One year on, say goodbye to All Things SDG…

[an announcement]

( … and hello to something new, sort of.)

What a year, eh?¹ Looking back on the one-year anniversary of my first All Things SDG post, I’m pleased, proud, and grateful, though I must admit my Substack debut on this date in 2024 wasn’t exactly auspicious.

Technically, I first joined Substack almost two years ago, by creating the Decent Films Substack. This was to replace the old MailChimp Decent Films newsletter that I hadn’t used in years, partly because I found MailChimp unwieldy and time-consuming. At first, though, I didn’t do anything with the Decent Films Substack either. I grabbed decentfilms.substack.com less because I felt an imminent need for it than because I thought I might want it at some point and didn’t want to lose it. What I still needed was a new place to write about topics other than movies.

What finally tipped the scales one year ago and led me to create a new, non–Decent Films Substack was Pope Francis declaring 2024 a “Year of Prayer” in preparation for the 2025 Jubilee Year. As a deacon, my first thought was that throughout 2024 I would try to make prayer a regular focus in my preaching.² My second thought was that I wanted an online home for this series of homilies.

This moved me, finally, to overcome my inertia and create this Substack publication.³ I was never crazy about the name All Things SDG, but I figured I could change it any time. (The subdomain I settled on, greydanus.substack.com, is here to stay, unless I implement my own domain name.)

Due to my inexperience, though, I accidentally posted that first homily on prayer to the wrong Substack—so the emails went out to my relatively large Decent Films subscriber base imported from MailChimp! I quickly deleted it, followed up with an apology note, and transferred the homily here, along with a self-deprecating note about my obvious lack of Substack bona fides.

Not a great beginning—but what happened after that surprised me!

• I found myself writing more than I expected—at first mostly homilies and film writing, but soon about other subjects: philosophy, language, politics, and especially comics! (Comics was my major at SVA, so I’m having a lot of fun in that area!)

• My readership here grew faster than I had expected. (Deep thanks to all who support and recommend my work!)

• One relatively early breakout piece was a sprawling, Bible-nerdy analysis of the the rendering of the New Testament phrase normally translated “the Jews” in the New American Bible—an essay that quickly landed on my homepage Top 6 most popular list, where it stayed until the last day or so, when it was overtaken by … my most recent piece, an analysis of a much beloved Calvin & Hobbes Sunday strip!

• By far my most popular topic has been moral and responsible engagement with politics and why Donald Trump is antithetical to it. At one point I think my top five most popular pieces were all Trump-related. (Although this is far from my favorite topic, I am very sorry to say I will have plenty of opportunity to write more in this vein.)

• Not necessarily best of all, but very happily nonetheless, when, after about six months, I turned on paid subscriptions, it turned out that quite a few people, God bless them, are willing to pay for content they were getting for free! (I don’t paywall anything. Your paid subscriptions, for those of you who pay, are a welcome and helpful gift. Thank you!)

All of which is great and gratifying … but the more this place took off, the more dissatisfied I became with the name “All Things SDG.” I want something with more personality. But what?

One early thought that occurred to me was a play on my last name: “The Grey Havens,” which is (as I’ve noted more than once) what we call our house. But a friend wisely counseled that a) this name would suggest a Tolkien focus, and b) there are already plenty of Tolkien-branded websites around.

More recently, while writing about a comic strip, it occurred to me that, instead of “Cartoon Critic,” a fun alternate tag for that series of posts would be “Thought Bubbles”—and then I couldn’t help contemplating the idea of interpreting “Thought Bubbles” as a metaphor for thoughts on anything and everything as a possible title for the whole Substack. My immediate reaction, though, was negative: That idea was a little too silly, and leaned too much toward the comics side of things.⁴

Sometime later an even sillier variation, but one in a way stickier in my mind, occurred to me: “Holy Thought Bubbles!” Burt Ward quippiness leaning into the cartoon stuff, of course—but, interpreted another way, it could also cover “thoughts about holy topics.” This was an idea that I couldn’t shake, but I also couldn’t convince myself that it wasn’t a bad idea (if you follow the negatives).

Then a clever friend suggested what immediately struck me as an idea with promise: “Dailies & Sundays.”

The immediate reference, of course, would be daily and Sunday comics, but with a secondary reference to topics and thoughts of an everyday or “daily” sort (about any subject I want to write about) and a “Sunday” sort (religious topics).

With “Dailies & Sundays” growing on me, I began polling my rather large number of friends in media and publishing. The responses were thoughtful and gratifying. (I particularly appreciate one friend brainstorming a raft of attractive alternative possibilities—all of which would make great names for a publication, though in the end none of them quite worked for this one.)

To my surprise, the candidate that got the most positive reactions was “Thought Bubbles”! The catch was, though, “Thought Bubbles” also elicited strong negative reactions.⁵ Clearly a name with a strong hook, but not necessarily in a good way! And while “Holy Thought Bubbles” had a small number of supporters,⁶ there were unsurprisingly even more negative reactions there.⁷ “Dailies & Sundays” got mostly positive reactions and a couple of enthusiastic shout-outs from very savvy friends.⁸

Which more or less confirms my gut instinct. I think I’d like to keep SDG in the title, at least for now while people get used to it. I took a stab at a logo. What do you think?

The colorful “Sundays” is of course meant to evoke full-color Sunday comic strips; in a reworked version, it could also possibly suggest stained glass.⁹ I’m still thinking about “Thought Bubbles” as the tag for the current “Cartoon Critic” posts. I’d be glad for any thoughts. New branding coming soon!

In closing…

A standard writerly practice around the turn of the year is to highlight pieces the writer is particularly proud of. It’s no longer the turn of the year in the usual sense, but between hitting my one-year anniversary and the Lunar New Year, I think I can stretch the point.

I’m not going to call out anything currently on the homepage top 6 list; those go without saying.¹⁰ That said, here are a secondary top 6 of pieces that are special to me, chosen from the various types of writing that I do, with the most recent first:

• A religious epistemic hierarchy: What I believe in 18 theses, ranked
  (this thought exercise is currently no. 8; I’d love to see it break into the top 6)

• Cartoon Critic #1: A Shocktober “The Far Side” commentary
  (currently no. 10; I love this cartoon and this commentary)

• Was the camel Jesus’ go-to funny animal?! (Bible nerdery)

• What is racism? Forming a Catholic perspective (first in a series with more to come)

• Crisis of meaning (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 – unfinished series on multiverse superhero storytelling in the MCU and the Spider-Verse)

• Homily: Why does Jesus tell so many stories about plants? Here’s one reason (one of my daughters told me this might be her favorite homily I’ve ever preached)

Onward!

Update: All Things SDG is now SDG’s Dailies & Sundays! >

1. Today happens to be Chinese (Lunar) New Year. When I started All Things SDG on January 29, 2024, it was, of course, not the Lunar New Year.

2. While I wasn’t able, due to unforeseen complications, to do the yearlong catechesis on prayer I had hoped to do, I did preach about prayer pretty consistently throughout the year.

3. “All Things SDG” came from the late, lamented Arts & Faith discussion board, where I had a thread for news about my work and life. I probably lifted it from my friend and fellow Arts & Faith message board alum Kenneth R. Morefield, who had a thread called “All Things Ken.” (Ken now owns artsandfaith.com and maintains it as a home for the movie lists the community has produced over the years.)

4. The idea of spinning off the comics commentary as a separate Substack also occurred to me. It is a fact that almost any time I publish anything—a homily, a bit of language trivia, comics nerdery, an exercise in religious philosophy—I get unsubscriptions from people who evidently signed up for something else and didn’t want that thing. Oh well. For better or worse, I like addressing a diverse audience that is patient enough to roll with the impractical range of my interests!

5. One friend ominously noted, “I would be irritated every time I saw the title ‘Thought Bubbles,’ in exactly the same way as I used to be when there were a million mommy blogs all titled something that included the word ‘musings.’”

6. One friend made a strong pitch for “Holy Thought Bubbles,” arguing that it was the most vivid and memorable of the options under consideration.

7. “Too many notes” was one such comment.

8. “Dailies and Sundays, UNQUESTIONABLY,” wrote a friend with an exceptionally good ear. “It just leaps up at one! It’s perfect.” Another friend suggested that “Sundays & Dailies” would be more intuitive. I see his point, but I have about three reasons for preferring “Dailies” first and “Sundays” last.

9. I could make it look more like stained glass—and maybe I will—but if the letters are too complicated they’ll be illegible at the much smaller size of the word mark at the top of Substack pages. Perhaps I’ll try more than one version. We’ll see.

10. I’m also not going to mention the piece on the New American Bible and “the Jews,” which was already prominently featured in this piece. (N.b. To view the current top six most popular, I believe you have to use the browser client; at least, I don’t know how to view the top six most popular list via the Substack app.