One Year Anniversary, 100 Book Reviews & 3,000 Hits

The Bully Pulpit was launched a year ago on February 25, 2008. The site is dedicated primarily to reviews of religious books that churches, preachers and members should consider adding to their reading libraries. The foundation for the launch of the site comes from the book reviews printed by Albert Farley in The West Virginia Christian. I am very appreciative to brother Farley for publishing my articles. While the paper is a monthly publication, I am able to publish book reviews on the blog at a more rapid rate. In fact, I have also completed publishing approximately 100 book reviews within this year. Now if I could read at least 100 books a year!

Here is a breakdown of visitors to The Bully Pulpit since inception:

Thanks to a program provided by Statcounter.com, I was able to learn some very interesting facts about visitors including:

• Predominantly visitors are from the United States; however, there have been visitors from the following countries: Canada, Mexico, Australia, United Kingdom, India, Portugal, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Republic of Korea, South Africa, Russian Federation, Philippines and Denmark.
• The number of visitors to the site exceeded 3,100 as of February 2009. Since computers often change IP addresses, it is impossible to state that this means 3,000 different people have visited the site. Statcounter provided me the ability to remove my IP address from the count. Regardless, I am very gratified that the numbers reflect this level of activity and hope that it continues to grow exponentially.

I selected the term “bully pulpit” for a very explicit reason. Some are quizzical about the name “Bully Pulpit”. I even had one or two suggest I might change the name because it might give someone the wrong impression. With no intention of being arrogant, I have refused to give into this suggestion. The term “bully” is from Theodore Roosevelt who would use it to describe things that are superb and excellent. The term “pulpit” refers to a platform from which communication is delivered. Often you hear that the President of the United States should use the “bully pulpit”. What that means is the President should use his authority to deliver important themes to the country directly rather than through media outlets. So, the Bully Pulpit, as I use it, is a platform to speak about books that deal with the most sublime, excellent, superb, bully subject—religion. Sure, the term may be provocative to some unfamiliar with it, but I deliberately chose it to be provocative! It prompts curious and sincere people to ask me about it which gives me the opportunity to get to know them.

As we continue to move into 2009, I would like to encourage others to tell people about the Blog. With a year’s worth of material to see the subject matter, I hope this provides you a degree of confidence to recommend the site to others. I also would appreciate more comments to the individual posts that have been made. If you know the authors and would like to tell a story about them, I would especially appreciate your comments. If you have read the book and would like to make an additional point about it, then please add a comment to that effect. All comments come to me for review prior to posting. To date, I have posted all comments without alteration for which I am thankful. If you do much on the Internet you realize that some become profane and vulgar. So, I review the comments to make sure such is not being posted here. I also will not tolerate evil speaking of others. As I have stated before, I have not had a single case of that thus far. That does not mean I will not post comments from those who have a disagreement. For example, I received a comment from a self-proclaimed atheist who commented on an apologetics book about God. His comment was neither profane nor vulgar so I had no hesitation in publishing it.

In closing, I would just like to say thank you to all those who have visited this site and told others about it. I hope it will be a reference to young Christians looking to build a library of quality reading material.