The Better World Fund, a group which "works to build a stronger relationship between the United States and the United Nations", has started the On Day One project. The purpose of the site is to provide a platform for gathering and sharing "ideas about what the next president can do on the first day of his or her administration to help address the world's most pressing challenges."
Not being a fan of the UN (I'm more of a League of Nation kind of guy) I would normally not give such project much thought. But a friend is involved in promoting the site and suggested that social conservatives should "submit ideas, swarm and vote, and get their readers to push those ideas." Since it would be amusing if the UN Foundation ended up having to submit a bunch of social conservative policy recommendations to the incoming President, I decided to add this proposal:
Require Family-Impact Statements for Global Policies
President Reagan's EO 12606 required government agencies to file family-impact statements before implementing policies that affect families, and to provide "adequate rationale" for any negative impact those policies might have on families. The next President should issue a similar directive that includes not only policies that affect Americans, but also global polices that affect the international community and which are not directly related to national security interests.
The site is still new so a few hundred votes would push it to the top of the page. (Click here to vote for this entry.) I'd also encourage other social conservatives to submit their own ideas. The site could use some thoughtful suggestions to help balance out the left-leaning entries (Submit Kyoto for Ratification, Withdraw Troops from Iraq, etc.).
This week Tim Challies is embarking on a "blog tour" to promote the release of his new book, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment. For ten consecutive days, a blogger on the tour will pose a question about discernment and Tim will address the question and the comments that readers might have.
I'm honored not only to be able to participate but to have EO be the first stop. The question I posed to Tim is, "What does discernment mean from a biblical perspective?" Here is his response:
Thanks, Joe, for participating in this blog tour. You ask a good question and one that is as good a place as any, I think, to begin this series of questions. As I researched discernment I found that there are a great variety of definitions--many different understandings as to what discernment is and what it entails. And Christians certainly do not have the market cornered as there are many New Age books dealing with the subject. Most people, and even the majority of Christians, seem to understand discernment as being something that involves feeling more than thinking. Discernment, they believe, is a person's ability, perhaps an ability that is innate for those who are Christians, to understand the will of God for their lives. A person who is discerning, they might say, is a person who is able to determine with confidence whether he should be a doctor or a dentist, a pastor or a pediatrician. As I researched the topic, relying on the Bible to define its terms, I found that it pointed in a different direction.
I think the most succinct definition of discernment within the Bible is found in Hebrews 5:14. We read there "But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil." According to these verses, we should understand discernment as being the ability to distinguish good from evil. Note that this is not something that is innate or something that we feel, but an ability that must be trained by constant practice. In the book I look throughout the Bible and provide an expanded definition that goes like this: discernment is the skill of understanding and applying God's Word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong.
So we see that biblical (or spiritual) discernment is a skill or ability that allows us first to understand and then to apply the words of God so we can distinguish between truth and error. When we understand the Word of God, we equip ourselves to live in a way that honors Him. Said otherwise, when we know the words of God, we can do the will of God. And this is the goal of all discernment--to honor God by living for His glory.
Order a copy of Tim Challies' "The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment"
Other stops on the blog tour:
In order to prove to customers that its software wouldn't break down under heavy use, the AskMe Corporation decided to create a website that offered a version of its software to the wider public. AskMe.com was launched in February 2000 and quickly became one of the most popular knowledge exchange sites, drawing ten million users in the first year. The advice on the site was freely offered by self-appointed experts who were ranked by the people who sought out there advice.
In June 2000, Marcus Allen registered as a legal expert. Allen became a prolific responder, answering, in one two week period, 939 out of the 943 he received. By the end of July he was the 3rd ranked expert on criminal law at AskMe.com.
But then Allen made a change to his online profile: he admitted he was only 15 year old high school student. The lawyers on the site attacked and drove his rankings down. But the people to whom Allen gave advice still supported him and within a month he rebounded to become the AskMe.com's #1 ranked legal expert.
On the surface, this incident may be read as a cautionary tale about trusting the Internet's self-professed experts. But what about the people who were satisfied with Allen's answers? There is no evidence that the teenager's answers were inadequate --at least not any more so than the average law school graduate. The problem appears not to be with inaccuracy but with our need for reliable authority.
In a pyramid-shaped, hierarchical authorities (e.g., Encyclopedia Britannica, universities), information is judged based on the reputation of the authority. We trust the accuracy of information in an encyclopedia article because it has been filtered through editors and is backed by a trusted authority (the Encyclopedia Britannica Company). In pancake-shaped, non-hierarchical authorities (e.g., Wikipedia, the Internet), information is judged based on the reputation of the distributed accountability system. We trust (for the most part) the accuracy of information in a Wikipedia article because it has been filtered through hundreds, even thousands of self-appointed editors and is backed by an error-correction system that is open to public accountability.
Pitting pyramid-shaped versus pancake-shaped authorities may produce interesting debates. The science journal Nature spurred a minor tempest after a peer-review survey found that Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries. But both models have their merits and since most information distributed by "pancake" authorities is produced by "pyramid" authorities, the dichotomy can be a false one.
