Interesting to read over my prospective from the beginning of 2006. I was wrong about the Liberals winning the election, but both parties still have stiffs for leaders.
I’m not sure what I have to say about the past year. It’s always tough to ruminate over that long of a period of time. But, here goes anyways. These are items of significance over the past year, in numeric form that does not necessarily ascribe value:
- I celebrated my first anniversary in Zürich.
- I went to Europe as part of my SSU schooling
- I moved back to St. Stephen after Europe to continue at SSU.
- I spent my first whole year within the blogosphere.
- Jaclyn and I took our first tentative steps into starting a design group.
- Book of the Year: The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. This book helped me to shed a lot of me preconceptions of social justice as being hopelessly liberal.
- Album of the Year: BT‘s This Binary Universe. This made me believe in electronic music again. This is classical, soundtrack-y music that is incredible in its scope. You forget that it was made on computers.
- Movie of the Year: Little Miss Sunshine. Well acted and well written, this tale of a dysfunctional family pulling together transcends the clichés of what you’d expect. There’s commentary on all kinds of social issues along the way too, but never in a heavy handed way. This is all capped off by an ending scene that made me laugh harder than anything in a long time. It hurt.
2006 also marked my first full year in the blogosphere. I grew restless with my old blog (pardon the pun ;) ) and moved over to these new digs, powered by the much more powerful WordPress. Here’s some blog-related retrospective:
- Blog of the Year: Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed, hands down. He usually posts three times every weekday: One on a book, one on a biblical passage (he’s currently working on Psalm 118 and went through all of Romans before that) and another on a topical issue. He models charity, faithfulness and concerted intellectual engagement to me.
- My most contentious posts: Change and Brian McLaren, Conversation and Life. I had some serious disagreements about politics and salvation with an anonymous commenter (a downfall of blogger) and one person even called me a patronizing asshole!
- Most encouraging blog trend: Quite simply that more and more people are doing it. The avenues of communication that this opens up are crazy. There are pitfalls to be sure, but there’s much to be gained as well.
- Most discouraging blog trend: The ease of publishing leads to sloppy thinking and interaction. We need to, in many ways, slow down. The anonymity of it all leads to a lot of name-calling and lack of charity too.
- My best posts:
Well, there’s that. A Prospective for 2007 will be forthcoming as well.