It was a slow year for AUFS, and I primarily blame myself. Between writing, translation, and new administrative duties, I had little energy left for blogging, and two waves of right-wing harrassment (for details of which you can look here, here, and here) have also made me more than a little gun-shy.
Yet we did some good work this year, most notably in the form of three book events: on Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible, S. Sayyid’s Recalling the Caliphate, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Worlds Without End. Many thanks to Stephen Keating for taking up the burden of organizing these events. We also hosted an event on Foucault and neoliberalism, organized by Mark William Westmoreland. All of these events proved to be great discussions, with a mix of AUFS regulars and newcomers.
The top three posts this year, traffic-wise, were my dashed-off account of Why Game of Thrones Sucks, a Foucauldian account of cat photos, and my attempt to decipher Zizek’s writings on the refugee crisis. The success of the first frankly depresses me, because I think the post gives “phoning it in” a bad name — but Craig made some good points in comments.
Highlights from other authors include Marika Rose’s reflections on Cameron’s Christianity, Eric Daryl Meyer’s The Ineradicable Supercessionism of the Christian Imagination, Thomas Lynch’s AAR paper on climate change and apocalyptic, Steven Shakespeare’s Neoliberalism and the British Left: Hardworking, Aspirational, Racist, and Amaryah Shaye’s On Marked and Unmarked Theologies. The inestimable Dan Barber also provided a preview of some of his forthcoming work.
In the year to come, I anticipate that my “strategy of hibernation” will if anything become more pronounced. This year taught me that I no longer have the stomach for online controversy that I once did — and that blogging energy can and should be productively diverted to more enduring forms of writing. I am going to be experimenting with an ascetic blogging discipline of posting only about offline texts I am reading. Freeform opinionating will be limited to Facebook for the time being, and I will likely attempt to pull back there as well. My co-bloggers have all done great work — perhaps as I recede gradually into the background, they will find space to do even more.
Thank you all, for reading and writing.
An und für sich 
I hope this will not spell the end to your occasional blogging about Shimer. It’s an important service you’ve been doing for the College, and I’d hate to see it leave.
We shall see. It’s hard to think of Shimer topics that are both new and not at risk of appearing to be either “inside baseball” or “dirty laundry.”