Hey all, so I’m still sorting through some of the things I want to do with Mere O as the lead writer. One thing I’ve been thinking about, and reading this book has pushed me further along in this thinking, is the role that Mere O Notes will play on the site. When Matt and I launched that part of the site the vision was to have a kind of Daily Dish-style curation hub that we used to share interesting essays and articles we came across online.
Since that time, a few things have happened:
One is simply that the internet has changed and the sort of curation most people once relied on blogs for now happens through Twitter for most of us. So a curation site is no longer used in the same way it was three years ago when we first started talking about Notes.
Second, Matt and I have both gotten much busier. This not only leaves less time for posting things to Notes, it also leaves less time for us to read things we might want to post to Notes.
For both those reasons, I think the curation work at Notes is probably done (for now). That said, I think the Notes page can still have its uses so we’re going to try to figure out what those might be. One obvious thing we can do with it is what we did last week with the refugee reader response. We ran the response on the main page and then a list of resources for people wanting to learn more about refugees on Notes.
I also think we can use Notes as a kind of more comprehensive footnotes section for long-form essays on the main page. Brief rabbit trails or what Edith Schaeffer used to call brackets can go over on Notes where we can hopefully have more conversation surrounding less developed ideas that aren’t yet ready for the main page.
Finally, I hope to use Notes to post excerpts from books that people tied to Mere O are reading rather than focusing it narrowly around online writing. Anyway, that’s our housekeeping note for today. Thanks for reading!
Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he studied English and History. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife Joie, their daughter Davy Joy, and sons Wendell, Austin, and Ambrose. Jake's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, National Review, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play and he has written or contributed to several books, including "In Search of the Common Good," "What Are Christians For?" (both with InterVarsity Press), "A Protestant Christendom?" (with Davenant Press), and "Telling the Stories Right" (with the Front Porch Republic Press).