The more interesting question is not what authorities are trustworthy but in how we make such evaluations. I believe the primary basis for almost all authority is reputation. We trust the entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica not because we know the editors to be authoritative, but because millions of other people also trust the accuracy of the entries. We also have a belief (a justified, true belief, I would argue) that at least some of these millions of people would have caught the errors and reported them to Britannica. In other words, we trust that an error-correction system similar to the one at Wikipedia is in effect at Britannica.
Encyclopedias, though, tend to deal with "facts" that are more or less established. What about information that is contestable and or open to interpretation? In such instances, the reputation of the error-correction systems is replaced with a system that bases error-correction on reputation. A loose parallel can be found between the pancake-shaping information revolution and the Protestant Reformation.
Prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church (a classic pyramid-shaped institution) was the sole authority on matters of theology. The reformers came along and created a flatter pancake-shaped structure by making the Bible accessible to the individual Christian and promoting the concept of the "priesthood of the believer." This did not, however, remove all authority or relativize theology. Instead of relying on the authority of the Church appointed priest, the individual believer was forced to decide for themselves who could be deemed an authority. Protestant Christians had to rely on their own powers of discernment (and those of their neighbors) to decide who was worthy of being considered authoritative. Based on the reputation of these "self-appointed" authorities--especially of such figures as Martin Luther and John Calvin--new pyramid-shaped error-correcting institutions were created.
The information reformation appears to be following a similar pattern. Information handed down by hierarchical authorities who we perceive as biased or who do not share our worldview is often viewed with skepticism. We prefer to place our trust in authority figures we have already vetted and whose reputation is validated by like-minded individuals. This leads to both a flattening of hierarchical authority and the creation of new pyramid-shaped authority figures. For example, just as some Christians shifted from the Catholic to the Presbyterian Church, some people shift from CNN to Fox News.
The pressing question is what effect this fragmentation of authority will have on society. Although it has occasionally suffered further schism, the Protestant church generally holds a core of shared beliefs (e.g., the Nicene Creed) and texts (e.g., the Bible) while differing on the "non-essentials." Will such institutions as the government and the media be able to maintain a similar balance? What will America look like if we all have a libertarian attitude about what constitutes a reliable authority?
Note: The anecdote about Marcus Allen and the pancake/pyramid metaphor are taken from Michael Lewis's Next: The Future Just Happened.
[Note: I’m still trying to acclimatize to the pace of working on a Presidential campaign (I love saying that), so for the next few days I’ll be recycling material.]
In his latest report, Technorati founder and CEO David Sifry claims that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times. Technorati now tracks over 7.8 million blogs which, if Montaigne is correct, makes for a great deal of diversity. Yet if opinions are so dissimilar, why does their appear to be a general homogeneity of viewpoints within the world of blogging? Why can the vast majority of blogs be grouped according to binary political categories? A forty year old experiment on racial diversity might just hold the answer.
In the 1960's, the Harvard economics professor Thomas C. Schelling devised a simple model to test his intuitions about segregated neighborhoods. Shelling found that most neighborhoods in America were mostly or entirely comprised of black or white families. Only a handful of neighborhoods where found where neither race made up more than three fourths of the total. Racism seemed to be the obvious culprit for the lack of diversity but Schelling thought something else might be involved.
His model showed how even tolerant people can behave in ways that can lead to segregated neighborhoods. It consisted of a checkerboard with 64 squares representing places where people can live. Two types of actors (representing, for example, whites and blacks) are placed at random among the squares, with no more than one per square. Schelling provided a "rule" that an actor will be content if more than one-third of its immediate neighbors (those in adjacent squares) are of the same type as itself. For example, if all the eight adjacent squares were occupied, then the actor is content if at least three of them are the same type itself as itself. If an actor is content, it stays put. If it is not content it moves. In Schelling's original model, it would move to one of the nearest squares where it would be content.
Not surprisingly, Schelling found that the board quickly evolved into a strongly segregated pattern if the agents' "happiness rules" were specified so that segregation was heavily favored. What was unexpected, though, was that initially integrated boards tipped into full segregation even if the agents' happiness rules expressed only a mild preference for having neighbors of their own type.
Figure 1 on the right shows four stages in a simulation run by The Atlantic's 
Schelling's model implied that even the simplest of societies could produce outcomes that were simultaneously orderly and unintended: outcomes that were in no sense accidental, but also in no sense deliberate. "The interplay of individual choices, where unorganized segregation is concerned, is a complex system with collective results that bear no close relation to the individual intent," he wrote in 1969. In other words, even in this extremely crude little world, knowing individuals' intent does not allow you to foresee the social outcome, and knowing the social outcome does not give you an accurate picture of individuals' intent.
While the applicability to real-world housing situation may be a bit suspect, I believe that the model could provide some valuable insight into how blog clusters develop. Bloggers, for instance, would only need a mild preference for reading blogs that hold similar opinion to their own for clusters to develop spontaneously. If Schelling's model is correct, the broad diversity of viewpoints among individuals would inevitably lead them to link and interact more often with those who hold similar opinions. Over time, the eight million blogs would naturally fall into distinct groupings that would cause them to appear rather homogeneous. "Micromotives," as Schelling calls them, would lead to strikingly peculiar "macrobehavior."
