A short history of this blog

From 2007 until I shut it down in 2014 to write my novel Everywhere She's Not, I wrote a blog, the posts of which for years at a time were simultaneously published on three platforms: here on my website (which I've recently overhauled: that's the header of my old website above); on the very liberal website Huffington Post, and on the very conservative website Crosswalk.

Though I could have made considerable money running ads on my old website (which for some five years did over 300,000 views a month, which [to be frank)] made it one of the most-read blogs in the world), I always kept the site ad-free. The majority of my writing on that blog was about how it's not just grossly immoral, but manifestly unbiblical, to claim that God thinks homosexuality, in and of itself, is a sin.

The audience I most wanted to reach with that message was always gay teenagers, LGBT kids who were being routinely bullied—in school, in their neighborhood, from pulpits across the country—just for being who they are. And Christian gay teens? That was a crowd I definitely wanted to know that God doesn't care if they're gay any more than He/She does if they're red-headed or left-handed. So I didn't run ads on my blog. Because I didn't want anyone—and especially not a young person—coming to my site and thinking that I was in any way getting paid to write what I was writing—that I was beholden to anything but the truth.

But after six or so years of making exactly zero dollars for the work on my blog that I was doing full-time, I finally moved my entire blog over to the Progressive Christian portal at Patheos.com. Patheos runs a lot of ads (and a whole lot more now than they used to!), but they pay. They're still paying me for the traffic my erstwhile blog brings them.

You can read more about the work and writing I did around Christianity here.

Here's what you'll find in my blog posts below/earlier than this one: posts from my old blog ("From the Archives"--or "Archive-o-Rama"); a few of the columns I ran under "Ask John," the weekly advice column I wrote from 2015-2020 for the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper; a few samples of "Around Asheville," which was a new column I was writing for the Citizen-Times before Covid sent us all indoors; and some miscellaneous other stuff.

All posts above this one are . . . more current stuff I'm writing. And . . . there we have it! Thank you!