I’ve not been so good at writing here lately… but that is about to change. I’ve worked at BioLogos for nine years now, and that plus the fact that I have a PhD means that I was able to apply for a sabbatical. That sabbatical was approved and begins in just a couple of weeks and runs through the end of this year. Technically there is still a week of podcast work in there, and a week of vacation, but as of Labor Day weekend, I won’t be “at work” again until 2023.
Actually, I’ll still be working. It will just be a different kind of work. The first six weeks, I’ll be traipsing around Europe to see some really cool things (which, now that I say it out loud (or, rather, type it publicly) doesn’t really seem like work!). The thought is (and the proposal was) that it will be research for a book I’m writing. And I thought a good way to prime the writing pump would be to write consistently here about where I go, what I see, and what I think about those things. It will be a journal of sorts which I have decided to call… wait for it…
Stump’s Travel Log
(I’ve never been particularly thrilled with my name. But it does seem useful when I can leverage it for clever arboreal puns.)
Anyway… I’m setting off on a journey, with nothing but my backpack and a load of ideas. You’re welcome to follow my journey here. Subscribing means that you’ll get an email when I post something new, which I intend to do every couple of days (and it won’t cost you anything but the time you could have spent elsewhere). If you’re a current subscriber and you’re really only interested in my non-travel writing, now is your chance to bail. I promise it won’t be just pictures of strange food and blisters on my feet (clarification: the blisters will be on my feet, the strange food will not be… unless there are customs in some corners of Europe I’m not yet aware of). But neither do I expect to be writing about movies, or my podcast, or the best play in the history of sport as I’ve been wont to do in this newsletter in ages past.
So I hope that I don’t get lost or injured or kidnapped along the way. I hope that I see some interesting things and can think of interesting things to write about them. And I hope you’ll enjoy following along.
Exciting!
I can't wait!