Here we are at the end of another summer. It’s been a busy one for me, which will serve as my excuse for not having written here in some time. Aside from the normal demands and joys of work and family life – with the bulk of the demands coming from the work and the bulk of the joys coming from my family – I’ve been working against some deadlines for a pretty major project.

The project is a second edition of a little-known book about the history of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada (FEBCC), or just The Fellowship for short. The book has had little readership due to its narrow focus on the subject of this denomination, a rather small one in the grand scheme of things. But when I was asked to consider taking on the project, there was a personal reason why I was drawn to say yes. When the first edition was published in 2003, it was for the 50th anniversary of this family of churches, and my mother was one of the people who worked on it. She co-wrote the chapter on Quebec and was involved with editing the whole to some degree. At the time, I was a high schooler with zero interest in church history or the projects my mom was working on, but thankfully I’ve grown up a little since then.

My mother passed away from cancer in 2012. Writing and editing is what she loved to do, and it is also what I love. This is a really meaningful connection for me, but it isn’t one we got much opportunity to share while she was alive. So when Dr. Haykin asked me in 2022 if I’d be willing to work with him on a second edition for the 70th anniversary of the Fellowship, I said yes. That was the easy part.

This summer saw the deadline for this project arrive, so naturally it meant I had to get done all the work I had procrastinated on in previous months. This meant dozens of emails back and forth with various contributors and lots of research and writing, culminating in a frenzy of productivity in the last weeks. But it’s quite amazing what you can get done when the need arises and when unbroken hours can be set aside for a focused purpose. So this project is coming to its fruition and the finished product will be presented in early November at the denominational convention, where I am expected to speak for five minutes or less about the book, or the experience of writing it, or what I learned, or something like that.

Another project came about unexpectedly in the summer: the chance to edit the text to Jonathan Pageau’s forthcoming adaptation of Snow White and the Widow Queen. I worked hard on it and am pleased that it was well received by the team at Symbolic World Press, who then asked me to continue editing the texts of the subsequent fairy tale books they are planning to publish. We’ll see where that goes, but I’m really enjoying the challenge of crafting English prose that feels ancient, mythological, and yet fully accessible to modern readers.

These projects have delayed the writing of a couple articles that I’ve had in the works for a while. But I recently finished a pretty major piece on psychedelics that I submitted to a new online outlet to see if they are interested in running it. If that goes anywhere, I’ll make sure to link to it. And then there is the second article I have been planning to write on the subject of pornography, as a follow-up to my earlier piece arguing that Pornography Poisons Everything. This second piece is meant to be a practical guide to fighting the scourge of pornography and lust in one’s personal life, and I am hoping to finish that this week or next.

Beyond that, I do need to write a book review for Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe, which I am currently reading and enjoying very much. I think I will incorporate Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World and Carl Trueman’s Strange New World into the review because together these three books cover a lot of the same ground, drawing on history to make sense of the present and give Christians tools for understanding and responding to the challenges of our age. I also would like to write a review & reflection on Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, of which I received a complimentary digital copy. I’ve been slowly reading it and trying to think of how I can say something useful about it despite not understanding much of the poetry within it.

So that’s what I’ve been up to instead of writing on this blog, but I hope to get back to more regular reflections in this space now that the big project is pretty much done. As always, thanks for reading!