Daniel Moch

I had the opportunity this past weekend to attend a short seminar held by my church on the topic of peacemaking in political discourse. The keynote speaker was Todd Deatherage, the co-founder and executive director of Telos, a DC-based nonprofit whose mission is to, “form communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference, and equip them to help reconcile seemingly intractable conflicts at home and abroad.” I was excited to learn how to be an agent of peace rather than division.

Over the past year or so I’ve been collecting quotes about simplicity. Here is a short collection of my favorites: Einstein: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” “Even the simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it.” Grady Booch:, “The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.” C.A.R. Hoare: “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

This is a personal post on why, after almost ten years, I am no longer self-hosting my blog, mail and other servers. First, a clarification: up until now a lot of my data has been hosted on various virtual private server (VPS) providers. This may walk up to the line between proper self-hosting and … something else. Still, I continue to call what I was doing self-hosting, not least because data I felt needed to stay private remained on servers physically under my control.

Ways of classifying Christian cultural engagement abound, but one is usually able to classify a given Christian community into one of two categories: those who separate themselves from their host culture, and those who seek to be “in the world but not of it.” This post concerns the latter group. In his book How To Inhabit Time, James K.A. Smith discusses two different approaches for Christian cultural engagement. (To be clear, Smith frame is not actually cultural engagement at all, but what you might call historical engagement: how Christians relate to past and future, and how that informs their attitudes in the present.

It has become commonplace to discuss with a certain level of anxiety the decline of American society. I hear this sort of talk from folks on both sides of the political aisle. More germaine to what I wish to discuss today, I also hear this talk from folks of all sorts of religious persuasions, including no religous persuation at all. It’s my belief that, while the discussion itself is certainly valid and important, the anxiety surrounding it is largely unhelpful.