Montaigne was correct when he claimed that opinions are as different as grains of sand. But just as sand collectively combines into dunes and beaches, opinions in the blogosphere collect into distinct clusters, swarms, and alliances. Oddly enough, it may just be the extreme diversity that creates congruity.
Note: A downloadable version of the Schelling Segregation Model can be found on this page.
At the recent GodBlogCon I was asked to give an address on "Identifying Impact Points in Culture." Even on a good day I'm not much of a speaker, but this speech was rushed and incomplete. Because of time constraints I had to cut down my 30 minute lecture into a 10 minute presentation. Still, I figured I should post it on the blog in the oft chance that someone might find it useful.
Below the fold is the related essay I submitted for the "Bloggers' Toolkit" booklet that was given to the conference attendees.
Identifying Impact Points In Culture
The title of this lecture can be a bit misleading. "Identifying impact points in culture" has connotations of a spotter scoping the battlefields of the "Culture War" in order to call in artillery fire. But the term "impact points" refers merely to areas in which Christians can impinge or influence the production, consumption, or redemption of cultural artifacts.
Despite the dominance of warfare metaphors by many Christians, culture is not about conflict but rather about creation. Our primary responsibility as culturally concerned Christians is not to critique culture (although that is an essential task) or to consume culture (an unavoidable part of being human) but to be creators of culture.
A (Very) Brief Theology of Culture
Most of us are familiar with the story in the first chapter of Genesis about how God created man and woman. What we often overlook is the next two things that immediately follow: God blesses mankind…and then puts them to work.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen. 1:28, ESV)
In the Reformed tradition, this command is often referred to as the "cultural mandate." As Nancy Pearcey explains in Total Truth:
In Genesis, God gives what we might call the first job description: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it." The first phrase, "be fruitful and multiply" means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, "subdue the earth," means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music. This passage is sometimes called the Cultural Mandate because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations-nothing less.
Crops, bridges, computers, and music are all examples of cultural artifacts. Artifacts are any man-made things that are created from artifice (human skill). The range of what is classified under this term is almost endless. Artifacts include everything from stone arrowheads to skyscrapers to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Culture, therefore, is simply a collection of various artifacts within a particular grouping of peoples.
In his illuminating book Plowing in Hope, David Bruce Hegeman observes,
Culture is the concretization--the rendering in some permanent form--of mankind's culturative acts, commonly manifested in man-made objects, structures, texts, etc. Such artifacts stand apart from but (ideally) work in harmony with God's natural creation or "nature."
For our purposes we'll only be focusing on artifacts associated with new media--blog posts, social networking sites, YouTube videos, etc. Each of these various new media artifacts are mediums through which messages are carried. The questions we need to examine are: What types of messages should Christian media carry, how should these artifacts be developed, and where should they be delivered?
Three Points of Impact
There are three broad "impact points" where Christians can use new media artifacts:
• Folk Culture -- artifacts created by a group that shares common ties, such as ethnicity, geography or religion (e.g., fairy tales).
• Popular Culture -- artifacts which attempt to appeal to a broad range of groups in a pluralistic society (e.g., romance novels).
• Haute Culture -- artifacts which are expressively rich and intentionally created to be elevated--whether aesthetically or intellectually--above common human works (e.g., Proust's Remembrance of Things Past)
While all artifacts can be classified in one of these three categories, the lines of demarcation are fluid. Many musical styles originate in folk culture before crossing over to the realm of popular culture. Reggae music, for example, is a genre rooted in the musical styles of Africa and the Caribbean. But in the 1960-70, musicians like Bob Marley helped to broaden the genre's appeal to a broader audience. Literature is another type of artifact that can straddle cultural lines. Novels like Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn can appeal to both haute and popular cultures at the same time. Likewise, the Bible spans all three categories simultaneously. The same is true of new media artifacts, though they tend to fall in one of the three distinct categories.
Christian bloggers are adding artifacts to folk culture when they debate about theology, discuss concerns about their denominations, or share experiences about what it is like growing up as a child of Korean-born parents. We engage popular culture when we discuss political opinions, critique movies or music, and eat at McDonalds. Unfortunately, it is difficult to provide examples of haute culture, since it is all but nonexistent in the blogosphere. However, as the medium matures, we should expect to find Christians producing new media artifacts that are worthy of being passed along to succeeding generations.
Currently, the vast majority of new media artifacts by Christians are reactive: commenting on politics, reviewing pop cultural phenomena, sharing links to sermons and news articles. All of these are worthy and enrich the world of new media. All of us are will likely engage in such tasks, while a select few might be called to create reactive content almost exclusively. The vast majority of us, however, should be creating original cultural artifacts. We are called to be creators of culture, not merely commenters.
Although the community of Christian bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers, should be deeply engaged in all three impact areas, not every individual is be called to
Some theological bloggers should never write about politics. Some art podcasters may never feel led to discuss systematic theology. Some movie review vloggers should have a narrow focus and never veer from their particular medium. Such decisions, however, require discernment and a humble recognition of our abilities, skills, talents, and our calling as producers of culture.
