New Substack: Translating the Tradition

Separating out into a new Substack my reflections on Orthodox Christianity

Long before I ever got started here on Substack, I started a podcast, at the urging of some of my parishioners, to periodically post some of my sermons. Because I think translation is one of the best metaphors for what Christians are called to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ—to translate those teachings into action and to translate them into our own time and language and culture—and because Orthodox Christians understand those teachings as a whole way of life that we generally term the Apostolic Tradition, I chose, as the title of my podcast, Translating the Tradition.

However, since getting back into blogging here on Substack, and since launching my personal podcast, Geek Orthodox, I’ve been wanting to do a little more with Translating the Tradition—so, I’ve ported the whole podcast over from our church website (which I hope will also help me eventually sort out some technical problems I’ve been having with the now very large “back catalogue” of sermons which have been dropped from the podcast feed) as the first step in starting a separate Substack for posting my more explicitly “faith focussed” musings on Orthodox Christianity.

There’s another reason that I want to separate my more explicitly Christian content from my musings here on Geek Orthodox: namely, while everything I post here is ultimately informed by my Orthodox Christian faith (as I hope everything that I say and do is!), my intent here has always been to focus primarily on the “geek” subculture which has shaped me and the world in which we live from that faith-informed perspective in a way that can be easily enjoyed by both faithful and “unfaithful” (not-yet-faithful?) alike.

My hope is that separating these back out, I’ll feel freer to “be myself” in both areas, in the sense that I won’t be worried about boring or annoying those who are more interested in my musings on “geek” subculture by posting long articles on Orthodox Christianity—or vice versa, for those who might be more interested to hear what I have to say about the faith who might not be all that interested in all this geekiness. And, of course, I would hope that the possibly not insubstantial subset of those interested in both might subscribe to—or at least follow—both!

So, if you’re interested in checking out more of what I have to say about Orthodox Christianity, please feel free to visit and maybe even subscribe to Translating the Tradition. And, if not, well… I’ll still have a fair bit to say about it here on Geek Orthodox, but it’ll probably be a bit more “in passing”—or maybe even a bit more deeply and invisibly integrated!

In the interests of preserving history, I’ll leave up my recent post on “How the Blind Man Saw Things”, even though it probably more properly belongs on Translating the Tradition, since it was actually one of the posts which motivated me to move my old podcast here to Substack in order to expand it—and to separate out all the more explicitly Christian musings I’m hoping to add to the Translating the Tradition podcast from the more geeky ones that I’m hoping to continue sharing here.