[ neoblogical ]

I’m finally here in the blogosphere. Well, sort of. I am really in my study typing on my computer. Yet as soon as I click publish, I will somehow inhabit the online world of blogging. As a writer; as a consultant in web design, communications, networking, and computing; as a student of rhetoric and composition with an intense interest in emerging forms of digital media; and as a college teacher; I have hesitated (procrastinated?) in adding my voice to the increasing din of the online world.Will I simply add to the noise? Will my voice blend into the background, adding incrementally to the oppressive weight of information overload?I hope not.I want to offer something new, something useful - thus the name, NeoBlogical.com. “Neology” refers to a new word or phrase, or the act of inventing one. In this sense the word is synonymous with “coinage,” and is linked to ideas of creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to be a pathfinder. (The term has also been used several times in the past few centuries to refer to new theologies in Christian and Jewish tradition, especially a German rationalist approach to Christianity.)So here begins my offering. We’ll be considering many subjects here: rhetoric, film, fiction, poetry, popular culture, religion, music, art, family, parenting: you name it. If I am interested in it, or living it, I’m going to eventually have something to say about it, and a desire to get my readers to see, as I try to, old things in a new light.Maybe this will come from finding new ways to say old things, or maybe it will come from finding new things to say. However it happens, we need to always be becoming new. In this sense, each day we should get newer rather than older. We should always live with the realization that we are on our way to infinity, and perhaps beyond. Otherwise we will wake up one morning entangled in our finite, stagnant lives, and we will look around at the greyness of it all, and we will wonder, “How did I get here?”Or we might never wake up wondering anything, never taste the infinite, swallowed by the grayness of ignorance and stagnance.