This is not a Substack…
…because I am not a Substacker.
I mean, pretty clearly. I briefly thought I might be, about a year ago. Last February I created a Decent Films Substack, optimistically blurbed “Movies, Catholicism, and more.” I was excited to try something new. Nearly a year later, I have yet to create my first post. I’ve been writing and blogging nonstop for decades, but after creating my Decent Films Substack, I never managed to do a thing with it.
The reasons are many, and not worth going into here for the most part. The bottom line, I guess, is that if I had something movie-related to say, I posted it at Decent Films, and if I had something else to say…well, despite the “Movies, Catholicism, and more” tagline, somehow a Decent Films Substack didn’t seem like the right place for it.
This has been a problem for awhile, because I do have other things to say, as a Catholic deacon, a dad, and, since September, a high-school theology teacher. For many years, as film critic for the National Catholic Register, I blogged at their website, but those days are long gone. I’ve kept busy and written for a number of publications since then, but I haven’t had a blog-type outlet for whatever I wanted to write. (The problem has been further aggravated lately by the death spiral of what used to be Twitter, a platform that was once important to me.) I felt this lack most acutely every month or two when I wanted to post my latest homily. For lack of a better option, I’ve been posting them as unlisted blog posts at Decent Films, but that was never a good solution.
What I really needed, I guess, was an SDG Substack. At the time I went with Decent Films partly because that’s been my brand for so long, but mostly because SDG was too short for a Substack handle (and even if it weren’t, someone else would have snagged it long ago).
Anyway, for one reason or another, things finally came to a head this week, and I decided to try something different. So welcome to All Things SDG, where I hope to post, significantly more often than zero times in a year, about “Catholicism, movies, and more?” (Reversing the order of “Catholicism” and “movies” from the previous blurb feels to me like truth in advertising for this new venture, but it’s the question mark at the end, for now at least, that expresses my hope of exploring in this space anything and everything I have to say that doesn’t fit at Decent Films.)
Who the audience for this may be remains to be seen. If you’ve read this far, maybe it’s you.