We're Ba-ack!

That's right folks. We're back.  Like a phoenix, we have arisen from the ashes of winter and general busyness. Like Gandalf, we have come back with renewed purpose (and hopefully new powers - though we didn't have any to begin with).  After a several month delay, and much anticipation from our one regular reader, we have returned.  Now that our lives have settled down a bit we have decided to continue writing. Like that pesky poltergeist, we just won't leave you alone for long.  In this, our re-introductory post, we wanted to spell out a little of our vision for this blog. Our original goals in writing this blog, which can be found here, have not changed.  In summary, they are as follows:

1. To edify other Christians through exposure to new ideas.
2. To offer challenges to non-Christians through the presentation of arguments and objections to other worldviews.
3. To explore interesting new ideas in (especially) the realms of philosophy, theology, and science that may not be directly related to belief in God or Christian doctrine, or else may not be beliefs that we personally hold.

While we have decided to stay the course in (the very broad scope of) our goals, we have been discussing ways which may improve the achievement of those goals.  First of all, we are going to try to make a number of our future posts shorter, less technical, and a bit more personal (at least in style if not in content). It seems that for a large portion of our potential audience, long technical posts might be somewhat intimidating and prevent them from ever engaging in our subject matter (and to be honest, we stretched the limits of our knowledge to the breaking point with some of our older posts).  Through shorter, more accessible posts, we hope to gain a larger actual audience which will directly impact goals (1) and (2) above (our writing can't edify or challenge anyone if they don't read it :-P ).  Along these lines, instead of long posts series' summarizing books we are reading, we will opt instead for single post reviews of books, or posts about singular ideas within a book we read. We will still be writing some longer and more technical entries, but this will not be universal. Second, we will likely take on a more polemical style in some of our posts.  In our initial push, we tried hard to come across as objective and informative, and as a result we instead came across as very dry, and rarely explicitly expressed strong opinions on anything. We have been upfront from the beginning with our own worldview(s), and our goals to further that worldview, so we have decided to not shy away from posts which more strongly reflect that.  Lastly, we think that many of the concepts we write about deserve to be discussed with both those who agree and disagree with its content (that's the fun part anyway, eh?). So we may do some posts which allow us to discuss issues with guests, or else frame regular posts in ways that are more likely to get readers involved.

That's about all for now.  Have a Calvin and Hobbes strip before you go: