Some Programming Notes

Chats, Podcasts, and More!

This light bulb has nothing to do with this post, but I saw it while sitting at a poetry reading in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago and became enamored of the way it shone even while being filled with rainwater, and this seemed like as good a place as any to share it!

I wanted to give you a couple of programming notes about how A Lover’s Quarrel will be changing, at least for the next month or so.

For most of 2025, I have been involved in a workshop cosponsored by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning and Theology and Religion and the Candler Foundry. The workshop is called Communities as Classrooms, and it seeks to help academics like me reach broad audiences outside of traditional academic settings. As part of that workshop, I have built a little summer learning experience, and it involves you!

Basically, my project is to try to take this Substack—the weekly-or-slightly-more-frequent posts that you get in your inbox—and add some things to it, to assess whether and how it serves all of you who subscribe. For the next four weeks (and maybe longer, if the experiment is successful), you’ll notice a few new things:

• A live chat (text-based) on Substack that will take place on the next four Fridays (August 1, 8, 15, and 22) at noon Mountain Time (2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, 11am Pacific) and go for about 45 minutes. This is a chance to say hello, ask any questions you want to ask of me or others on the chat, and workshop ideas about the lectionary texts for the coming Sunday. Note: You can join the chat either from the Substack app or from a web browser, but you will need the app if you want to get a push notification when the chat begins. Otherwise, you should get an email about the chat beginning, with a link to join it.

• Podcast versions of my weekly lectionary reflections. This is basically just me reading my post, but if you prefer listening to reading or if you spend a lot of time commuting, this might be a good option. I am not yet sure whether these will launch on Mondays like my text posts, or later in the week.

• Podcast conversations with some special guests. My goal is to do this all four weeks, if I can line folks up. These will likely come later each week.

This is all happening on a four-week experimental timeline, but of course my hope is that once I learn more about how these things work and whether they are effective, some or all of them will become regular features of A Lover’s Quarrel.

Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, and thanks for sharing this Substack with people you think might enjoy it. And thanks for sticking with me as I try a few new things!