While there are obvious forms that should never be used (i.e., pornographic vlogs, snarky gossip blogs, podcasts that cover profane topics), most every aspects of culture is open to someone within the Christian community. There is little in culture that cannot be corrupted, so we cannot wall ourselves off from human sin. Still, as Albert Wolters cautions in Creation Regained,
A certain culture phenomenon may be so terribly and thoroughly distorted in a given historical setting that it is a matter of Christian wisdom to avoid it altogether.
In his book on art and the Bible, the late Francis Schaeffer provided four standards of judgment for the Christian artists, each of which is relevant to those of us who create media artifacts:
(1) Technical excellence -- In all our work we should be striving to implement the highest technical excellence that that we can achieve. This requires not only that we consistently hold ourselves to a standard of excellence but that we continually work on improving the skill sets that are related to our chosen medium (i.e., bloggers should work on improving their writing).
(2) Validity -- Validity requires that we are honest to ourselves and to our worldview. We shouldn't change or modify our content just to be accepted by the broader culture.
(3) Content -- Our work should reflect our worldview and must be seen ultimately in terms of Scripture.
(4) The integration of content and vehicle -- The form of new media we choose will have an affect on how and what messages can be communicated. We must be deliberate in matching the content to the proper vehicle.
Mine!
Jesus Christ is Lord over all of creation. Jesus’ lordship extends through every area and aspect of life including the creation of new media artifacts. As the theologian and former Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper once claimed, "No single piece of our mental world is to be sealed off from the rest and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’" As Christians we must ensure that our work and our interactions in these new media are God-centered, reality-bounded, and love-impelled.
Although I've been back almost a week, I still haven't finished putting together my post on the recent GodBlogCon. Some subjects are trivial and rather easy to write about (i.e., politics). More substantive matters are more difficult and it takes me some time to think about what I want to say. GodBlogCon is one of the most important events of my year so it's taking me awhile to get the words out.
I could have (and probably should have) linked to all of the other blogger that were there, but I've wanted to save those until I can comment on them. I hope to have a post on it completed for Friday. I apologize for not having something sooner.
I will say that it was one of the best GodBlogCons ever. If its not the best, it's definitely in the top three.
The 2007 Weblog Awards launched this week. Although it was eliminated last year, the "Best Religious Blog" category has returned. While I'm honored that my blog was included as a finalist I'll be the first to admit that it isn't deserving of inclusion. In fact, any of the blogs on the EO 100 would be more worthy.
Not being worthy, though, doesn't mean I'm ready to give up the title I gained in my fluke 2005 win. My competitive nature also precludes me from displaying faux humility by saying that I don't want you to vote for me. I do want you to vote for me, since I'm representing the evangelical/neocalvinist/Reformed wing of the blogosphere.
While I'm a Catholic-friendly evangelical, I can't just allow Fr. John Zuhlsdorf from What Does The Prayer Really Say? to whoop me (he's currently ahead 130-77) without showing our Catholic brothers and sisters that we can turn our the Reformed vote. Fr. Z may be predestined to win, but let providence decide that after you cast your ballot.
So vote early, vote often, and vote for the Calvinist (note: I'm referring to the one that hasn't been nominated for a Dove award).
While you're there, why not vote for these other fine nominees:
Best Blog -- The Presurfer (Source of many of my 33 Things)
Best Individual Blog -- The Anchoress (A worthy candidate and will make up for voting against Fr. Z.)
Best Conservative Blog -- Captain's Quarters
Best Political Coverage -- The Campaign Spot
Best Celebrity Blog -- Jenna Fischer (Her site design is atrocious…but still, she's Jenna Fischer, the coolest girl on NBC.)
Best Technology Blog -- Lifehacker (Source of many of my Yak Shaving Razor entries.)
Best Military Blog -- Blackfive
Best Pet Blog -- I Can Has Cheezburger
Best of the Top 250 Blogs -- RedState
Best of the Top 501 - 1000 Blogs -- Betsy's Page
Best of the Top 1001 - 1750 Blogs -- Dispatches from the Culture Wars
Next month, Family Research Council Action will be hosting The Washington Briefing, one of the premier annual events for social conservatives.
This year my friends at Americans United for Life are joining FRC Blog in sponsoring several events for bloggers, including the New Media Row and a panel discussion on Politics and Blogging. Some of the bloggers that will be attending include: Erick Erickson (RedState), Amy Hall and Melinda Penner (Stand to Reason), Nathan Bradfield (Church and State), Soren Dayton (eyeon08.com), David All (TechPresident), Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic) and Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic).
After I ran out of free passes to give away, I convinced FRC that if they reduced the registration fee, more bloggers would come (or at least help promote the event). The cost for the conference is normally $95 but with this promotional code (PNCH4CRD) bloggers (and blog readers) can get the reduced rate of $50. (The registration page can be found here)
All of the GOP Presidential nominees are expected to attend (sadly, none of the Democrats accepted the invitation). There will also be a number of other interesting speakers, including Chuck Colson, Bill Bennett, and Ben Stein. We're working on making this a great event for politically-inclined bloggers so if you're within driving distance of Washington, D.C. I highly encourage you to come out.
If you made a list of Christian leaders that are ripe for satirical treatment, theologian D.A. Carson would be somewhere near the bottom. Although Carson has written or edited more than 45 books and is a distinguished New Testament scholar, he isn't exactly a household name. But in the hothouse world of evangelical academia--particularly at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS)--Carson is revered for his brilliant mind and prodigious output.
