With this post I take my leave of GetReligion. Terry Mattingly should be along either later today or early tomorrow to announce further changes. I'm skedaddling to devote time to a book-in-progress about hypocrisy, which should land in finer retail outlets next year. Don't know if I'll be back to these cyber pages, but I wouldn't rule it out. It has been fun. Before I go, let me say a few things about my co-bloggers.

I bumped into Doug LeBlanc when he was the book review editor for Christianity Today and found him to be a remarkably understanding editor. He let me write about things that caught my interest, insisted on changes when I went off the rails, didn't meddle needlessly, and helped to negotiate my work through what can become an editorial buzz saw. So when he sent an e-mail asking if I'd like to work with him on this site he was associated with called GetReligion, I didn't give it much thought. I didn't have to.

At GetReligion, Doug has saved me from numerous embarrassing mistakes and some truly traumatic typos. He has also been a great friend, and I'll miss some of our bull session-like and "Hey can you please fix this?"-oriented phone calls. No doubt he'll now have exponentially more free time.

And what does one say about Terry Mattingly? The guy is so tireless he's almost a force of nature. The passion he brings to teaching and analyzing journalism makes Howie Kurtz look like a lazy part-timer. "On deadline" should be the epitaph they carve on his tombstone. He's also sweet and quirky and funny and he evinces a remarkable ability to crash any computer program known to man.

Terry cared enough to give a down-on-his-luck freelancer a regular gig and a lot of rope. For that I will always be grateful.