Happy bloggerversary

On Easter Sunday it will be exactly a year since I started this blog. Quite appropriate, really, given that my first ever post (and quite a few after it) was about the betrayal of liberal principles by supposedly 'liberal' Christian commentators. Since then, I've found myself blogging regularly about religion and secularism, fundamentalism and terrorism, freedom of expression, human rights, the arts, travel, national identity and (more recently) the US presidential election.

I started blogging because I'd become a keen reader of political blogs and wanted to be part of the conversation. Unlike some bloggers, I didn't come to blogging with fixed beliefs that I was desperate to share with the world. My own thinking on a number of important issues - Iraq and Israel to name but two - had changed as a result of reading bloggers like Norman Geras, and through them coming across resources such as the Euston Manifesto, Democratiya and Engage. But I was at a stage in my life when my opinions on a whole range of things were shifting - and I thought that blogging would help me to work out where I stood.

And so it has proved. After a year of blogging, I'm a little more confident about describing my political/philosophical position: as a liberal, pro-feminist, cosmopolitan, social-democratic secularist (phew!). But still with those nagging spiritual tendencies.

Happy Easter.