It is these qualities that appear to have inspired one blogger to make an amusing--and seemingly controversial--fake blog dedicated to the TEDS professor.
The Secret Diary of D. A. Carson is a hyperbole-driven site written from the perspective of Carson and focused on his "awesomeness" (...originally my parents named me Donald Arthur, but I had the "A." legally changed to "Awesome" in 1978 shortly after I definitively defeated J.I. Packer in a game of badminton. Old goat never even saw it coming....).
The inside jokes usually require a familiarity with TEDS and evangelical academia, though occasionally the names dropped are more familiar. For example, one entry relates FakeCarson's phone call with another famous Christian thinker:
I answered because I figured it was probably just John Piper calling for his weekly pep talk. I love the guy, but he has very little confidence in his preaching ability so he calls me regularly for some encouragement.
His preaching style is a little dry and I always feel like I to fib a little to make him feel better about himself:
"No John, I think it's good that you never use humor when you preach."
"No John, no one was sleeping while you were prattling on about T.U.L.I.P."
"Yes, John, I agree that preaching is most effective when you constantly shame your audience and never crack a smile."
Other times the satire is almost poignant. In a response to a question about how the professors at TEDS choose which books to use for texts, FakeCarson writes,
Well, let me explain a few things to you. Sure, it's better to read proponents of these heretical views if you want to truly understand all of their strengths and weaknesses. But we don't always want you to understand them. Sometimes we just want you to know they're really, really bad.
Perhaps an illustration will help. You probably know what a wood chipper is, but you don't really know exactly how it works. Sure, you could walk up to one, stick your hand or arm in it and really try to understand all the ins and outs of it. Or you could just watch this scene from Fargo and realize that you shouldn't have anything to do with a wood chipper. Understanding all the intricacies of a wood chipper doesn't help keep your hand from getting torn off when you stick it in.
So in answer to your question, CQC, Open Theism and the New Perspective are just like wood chippers.
The funniest entries are the ones that play off the insecurities students have when confronting legendary teachers. Responding to a real comment on RateMyProfessor.com, FakeCarson writes,
As a matter of fact, sometimes I even ask you guys questions that I didn't actually lecture on. The funny thing? Whenever you ask if we covered it in class, I'm adamant that we did and I'll even tell you the exact date we "covered it." Then I watch you act like you suddenly remember us going over it now. Priceless!
The humor can be biting, though rarely disrespectful. Still, not everyone at TEDS is charmed. The latest post notes that the TEDS administration "has been working pretty hard to get us to shut this site down."
It is this controversy that raises interesting questions for the Christian blogosphere.
Many of us enjoy celebrity-based internet memes like Chuck Norris Facts (Sample: "There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.") or the Fred Thompson Facts (Sample: "Not only does Fred Thompson cut taxes, he cuts tax collectors."). Such public figures expect this sort of notoriety and tend to take in good humor. But are "celebrities of the Church", particularly respected leaders, off-limits? Should we refrain from making them the targets for such frivolity? Does it diminish their role or offend their reputation?
Initially, I thought the TEDS administration was being overly stuffy and lacked a sense of humor. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they responded properly and I am the one who has become desensitized and addicted to satire.
I'm curious to know what other Christian bloggers think about this situation. Did TEDS overreact? Should bloggers refrain from taking humorous jibes at church leaders? Where do we draw the lines?
We're less than two months away from the next GodBlogCon, one of the most engaging events in Christian blogging. GodBlogCon is the only Christian conference in the nation which brings together Christian bloggers for the purpose of creating community. 
Founded in 2005, the first two GodBlogCon's were held at Biola University. But this year it is joining with the BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the premier New Media trade-show in the nation.
I highly encourage every Christian blogger who is able to make the trip to Las Vegas to attend this important event. The past two conferences provided extraordinary opportunities to meet, interact, and fellowship with some of the most interesting people in the blogosphere. This year looks to be even better. Not only will attendees have the chance to engage with some great Godbloggers--include a keynote speaker Al Mohler--but at the Expo you'll get to hear from Glen Reynolds (Instapundit), Ed Morrissey (Captain's Quarters), Mary Katherine Ham (Townhall.com), Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post), and many others.
Register now for this great conference. I guarantee you won't regret it.
The Washington Post recently launched a new Discussion Groups section where readers can join WP staffer and others in talking about politics, culture and other topics. Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for National Review, is the moderator for Right Matters, a section devoted to "Talking About the Future of Conservatism."
Today's discussion is on a ruling by Judge Robert Hanson's ruling that declared Iowa's marriage laws unconstitutional, and ordered the county recorder in Des Moines to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Judge Hanson is utterly dismissive of the concerns of opponents of same-sex marriage, which he treats as irrational and illegitimate.
The decision is a gross act of judicial activism. Advocates of same-sex marriage make a serious case: but that case should be made to voters and legislators, not to judges. When the people of Iowa adopted their constitution, they surely did not mean to embrace principles that would lead to same-sex marriage. If they want to do so now, they can; but courts should not pretend that they already have.
