Two Years Until Patheos Hits the Age of Reason

Patheos is celebrating it’s fifth birthday this week, and they’ve asked us bloggers to reflect a little on our time here and to share a little list of recommended posts.  It so happens, when I was poking back in my archive, that I noticed that my blog is about a month away from it’s four year anniversary, since I started it during the summer before my senior year of college.  I’ve done the math, and it looks like I’ve racked up about 86% of the posts I should have if I’d faithfully posted every day for the blog’s whole lifetime.

I was invited to join Patheos the fall after my graduation, and I liked the platform, the professionalism, and how much easier it suddenly seemed to be to get advanced reader copies of books for review.  But it was about another year before the best thing about blogging at Patheos happened to me.  A little while after I announced my conversion and switched over to the Catholic channel, all those bloggers ended up forming a private facebook group (which, to the best of my recollection, I was the one to suggest naming “The Catholic Patheosi”).

It’s been an enormous pleasure to get to know a lot of the other bloggers here better.  We’ve shared articles (and gotten feedback on blog posts), all jumped into conversation together to discuss religious education, prayed novenas together, and even sent each other homemade cookies, on occasion.  Elizabeth Scalia, the Anchoress who manages our channel, is the one who noted my love of St. Patrick’s Breastplate and sent me the infinity bracelet with his prayer printed on it as a gift for my baptism that I wear now.  It’s been a pleasure to have online connection deepen in this way.

So, to do my part for the festivities, here are five posts from Unequally Yoked’s run that particularly caught my fancy:

• The (Epistemic) Floor is Made of Lava – definitely one of my favorite title’s I’ve ever given to something.

• Pretty much anything from the Weatherwax Wednesday series (the first regular feature to exist on this blog, making Granny Weatherwax the original patron saint of the blog) but particularly “People as things, that’s where it starts.”

• Another post that I sometimes still use as a litmus test for my present actions is “That his heels may kick at heaven” from the Offering Loving Resistance series.  I’d like to grow up to be Granny, but, in the meantime, I can at least keep my guard up against being Hamlet.

• Some of the posts that were the most delightful to write were the three that make up “Singing my way to the Sacraments” which ran on the three days leading up to my reception into the Catholic Church and drew on Anyone Can Whistle, Floyd Collins, and The Man of La Mancha.

• And, finally, one of the most fun things I got to do as the result of this blog was to speak at Chicago Ideas Week.  A lot of the material in the videos below comes from you guys, and the entries and reactions you’ve had to our Ideological Turing Tests, but some of the content can also be found in the Cultivating Curiosity series.

P.S. I’m a little curious about how easy it is to score a bingo, using Christian H.’s board of my tropes from those five posts.