Recommend-a-[____]

Things fall apart.

It’s a sad fact of life that attrition culls the blogosphere on a regular basis. I guess it’s also a vivid demonstration of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in action (believers in the theory of evolution take note). I recently updated our Recommend-a-blog page (one of the gray tabs just below the banner at the top of our home page) to include links to all the posts and blogs I have recommended since December 2013 when we debuted online, only to find that six of the thirty-two either no longer exist or are exclusively available on The Wayback Machine.

That’s almost 20% of the total. Wow. I guess we should be thankful for the ones still alive and kicking.

Reasons for pages disappearing vary:

• Adam Ford, formerly of The Babylon Bee, started the Christian Daily Reporter, which quickly became DISRN, which just as quickly disappeared. I’m sure Adam is still doing something constructive today, but those things are not it. Little evidence of those worthy enterprises remains.
• Michael Windheuser used to contribute a science column to Uplook Magazine. Those columns may have been moved, but I sure can’t find them to link to anymore. Too bad, they were excellent.
• William Lane Craig wrote an equally excellent 2015 article answering a reader’s question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage to include same-sex partnerships. That one’s only available in archived form, which suggests it was either moved, deleted or maybe even self-censored.
• Three blogs I recommended have been completely deleted by their writers for reasons only they could tell us.
• Three of my first five recommended posts came from the blog assemblyHUB, which still exists even though nobody has posted an article there in almost fourteen months.
• Maintaining a blog page online requires a (nominal) annual fee. Fail to make that payment, and … poof!

As I say, reasons vary, but “time and chance happen to all”, as Solomon famously put it. Of all the Christian blogs still standing, Stand to Reason got the most recommendations from me (5). That says something about their quality and persistence over the last decade, I think.

I’m recommending fewer things these days, not because I like other people’s online writing any less than I used to, but because a lot of posts I might have recommended in this series have made their way into other ongoing features here. Still, I gave a few nods of approval over the years that have stood the test of time. You can find the updated page here.