Many thanks to the readers who responded to my thoughts on a shift in direction and redesign, with encouragements, either in comments or by email. Apologies to those to whom I have not yet responded directly. I fear it’s been a difficult week - not in practical terms, of conflicting demands on time, but more emotionally and mentally - with conflicting ideas, impulses and emotions, some blog related, some entirely personal.

I have a number of thoughts and ideas bubbling away that I want to develop, as the “more enduring” type of piece I discussed and that readers appear to welcome - but have been unable to settle into the extended, concentrated time they need. In the meantime, I have spent some time scouting out useful news items, and posting introductory paragraphs, with links, at “Queer Church News”, as promised. I believe that this is valuable on two distinct levels: most obviously, as a simply sharing of items (mostly current) that I think are valuable and likely to be of interest to my readers, but also as developing an expanding resource - to myself, as well as to readers.

This is how it works.

For each entry that I post, my Zemanta tool offers a range of suggestions for “Related Posts”, some of which I select for inclusion, as a listing at the end of the piece. There are always a number that I reject, as being “related” - but not in any sense relevant to my interests, or as directly relevant - but promoting ideas that I reject (homophobia and intolerance, for example), or simply not offering anything particularly new or interesting on the subject, that has not been done better elsewhere. Some, however, are of so much interest to me, that if I have not already written about them, I build them into independent posts on their own for QC News - and in doing so, develop a whole new set of suggestions for links to related posts - potentially developing an extended chain of reports on a single theme.

Such was the case this morning. This headline caught my eye, Sexual Healing: Evangelicals Update Their Message to Gays which I duly published as a Queer Church News item. When I did so, I quickly developed just that kind of series of useful related posts that suggested to me that there is something really important going on here, a really important change within Exodus International that I can respond to, and that offers some point of contact and (partial) agreement. This also taps into an earlier post I had drafted, but not completed, on the case of the Christian counsellor who was removed from her professional association for imposing her religious views in a therapeutic context, and news stories that California is attempting to outlaw “reparative therapy” for under - 18′s, and that the Netherlands Health Service has excluded such therapies from state funding.

When I return to my half completed post on conversion therapy, Christian counsellors and the medical establishment, I will have easier access to relevant source material from my own pages than I would do by a Google search - which would throw out so much more, but which would require comparably more sifting.

 

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