Category: Blog administration

Half a month has past since I last wrote, and casual readers may have thought I’ve slipped back into the void. The fact is it’s hard to keep momentum, and worse now that the blogging ecosystem is so diminished, and — frankly — the Unitarian Universalist space has become so inert.

So, I plan to read or re-read as many neo-Universalist books as I can muster to see which I would recommend for the newly convinced, and for ministers who may be drifting this way. I suspect this will also help me say more about the various needs of different groups of Universalists. I might also transcribe another historic work. But if you have thoughts about what I should address, please leave them in the comments.

Am I getting my blogging voice back? Time will tell. But two things are true and are worth noting:

1. I am grateful for the kind words of support and earnest inquiries for more information I’ve gotten over the years and to this day. I also appreciate those of you who take time to read my posts and make comments.
2. Universalist Christianity — or anything worth having — won’t prosper in the walled (and manipulated) gardens of corporate social networks. I’ve been able to speak freely over the years because I have this little patch on a server that I pay for myself, and some 22 years of posts may be found here. (Try that on Facebook.)
   
   To that end, and if you know how, you can also read the posts here by subscribing to the RSS feed or by subscribing to @admin @www.revscottwells.com [remove the space] through one of the distributed Mastodon nodes. (I think that’s right.) I don’t advertise and don’t worry about site hits, so read this as you want.

If you do want to help me, link to my site here, or refer people over. Thanks.

As it happens, it’s been a busy summer but I have five things to write about:

I’ve been asked about Universalist liturgical practice around All Souls Day, so I’ll share what I found.

In collecting answers to the All Souls question, I realized I hadn’t published some nineteenth-century reports that I transcribed.

In answering another reader question, I used a research source I’ve never had to used before, so I’ll review that. (I may or may not write about the original question.)

Two readers have asked about where you can find a Universalist church, so I’ll be updating that information here.

And I’ll be updating the Sunday-only calendar for 2026. I know what drives traffic here.

Close friends will know that some challenges and troubles are now passing, and I hope to start writing again. I look forward to your interests and feedback.

You don’t need to come here to read this site. Like most which use WordPress, this site publishes its content, or syndicates using the Atom and RSS (Real Simple Syndication) formats at revscottwells.com/feed. This makes an open web possible, rather than one where you are locked into closed systems, which seems to be winning. An open web is more free, and feeds give you more options, which is why I promote and support it.

In practice, there are lots of feed readers; I use the Firefox browser, and use its Feedbro extension.

I mention all of this because my feed was broken until last night, but it’s fixed and needs to be celebrated here, in your preferred feed reader, or sites the UUpdates.net that collect these feeds into a common, one-stop site. My thanks to UUpdates’ UUpdater for identifying why the feed was faililng. (Since his name isn’t anywhere on it, I’m not sure how private he would like to be, and err on the side of animosity.)

This May will mark twenty years of my blogging, with more than 4,200 posts behind me. But for the last few years, I’ve been writing very little; I hope to change that, sparked by recent events by one well-know social media outlet, and a bit of encouragement I found there. The meltdown of Twitter is not complete, but even if it survives and even if it prospers, it’s hard to imagine that it could have the appeal it did in its early years. Indeed, through the Trump administration, it increasingly became a vehicle for horrors, and the case for it being good or useful in spite of this became harder to justify. But so long as it had a critical mass, leaving it in a huff more more performative than useful. Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter changed this calculus, leading millions of people to seek alternatives. His sabotage of its technical capacity puts its continued functioning at risk, and the exodus of advertisers makes it financial viability even less likely. It might collapse even if it’s “reformed.” I chose Mastodon (introductory guide) as my way out, as you will have seen in my last two posts. I’m finding an enjoyable community within a Mastodon, a distributed community with certain features like Twitter, but the change once made leaves me wanting even more. I want the writer- and reader-driver community we had before the large tech companies, including Facebook and Google and all their products, became identified with the internet itself. So Mastodon is good, but having a set of reliable long-form authors whose sites — often blogs — are worth reading is even more valuable. As an author, not having space limits or seeing your ideas vanish down the conveyor belt of attention is much more rewarding. This idea is bubbling on Mastodon, with wistful memories of what we had and might have again. (1) (2) We may never have a new “golden age of blogging” but we don’t need one either. We just need good enough. And for small minority interests, like Universalist Christianity, having thoughts shared in the public, open web is invaluable. So I’ll take the “three post challenge” for January at bringback.blog.https://bringback.blog/. If you have a dormant blog, might you?

Part of me wants to start blogging again. Part of me says that the blogging age is over and that almost nobody would care.

I’m putting this out there not to cultivate sympathy, but to get a sense of whether anyone would read anything I write, and if so (and this is the important part) what kind of things would you like to see in 2022?

Please comment.