If judges can rewrite our most fundamental laws, are we still a self-governing country?
This is a great forum for conservatives to explain our rational and legitimate reasons for opposing same-sex marriage, so drop by and present our case.
"What are the best Christian blogs?"
Over the past four years, I've been asked a variation of that question dozens of times. When people hear that I myself am a "Godblogger"--a formerly derogatory term for a blogger who writes about religion or faith--they often inquire which ones I'd recommend.
Trying to answer such a query is like trying to recommend a church -- there are too many factors involved to give a generic, one-size-fits-all response. Still, it is a worthy question and one which I've given a lot of thought. The following list--The EO 100--is my attempt at providing thorough response.
In a way, though, this is an answer to a different question. This is not a list of the "best Christian blogs" (whatever that might mean) but rather the top 100 blogs that I have found to be the most convicting, enlightening, frustrating, illuminating, maddening, stimulating, right-on and/or wrongheaded by Christians expressing a Christian worldview.
The selection process is, by necessity, intensely personal and unapologetically subjective. There are a number of Christian blogs that are written by brilliant thinkers and stylists yet, for one reason or another, have not captured my imagination in the way that the following blogs have done. The list is also reflective of my rather narrow field of interests and associations. By and large, the bloggers that are included are from the conservative wing of evangelicalism and Catholicism. There is also a peculiar range of focus. Philosophical blogs are overrepresented, for example, while "This is where I’m at right now"-style introspectionists are all but excluded.
While the entire list won't be to everyone's taste, there is something to be gained from searching out the unfamiliar names. And although these bloggers cannot be said to be representative of the Christian blogosphere as a whole, each is worthy of being included on any list of essential blog reading.
Because the task would be too daunting to take on all at once, I hope to defend each selection separately sometime in the future. For now, I've listed the top 20 that have had the most influence on me over the past year and listed the others in alphabetical order.
1. Between Two Worlds
2. JollyBlogger
3. The Scriptorium
4. Challies.com
5. WORLD mag blog
6. SmartChristian
7. Prosthesis
8. Parableman
9. (Tie) Boars Head Tavern | Pyromaniacs
10. Acton Institute PowerBlog
11. Hugh Hewitt
12. Al Mohler's Blog
13. Blogotional
14. Mark D. Roberts
15. Pseudo-Polymath
16. Mere Orthodoxy
17. New Covenant
18. In the Agora
19. ChristianThinker.net
20. Mirror of Justice
21. The A-Team Blog
22. Ales Rarus
23. Allthings2all
24. The Anchoress
25. AnotherThink
26. Adrian Warnock
27. Back of the Envelope
28. Better Living
29. blogs4God
30. Boundless
31. Broken Masterpieces
32. The Buck Stops Here
33. Catholic and Enjoying It!
34. Cerulean Sanctum
35. The Christian Mind
36. Christianity Today Liveblog
37. Common Grounds Online
38. connexions
39. Contrarian Views
40. Cranach
41. Crunchy Con
42. Dangerous Idea
43. The Dawn Patrol
44. The Dawn Treader
45. djchuang.com
46. Eternal Perspectives
47. The Evangelical Ecologist
48. Evangelical Perspective
49. Ex Nihilo
50. Fides Quaerens Intellectum
51. Fide-O
52. Fire & Knowledge
53. First Things: On the Square
54. FlashPoint
55. Gideon Strauss
56. Happy Mills
57. He Lives
58. Holy Coast
59. Honest to Blog
60. Imago Dei
61. Internetmonk
62. Intellectuelle
63. It Takes A Church…
64. Jeff the Baptist
65. Jesus Creed
66. JimmyAkin.org
67. JivinJehoshaphat
68. La Shawn Barber's Corner
69. Leithart.com
70. Mark Byron
71. The Marshian Chronicles
72. Mere Comments
73. New Covenant
74. Notes from a Byzantine Calvinist
75. One Eternal Day
76. The Point
77. Reasoned Audacity
78. Reformed Chicks Blabbing
79. Reformissionary
80. Resurgence
81. Reverend Mike's House of Homiletic Hash
82. Rhett Smith
83. The Right House
84. Sarcasmagorical
85. Scrappleface
86. SharperIron
87. Stand to Reason Blog
88. Stones Cry Out
89. Tall Skinny Kiwi
90. Thinking Christian
91. The Thinklings
92. Through a Glass Darkly
93. Triablogue
94. TruePravda
95. two or three . net
96. the view from her
97. Vox Popoli
98. The Wardrobe Door
99. Wittingshire
Honorable Mention (e.g., Blogs That I Intended To Include But Forgot)
The View From The
Cheap Seats
Wonders for Oyarsa
Further explanatory notes:
[Note: I don't intend to cross-post very often from Blogs for Fred. But since we are giving away free stuff I thought I'd make an exception.]
If you have a blog, now is the time to join our growing coalition of savvy bloggers who believe Fred Dalton Thompson is the right choice for president of the United States. Blogs for Fred has teamed up with The Fred Store to encourage FDT supporters in the blogosphere, and to launch their store, they've given bloggers a pretty sweet deal.
For a limited time, if you add your blog to the Blogs for Fred blogroll, our friends at The Fred Store will send you a FREE (shipping included!) coffee mug and bumper sticker that says "I Blog for Fred."
