What a fascinating project, I love it! The only thing that slakes my interest slightly is that the thesis is too obviously true. But old truths told well are always worth reading, and I'm sure there are plenty of flashpoints of controversy with people who are not me.
One non substantive point: for some reason this post has no audio. That's a big drawback because the time I have to read is far less than the time I have to listen. It you could fix that, it would be very convenient.
I would hope that people who agree already with the thesis could still find the project interesting as a framework for discussing how and why the thesis is true. For instance, you can agree with me that Christianity is the most successful religion in history (not really going out on a limb there) but still enjoy discussing and debating all the reasons.
There are, as I ruefully acknowledge, media-market reasons to find ways of making a point that will seem bold or surprising to at least many people. A chin-scratching "let's think about what makes Christian faith so resilient" doesn't perhaps (we'll see) sell as well as "let me tell you why Christendom is being reborn," but really, these are mostly different ways of packaging thematically similar ventures.
Yes, definitely still interesting to discuss in spite of agreeing beforehand.
It's interesting to relate this project to Christian apologetics. It's kind of orthogonal to it. You don't quite want to say "Christianity keeps convincing people because it's actually true," since (a) you lose part of your audience, and (b) it's not a full explanation anyway. And yet the resilience of Christianity is a reason for faith.
Do people actually listen to audio recordings of posts? I always assumed that most everyone was doing what I do on long car trips: downloading Substack posts into a text-to-speech app like VoiceAloudReader and letting the robot read them to me.
(Sorry to digress, but, if there's demand for audio, that's relevant info for me!)
What a fascinating project, I love it! The only thing that slakes my interest slightly is that the thesis is too obviously true. But old truths told well are always worth reading, and I'm sure there are plenty of flashpoints of controversy with people who are not me.
One non substantive point: for some reason this post has no audio. That's a big drawback because the time I have to read is far less than the time I have to listen. It you could fix that, it would be very convenient.
I would hope that people who agree already with the thesis could still find the project interesting as a framework for discussing how and why the thesis is true. For instance, you can agree with me that Christianity is the most successful religion in history (not really going out on a limb there) but still enjoy discussing and debating all the reasons.
There are, as I ruefully acknowledge, media-market reasons to find ways of making a point that will seem bold or surprising to at least many people. A chin-scratching "let's think about what makes Christian faith so resilient" doesn't perhaps (we'll see) sell as well as "let me tell you why Christendom is being reborn," but really, these are mostly different ways of packaging thematically similar ventures.
Yes, definitely still interesting to discuss in spite of agreeing beforehand.
It's interesting to relate this project to Christian apologetics. It's kind of orthogonal to it. You don't quite want to say "Christianity keeps convincing people because it's actually true," since (a) you lose part of your audience, and (b) it's not a full explanation anyway. And yet the resilience of Christianity is a reason for faith.
I'm very eager to read your posts.
Do people actually listen to audio recordings of posts? I always assumed that most everyone was doing what I do on long car trips: downloading Substack posts into a text-to-speech app like VoiceAloudReader and letting the robot read them to me.
(Sorry to digress, but, if there's demand for audio, that's relevant info for me!)