eroded to about eight pieces ahead (four weeks), which is less than I’d like and produces stress of its own. So, my plan is to take a writing “rest’” over the summer with the aim of building up my buffer. You’re still going to get two posts a week, but through July and August one of those will be a repost: either some of my very early work that no one read or a “greatest hits” piece. You can decide which are which.

Occasionally this throws up some odd circumstances, like when I wrote about how the country felt after the Queen’s death two months later, and then the following January. Funnily enough, no one was that interested. The lesson here is the one I’ve generally been trying to learn: you don’t need to hear from me on current affairs.

If you really want to hear my hot takes, you can always follow me on Twitter. I like a lot of pictures of cats.

We live in a world of what Douglas Rushkoff calls Present Shock, where the ever-present social internet, 24 hour news, and the push notification means that—as his subtitle puts it—everything happens now. Neil Postman’s genealogy of the media malaise, in his seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death, starts with the way that the invention of the telegraph meant that news arrived at ever increasing speed until the disaster somewhere a long way away is now a thing that we are living through as well. For all this might have positive impacts for philanthropy and our ability to organise humanitarian relief, Mark Sayers points out in Strange Days the way that also breeds ‘ambient anxiety.’ We are anxious about things over there despite their impact on us being negligible or difficult to trace.

While quality Christian current affairs writing is valuable to us, as we learn how to think through the events of the day Christianly, it’s not my niche. I’d rather jump off the events I’m living through into a broader principle that might be relevant in a few months time. We desperately need more thoughtful Christian writing. I think my blog is helping me do that, though we shouldn’t mistake this for that, my most thoughtful writing is article length and so happens in other people’s journals. We need more of those too.

I’m going to continue writing cold takes because it works for me. I don’t think everyone needs to, but I imagine more of us need to, so I commend the practice to you. Here are three reasons I think it makes me a better writer.

It’s Good for My Soul

I’d like more people to read my stuff. I’d prefer to not be doing the job I do to make ends meet, I’d love to be thinking, teaching, writing, and mentoring full time. That’s probably a long way off if it’s even possible, but it’s incredibly tempting to make a name for myself in the quickest way possible. If you build a platform, it’s more likely that you can get paid for Christian thinking and teaching.

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