Thank you for signing up to my newsletter over the last year or so. You’ve not heard from me for a whole variety of reasons that we don’t need to get into. I can’t really blame the pandemic (you probably saw that in the newspapers), but there were other factors, some of which will become clear in the future.
My plan for 2021 is to put out a regular newsletter. It’ll be called Don’t Mention It. It’s the best I could come up with when pressed for a title. It’s related to a quotation from one of my heroes, GK Chesterton:
“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”
I’m quite a big fan of religious liberty, and erosion of these freedoms isn’t just coming but here. I covered some of that in my book, The Sacred Art of Joking. I’m really into talking about the Christian Faith, the history, the theology, the source material and the future of the Church of England. (Oh yes, I’m now a member of The Archbishops’ Council, as well as General Synod, which I’ll explain in a future newsletter).
I hope you’re getting a sense of the newsletter. It’s partly about the Church. But it’s also about the Culture, so I’ll be mentioning a lot of other things that I’ve been thinking about, stumbled across, working on and found interesting. If you’re the sort of person that subscribed to my website, I suspect you will find them interesting too.
This newsletter will be coming to you via the SubStack platform. This list began life in MailChimp, not that you care. I mention it as you may need to subscribe to this new platform to get the newsletter. Companies have to be very careful about data these days, even though everyone’s giving it away for free on social media.
Please do subscribe to the newsletter. The first one will be about when I read the lesson at Bath Abbey during my school carol service in 1992. I originally wrote about this for my new book, The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer (released June 2021), but in the end I didn’t use it as it felt a bit off topic.
Signing up will also be get you various freebies and discounts for things I’ve done, am doing and will do in the future. So, see you on the other side?
And if there’s anyone else you think might be interested, tell them!