so like i said, i’m sort of relaunching this site and that time has now come. if you’ve been here before, you’ll notice a new theme design, although the layout remains pretty much the same. you might also notice that the address of this site has changed and is now brandoncozart.com, so be sure to update your bookmarks if you have this site bookmarked.

along with a new design is a new, or rather, stated, focus. i think that one of the reasons i haven’t posted as much as i would have liked up to this point is a lack of clear intent for my blog. i think i thought too often that if i didn’t have something long and profound to say, then i just shouldn’t post. but over the last couple of months, as i’ve been reading more and more blogs, i’ve realized that most blog posts might just be a short paragraph, a single quotation, maybe even just a link to someone else’s blog post. my posts have sort of evolved into that in the last couple of months, but having it stated will help me out a ton, i think. so at least, if all goes to plan, i’ll have at least one post per week, but hopefully there will be more.

in addition to this, i’ve also decided to focus my posts in the area of the intersection between faith and culture. again, i think that that’s what my posts have evolved into in the past couple of months, as that’s what i’ve been most interested in in that time, but the sort of self-consciousness that i mentioned above still hindered the quantity of posts on here. what this means as far as content is that i plan to use this blog for book reviews, possibly movie and music reviews, as well as interaction with articles that i find interesting and relevant to this project.

so why a Peanuts theme? well aside from being the greatest cartoon strip of all time, when i think of something that perfectly captures the intersection of faith and culture i think of Peanuts. Charles Schulz was truly a genius at capturing the cultural sitz im laben and dissecting it from a number of angles, including the angle of faith. and he did so, of course, through the lives and conversations of children. brilliant!

Peanuts has had a big impact on me over the years and has always been a part of my life, and i feel that this is a fitting tribute to what Charlie Brown and his gang has meant to me. also, in further honor of Schulz’s life work, around the first of the year i plan to start posting a Peanuts strip per week on a particular day.

so that’s the manifesto, so to speak, of where i want this blog to go from this point on. and to get it started, i will be doing a series of posts on the highly lauded, highly controversial, His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (from which comes the much anticipated holiday movie, The Golden Compass). i’m really looking forward to reading this books because i’ve heard so much about them, good and bad, and i think they will be a fascinating read.

38-30. Gig’Em!!

so i haven’t posted on this blog in a while, and that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is time. but another reason for this is probably a lack of focus or purpose for this blog. so this is just a note to say that i am in the process of recasting a vision for this blog, as well as a complete redesign (so if things look a little wonky, that probably means i’m playing), and my hope is that doing so will allow me to be more aware of blog post ideas, and that this will give me the encouragement and drive to keep up with this thing.

so stay tuned. i hope to “relaunch,” so-to-speak around the first week of december or so.