Every piece of marketing advice I’ve encountered begins with the same commandment:
Find your niche.
Choose a lane. Become known for one thing. Make it immediately obvious why someone should subscribe. Build a recognizable story brand. Then, stay in your lane!
This is, I’m told, how the internet works.
The trouble is, I don’t seem to inhabit a niche. I aspire to inhabit an ecosystem.
I’m still new to Substack. For a few weeks I’ve been perplexed by the space where a Substack title should go. Orthoparadoxy? Shalomic Imagination? Both are terms I suspect I’ve largely invented—or at least stretched beyond recognition. They require footnotes before they can become invitations. Not exactly ideal marketing.
One points toward the conviction that faithfulness often looks less like certainty than living well within holy paradox of the gift of real difference inviting relationship. The other imagines participating in G-d’s flourishing dream for all and everything.
Neither fits neatly on a business card.
And perhaps that’s the point.
I am a practical theologian. Or a public theologian. Depending on the day, those feel like different callings. On better days, they are simply two ways of describing the same vocation: paying attention to what is real, listening for the movement of Love, and asking how we might faithfully respond together.
Which means I write about theology.
And cities.
And moss growing on my roof.
And the Jesus Way.
And Mary Oliver.
And Christian nationalism.
And depression.
And the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
And film.
And neighborhood pubs.
And Bruegel.
And artificial intelligence.
And quilts.
And the way my grandmother loved me into believing I belonged.
To an algorithm, this probably looks like confusion.
To me, it feels like ecology.
The world has never arrived divided into categories. Theology leaks into politics. Politics shapes neighborhoods. Neighborhoods shape loneliness. Loneliness reshapes spirituality. Spirituality changes how we notice birds, or moss, or our neighbors, or ourselves. Everything belongs to everything else.
Why should my writing pretend otherwise? Perhaps my niche isn’t a topic. Perhaps it is a hermeneutic. A way of seeing.
I find myself returning to a simple intuition that has become increasingly difficult to ignore:
The ecosystem of all things invites a loving, faithful presence in response to the Real.
That sentence probably won’t help the marketing experts either. It is too expansive. Too mystical. Too practical. Too theological. Too ordinary. But it is the sentence I keep living into.
It means I care less about mastering ideas than cultivating attention. Less about winning arguments than becoming the kind of person who can remain lovingly present when certainty evaporates. Less about explaining G-d than noticing where Love is already at work in the world.
Maybe that’s what practical theology has always been—not applying theological theories to life, but discovering that life itself is where theology happens.
So perhaps this Substack will remain difficult to categorize.
Some weeks you’ll find an essay wrestling with Bonhoeffer or Willie James Jennings. Other weeks, a poem about learning to brake a bicycle, or reflections on Denise Levertov, or why cleaning moss off my roof unexpectedly reminded me of Icarus.
The connecting thread isn’t the subject matter.
It’s the practice of paying attention.
Because I am coming to believe that faithful presence is not primarily a doctrine but a way of inhabiting the world. A willingness to meet reality as it is—with curiosity instead of control, with love instead of fear, with hope instead of despair.
I don’t know if that’s a niche. But I know it is the life I long to practice. And I have a long way to go. I also know I love writing. Perhaps that’s enough. So welcome.
Whatever this eventually becomes, I hope it will be a place where we can practice noticing together. Where theology escapes the classroom without abandoning its depth. Where poetry and politics, neighborhoods and mysticism, grief and delight, all find themselves seated around the same table.
Because that, it seems to me, is how ecosystems flourish.
And perhaps that is how we do, too.
Peace, dwight
