Members of my blogroll have been going AWOL lately.

This is a bit disconcerting for a member of a generation whose virtual addresses tend to be more stable than our physical addresses. I don't even keep track of which states a number of my friends live in anymore, but I always trust that I can track them down electronically if and when the need should arise. So if their electronic presence goes "poof," they might as well stop existing, for all the good it does me.

I admit that this is symptomatic of the sort of mind-body dualism to which I am regularly tempted, even though I am fully convinced that it is theologically and metaphysically WRONG. My friends are not collections of ideas floating out in the ether of the internet; they are flesh-and-blood human beings who exist in discrete physical locations, even if they do move too often for me to keep track of them. For someone like me, the use of snailmail could well amount to a principled spiritual discipline.

Fortunately, both of my recent renegades were easy to track down. A simple Google search turned up Myles' new digs, and Leslie Ruth's new address was easy to guess. So my blogroll is once more complete and fully functional.