Giving up blogging for Lent

I've decided to give up blogging for Lent this year. Not blogs themselves so much as "blogging"—let me explain.

Back when Lewis Lapham was at Harper's,
I read his monthly "Notebook" with delight and frustration. His writing
was incisive, hilarious and scornful—with much of the scorn aimed at
Christians. I once wrote to the editors lambasting Lapham for "alarmist
screeds like May's Notebook, with its familiar formula of smug elitism,
crude hyperbole, and triadic lists culminating in caustic punch lines." I
was proud of my style-aping sentence but at the same time alarmed that I
was taking so much pleasure in clever ridicule—Lapham's own
stock-in-trade.

Lapham's moved on, but Notebook's biases and tone—now in the hands of a large stable of writers—as often as not remain. This month Mark Slouka focuses on the ignorance of the U.S. electorate, especially conservative Christians (subscription required):

Forty
percent of us believe God created all things in their present form
sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number—not
coincidentally, perhaps—are functionally illiterate.

Then there's this sarcastic creed, aimed at former President Bush as well as the people who voted for him:

Belief and knowledge are separate and unequal. Belief is higher, nobler; it comes from the heart; it feels like truth.

And Slouka blames both Bush and the ignorance of the faithful for what he calls an "unpleasant fact":