Year six of the blog is now complete! Thanks once again to all of you who have joined me here! As I like to do, I thought I’d take some time at year’s end to look at the most popular posts from the past year, along with a few posts that mean a lot to me but which didn’t get as much traction. (For further ‘best of’, see my Best of the Blog, 2019, 2021, and 2022, along with my end of 2020 post reflecting on the blog’s first three years.)
2023 Overview
2023 started with a bang, as my first two series of the year — In Search of the Missing Myth, which explored themes of gender and human sexuality within the Christian tradition, and my Lenten series which walked through Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love — were the two that garnered the most attention. In the later Spring, I continued my larger ‘Reading the Bible Better’ project with a series discussing the particularities of different biblical genres. This was followed by a series on the theology of the Nicene Creed. After a bit of an early-Summer hiatus, I returned with a short series looking at the spiritual themes in some of my favourite pieces of literature. And, this Autumn my A Faith that Lasts series explored the relationship between permaculture principles and the life of faith. And then, my Atonement across the Ages series looked at the different ways Christians have understood this all-important doctrine throughout history. Finally, my Advent series focused on the traditional Advent themes of Hope, Peace, Love, and Joy.
What’s interesting to me is that the blog seems to be settling into a comfortable rhythm, with a balance of series expanding our theological frame of reference, exploring the history of Christian belief, looking at hermeneutics to help us better read our Bibles, and one looking at faith and discipleship through a particular external lens. While I’m not going to force future writing to fit this pattern, overall, I’m pleased with this unintended emerging pattern.
10 Most Popular Posts from 2023
As always, the most popular posts of the year were all from the back catalog. I’ll get to some of those later, but first, here are the most popular new posts from 2023:
- Two Sides of Adam: Gender in Genesis 1-3
- My Story, Part I
- My Story, Part II
- A Question of Forgiveness: A Reflection on Matthew 18.21-35
- ‘Queer-Coded’ Friendships: On David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi
- What’s Sex For, Anyway?
- God’s Righteousness Revealed: A Reflection on the Baptism of Christ
- The Advent of Joy
- Julian Lent: Strength against All Devils: A Reflection on Matthew 4.1-11
- Julian Lent: Sin is Nothing
In terms of older posts, once again my post on Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s practice of ‘Feel the Feeling and Drop the Story’ saw the most traffic by far (even more than the homepage!). Next was my post from the history of biblical interpretation series on the schools of Alexandria and Antioch. For the second straight year, my post on the thought of Verna Dozier, which did not get a lot of views when it was first published, was in the top three backlist posts. Other popular posts from the backlist were my posts on the theology of Black Spirituals, Fundamentalist hermeneutics, and the Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence as a Christian virtue.
My Favorite 2023 Posts that didn’t make the ‘top 10’
Of course, as often happens, many of my favourite posts weren’t among the most viewed. Here are some of the posts not mentioned above that were particularly close to my heart in 2023:
- Whispers in Tradition, The Clobber Texts, and Facing the Beast (from In Search of the Missing Myth)
- The Parable of the Servant: An Alternative Myth of the Fall and The Light of Love, or How to Please God (from Keeping Lent with Julian of Norwich)
- Harrowing the Hades Within: A Reflection for Easter Saturday
- We Believe, I Believe (Nicene Creed)
- Christ the Fulfillment: The Doctrine of Recapitulation; Christ our Champion: Christus Victor; and Christ Our Victim: Nonviolent Atonement (Atonement across the Ages)
Matthew Root 
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