Daniel Moch

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.

Today brings us another reminder to read the reference materials, which will be your best source of information for any well-documented project. I’m primarily putting this out there as a reminder of that advice, and to point folks to the appropriate reference in this specific case. I like that Go’s module system is an integrated part of the toolchain, and that for the most part it does The Right Thing. Until recently I thought that private modules were an exception to this.

The title, I’m sure, will offend people in at least two different groups. The first will see it as an attempt to inflame an already simmering conflict within American culture. The second will see it as an attempt to make a very real and necessary conflict seem unsavory. To the first group, let me assure you that I have no such desire. I already think our public discourse in America has come off the rails, and the last thing I would want is to further toxify the conversation by raising passions further.