Add your blog today, and send this offer around the "Fredosphere." (If you've already added your blog, you've been grandfathered in, so look for your code soon!)
Regularly scheduled blogging will resume tomorrow. In the meantime, please check out my new project, Blogs for Fred, a group blog and online rallying point for supporters of Fred Thompson.
[Note: I apologize in advance for this post's lack of structure; I failed to tie up all the loose ends before reaching a self-imposed 700 word limit. Hopefully, the remaining threads can be weaved into a coherent theme.]
"The plural of anecdote is not data", claimed toxicologist Frank Kotsonis, in attempting to correct sloppy thinking. While Kotsonis has provided a useful aphorism, it can obscure the equally interesting fact that the singular of data is anecdote. Consider, for example, the following two stories.
The first is the shortest work of fiction ever written by Ernest Hemingway:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
This powerful story is a marvel of economy. In a mere six words and three punctuation marks, Hemingway is able to convey a sense of tragic loss without ever introducing a single character.
Compare to a story with a similar theme from an anonymous author:
Infant mortality rate: 6.9 deaths per 1,000 live births.
Although it lacks the emotional impact, this too is a model of brevity. Seven words, two numbers, a comma, colon, and two periods are used to express--albeit rather dryly--an important fact about the human condition. Indeed, if Hemingway's story was not fictional, it could be considered a singular instance of the second story; a particular example of a more general phenomenon.
At this point, you may object to the use of the term "story" in reference to a statistic. You may be tempted to repeat back to me Kotsonis' mantra: "The plural of anecdote is not data." But if the singular of data is anecdote and anecdotes are a form of story, then why can't data be a collection of tales, sifted down and pressed together, into a narrative?
In his essay "Social Science as Moral Theology" the late media critic Neil Postman notes "there is a measure of cultural self-delusion in the prevalent belief that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other moral theologians and doing something different from storytelling."
Postman rejects the very idea that what "social scientist" do should even be considered empirical science. He uses the distinctions made by philosopher Michael Oakeshott between processes (events that are bound by the laws of nature) and practices (events that result from human practices and decisions):
…I believe with Oakeshott that there is an irrevocable difference between a blink and a wink. A blink can be classified as a process, meaning it has physiological causes which can be understood and explained within the context of established postulates and theories; but a wink must be classified as a practice, filled with personal and to some extent unknowable meaning and in any case, quite impossible to explain or predict in terms of causal relations.
Processes ("blinks") and practices ("winks") are easily confused when they use the language of numbers and quantification. As Postman explains, the scientist uses mathematics to assist in uncovering and describing the structure of nature while the social scientist uses quantification merely to give precision to his ideas.
Blogging is often about the "winks", the practices and meanings of human behavior, which makes it a form of storytelling. At its best, blogging can even fill the role that Postman ascribes to social science: contributing to human understanding and decency. Bloggers who want to become deliberate storytellers, therefore, should learn how to incorporate the tools of social science in ways that help them create metaphors, illuminate archetypes, and "tell tales."
What is needed is what Steven Johnson, an author who combines cultural criticism and science journalism, calls the "long zoom", a perspective that shifts back and forth from the macro- to the microcosm. Edward Tufte also advocates such a method which he calls PGP, Particular-General-Particular. As Bill Harris explains,
When communicating complex information, start with a particular example to capture the imagination. Follow up with more general information (this is where you can explore alternatives and do more detailed simulations or analysis). Finish with another particular case to drive the point home and help people remember.
The best bloggers are often the ones who are able to emphasize both the micro/particular (their own personal experience) and the macro/general (statistical trends, polls) in ways that help us better understand ourselves and our society. They are able, pace Postman, "to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity."
Each Sunday night for the past nine weeks I've created a post filled with 33 quotes, links, and other intriguing bits I discovered in the blogosphere. Finding 33 items every week may sound daunting but I've found that it has become one of the easiest posts to write. The reason is that I'm able to combine my RSS reader and my email account into a powerful blogging tool. The following explains how you too can combine these items in a way that will increase your effectiveness as a blogger while decreasing the amount of time you waste searching for something new to say.
[Note: I'm a Google-phile so the example that I'll be using combines Google Reader (GR) and GMail. Although I can't imagine why anyone would choose to use any other kind of feedreader or email account, this process can be modified to fit almost any system.]
1. Set up your RSS Reader -- If you don't already have one, create an account for Google Reader.
2. Add Feeds -- GR makes it easy to add a subscription. Simply fill in the URL of the blog or site you want to add.
Some blogs have more than one option for viewing the blog feed. My site, for example, has four different types including a way to view the full post and/or comments. (Unfortunately, typing in the blog URL for my site only provides a partial view and requires you to click through to my blog to read the full post. To read the entire post from your reader, use this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/evangelicaloutpost/okAx.)
3. Add Feeds to Folders -- Folders are particularly useful for those times when you don't have time to read every feed or when you need information about a specific topic. Rather than classifying blogs by overly broad descriptive terms (i.e., Christian Blogs; Philosophy Blogs), group them in folders with titles that reflect how you use them (i.e., Political news -- Presidential Election; Resources for Yak Shaving Razor posts).
