First Things First

I was planning on starting this Blog on Ash Wednesday to correspond with the release of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. My original idea was to go to the first available showing, then give my unedited impressions.

However, some folks from my church decided to wait a week and see it in a group, so I delayed the review to go along with them. After seeing the film, my wife and I invited everyone back to our place to discuss it, which lasted until well after 1:00 AM so no immediate blogging was possible (or at least reasonable).

I did write a review, though but it kind of grew in the telling so I decided to submit it to Touchstone. I got the following, very sweet, email back from editor David Mills the very next day:

Thank you for your submission. We (the editors) are currently trying to figure out what to do about the movie. We have nine submissions already, not to mention the queries I've gotten, but our lead time is such that we couldn't easily publish anything before the June issue (May is in production now and we could get in perhaps one short article), by which time the subject may be exhausted, between the print media and the web. This is one of the headaches of modern publishing. I don't mean to discourage you, esp. since I haven't read the submission, but wanted to be honest about the situation.

Odds are, of course, the thing won't get published, in which case I will post it here. But with all the craziness involved, I thought it would be appropriate to start the blog on April Fools Day.