New Year's Resolutions
See, I am doing something new
In the first semester of my sophomore year of college, I got my first B. I think it was in a course on American literature, although I’m not absolutely sure, and I don’t have a copy of my undergraduate transcript to check. I had received all A’s during my freshman year, and this first B was a disappointment, but it was also a relief. I felt relief because it allowed me to just focus on doing my best in, and enjoying, my classes rather than worrying about achieving some external standard of perfection or measuring my performance against my fellow students.
I was reminded of this episode last week when I apparently reached a special milestone here on Substack. Substack encourages authors to write for their newsletter at least once a week to help attract faithful readers and subscribers. The company sends a celebratory email for each consecutive week an author contributes to their newsletter and even reports the percentage of authors who have successfully completed a similar consecutive writing streak. After a while, these emails created for me a sense of pressure to write for the newsletter even during weeks when I didn’t feel like it, fearing that I would break my streak and lose my coveted status of superiority over the majority of Substack writers. As of last week, I had written for 95 consecutive weeks, longer, according to Substack, than 98 percent of other writers! Due to a number of factors, however, nine days lapsed between my post on Luigi Mangione and the end of year review I published last weekend. I thought for sure my streak had been broken, and I felt again a sense of relief. I decided I could stop comparing myself to other authors on the platform and instead focus on a pace that worked for me and Window Light’s readers while also planning for some improvements to the newsletter in the new year.
On Monday morning, however, I received yet another email from Substack congratulating me on my 96th consecutive successful week of publishing! I assume that Substack records authors’ streaks in terms of what is published in a week measured from Monday through Sunday on the calendar. In other words, an article published on Friday of one week followed by another nine days later on Sunday of the following week would count as publishing in consecutive weeks, even if over a week had passed between articles. So, the streak continues!
I know this is all relatively trivial, but the brief period in which I thought the streak had been broken—and the process of working on the end of year review, including reflecting with amazement on how I had managed to keep writing at least once a week despite all the things that had happened in my life over the past year—did lead me to ponder how I could make some small improvements to the newsletter over the next year while continuing to regularly provide the theological analyses and reflections that readers enjoy. So, consider these my new year’s resolutions for the newsletter.
When I started Window Light nearly two years ago, I envisioned it as not just a newsletter or blog, but as a conversation starter among theologians and those who love theology, and maybe even a source of community. During the first year, in almost every post, I encouraged readers to contribute their thoughts and responses in the comments, and if someone did post a comment, I would reply so that they felt acknowledged and to generate further conversation. Unfortunately, comments were few and far between. Now, I do understand that people may be reticent about posting comments on an online forum, particularly when at least some of the topics I write about are controverted: they may not want to get sucked into a fruitless online debate, may not have time to engage beyond reading, or simply may not want to have their name out there in cyberspace. No problem.
There have been a few more comments over this past year, but I have had a harder time keeping up with responding to them. Frankly, this year just getting the writing out there has been all I could manage given my other work and personal responsibilities. And I regret that, even though it was out of my control. But this year I do anticipate having a bit more time to devote to building relationships and conversations and promoting the newsletter. So, I do hope to be more faithful about responding to readers’ comments, but I also want to think about other ways of generating conversation about the topics I cover in Window Light, whether that’s putting on some kind of online forum or discussion, experimenting with different types of posts throughout the year, or something else. Let me know if you have any ideas!
One of my favorite parts of working on the newsletter is preparing what has become the Window Light podcast, the occasional interviews I have conducted with theologians and others involved in the life of the Church. I really enjoy having conversations with the guests, and my sense is that they relish the opportunity to have an in-depth conversation about their work and topics of interest to them. And, of course, the best part is sharing those conversations with newsletter subscribers and other listeners.
We are in the middle of season two of the podcast, and so you can look forward to further episodes in the next few months. One area that I want to work on, however, is the audio quality of the interviews. My impression is that the audio for my guests is usually fairly high quality, but the quality of my own audio is uneven. Over the different interviews, I’ve used different audio equipment and computers based on the necessity of the situation, and that may have some impact on the audio quality. My impression, however, is that the software I have been using to conduct the interviews, Zoom, also has a negative impact on the audio quality. It seems to me that Zoom has trouble recording cross talk, when both the guest and I are talking, and it temporarily dampens my volume, even after the cross talk is over. As a result, I want to explore other software for conducting online interviews that can create a better final product. If you have any recommendations, let me know! I’ll also experiment with my audio equipment to see if I can improve things there, as well.
I’ve also struggled with the transcripts for the podcast interviews. In the past, I’ve used Microsoft Word’s transcription feature and then edited the transcription for accuracy. This is a laborious, time-consuming process, which is frustrating because it slows down my ability to publish an interview. The Podcast feature introduced by Substack last year has its own transcription option which has the benefit of linking the transcript to the audio file by using time stamps, which means a listener could follow along with the transcript somewhat like closed captioning. I experimented with this option for the last two podcast episodes but found the process of adding and editing a transcript unworkable. The accuracy of the transcripts is not great, and they are hard to edit. Even more frustrating, I found that the transcription sometimes misidentifies who is speaking, and it is impossible (as far as I could tell) to correct it. Hopefully in the new year I can find a simpler way to make accurate and helpful transcripts, but maybe it is not worth the effort. Let me know what you think in the comments!
If you have any other ideas for things you’d like to see offered by the Window Light newsletter in the new year, please let me know in a comment or via email. For example, if another Substack newsletter to which you subscribe offers a feature you think would be valuable here, just let me know and I’ll consider it!
I promise I’ll get back to the theological analysis and reflections you enjoy in the next post (I think I will finally get around to commenting on Pope Francis’s recent remarks on the discipline of theology), but I wanted to share some of the inner workings of the newsletter and how I’m hoping to improve in this one. Happy New Year!
Your idea makes good sense. Some of your interviews could also engage someone with a complementary expertise to your own. Glad you are not thinking of folding up the tent. Jim
Dear Paula,
Thanks for your response to the comments that I sent to Matthew. Even though I did not ask for replies to those columns I wrote, I often got responses (remember, that was before emails). Most of them were complimentary, and two led me to revisit the topic in a future column.
I must admit that podcast and substacks and such are things that your generation (I know that I am making an assumption here) is more at home with than mine.
While I think that some Catholics still believe that to have faith means that you believe that God intervenes directly. However, I think that the bigger problem today is that so many Catholics don't think that God intervenes at all. We live, as Charles Taylor reminds us, within and under the "immanent frame." I think that synodality, which too many people dismiss as amounting to not much, is based on the belief that the Holy Spirit remains active and is especially active when two or three are gathered and wrestle with where the community of faith needs to go and what it needs most to reconsider and learn again or anew.
So, I will continue to write as best as I can what I think people without a theological background would appreciate. I will do the same in the years I have left when I might be able to teach. Last fall, I created a new course, "What Kind of Life is Worth Living?" A pretentious title for an undergraduate course and a question which only Jesus would dare to answer. But in your 80s, you sometimes think you can get away with things that someone less subject to illusion would put to the side. I will leave podcasting to others more adept at the world of computing and communicating in that way.
Blessings and keep at it! Jim