You can always change these folders later so don’t worry about putting blogs in the wrong place.
4. Star Posts for Further Review -- The next step is to weed through the posts, separating the wheat from the chaff. Quickly skim each blog post to determine if it is worthy of further attention. If so, add a star in the upper left hand corner.
Using this method you should be able to skim hundreds of post in less than an hour.
5. Establish Your Filing System -- Before we move on to the next step, let's set up a filing system in Gmail. Each week I write two "link" posts (Thirty Three Things and Yak Shaving Razor) so I've set up labels for each of those areas.
I also have a label for articles that I plan to read later and for material that can be used for future blog posts.
6. Set Up Email Filing -- Once we have the labels for our filing system in place, we need to email the articles to our Gmail account. Rather than have to file them manually, we'll take advantage of Gmail's "filters" to handle that task automatically. You can create a unique email address by adding the plus sign between the end of your email and the @ sign. For example, I could modify my email address (joe.p.carter@gmail.com) to create a unique email address for my label (joe.p.carter+33@gmail.com). To make it easier to use the auto-fill function, I create a username for the address like this that I email to myself. Now whenever I start typing "33" into the "To" the address appears automatically. Once you have the address set up, click on the "create a filter" link and add it to the "To" section.
Click on "next step" and check the boxes like this:
From now on when you send an email to that address it will automatically be filed under the proper label.
7. File Your Starred Post -- Once our filing system is in place, we can email these posts to our files. Click on the "Email" link under the post and fill in the address for the label you want to file it under.
Make notes for later use and hit send.
8. Plunder Your Files for Links and Post Ideas -- Work your system regularly and you should find that you are never at a loss for intriguing blog material.
For the first three years I was a blogger, I remained a blogroll purist. I steadfastly refused to use an RSS reader to keep track of the blogs I read on a daily basis. Every night I would spend hours trawling through the fifty blogs on my blogroll. That was the proper manner for a blogger. Real bloggers, I would snobbishly contend, read blogs not feeds.
Then one day, on a whim, I decided to test Google Reader and my blogging was forever changed. The change was like trading in a horse and buggy for a Hummer.
The RSS reader entirely changed the paradigm of blogging by reducing the attention cost I paid for each blog. Currently, I have 130 feeds yet every blog--indeed every post--gets my attention every single day. In economic terms, the cost per post in processing time has dropped considerably, allowing me to spend more of my attention on a greater number of blogs. I'm also able to keep track of interesting posts and links by combining my RSS reader and email account into a "blog filing system." (More on this in part II.)
Using an RSS reader also changed the way I viewed blogging. When I started in 2003, I coveted a spot on other people's blogrolls. Now I realize the prime real estate is in a person's RSS reader. This shift is subtle but profound. The blogroll is hierarchical and labor intensive. Unless the blogroll is very short, most bloggers will not click through to every site every day. Therefore, the blogs listed on the top of the blogroll tend to be read more often than those in the middle and near the bottom of the list. Being on a blogroll doesn’t necessarily increase the likelihood of your blog being read.
Though it happens extremely quickly, each time the blogger examines his blogroll they are faced with a range of decisions. Is this a blog I have to read everyday to keep up with? Is the blogger likely to have written a post that I can use today? What if they have a good post that I want to read later? Not even my favorite bloggers could make it past such an intensive decision process every single day.
Another useful--though largely unrecognized--benefit of using a RSS reader is that it reduces distractions and extraneous context. By trying to express their individuality through their blog's design, bloggers tend to get in the way of their own content.
To see what I mean, look at the dress code of the modern teenager. One of the biggest challenges I faced on recruiting duty was explaining to teenagers what I call the paradox of uniformity. They believed that expressing themselves by how they wore their clothes, hair, makeup, or jewelry helped them to stand out from the crowd. Instead, it merely provided signals about their chosen subgroups.
Whether the signals provided clues about class (rich kids wear expensive clothes), sub-culture (skaters sporting funky haircuts), or interests (a t-shirt of their favorite band), they provided a useful means for the teens to pigeonhole themselves into their chosen stereotypes. (The extremes of nonconformity often lead to the most extreme conformity. Have you ever seen a "Goth" that didn't look like every other Goth since the 1980s?)
Paradoxically, forced standards of conformity (such as wearing a military uniform) cause people to send and receive signals about personality in ways other than dress. The individual personality traits of people in the military tend to stand out more for their colleagues because they are not camouflaged by the normal civilian clothing signals.
The same is true for the "dressing" that accompanies blog post. Take, for example, my friend Mark Olson (hopefully he won't mind me picking on him). While his blog's layout is clean and uncluttered, the purple and green color scheme is hideous. There is also a photo of Mark in spandex and a bike helmet and the subtitle, "Christianity, Cycling, and Current Events from Right of Center."
If I were to rely solely on contextual clues, I'd get the impression that the blog was mostly about cycling. Yet I've been reading Mark's writings for years and can't recall a single post that mentioned a bike. Instead, I read his work because he is a first-class intellect who grapples with serious theological and philosophical topics. By filtering his posts through my RSS reader I get distraction-free content. I can focus on the contents of Mark's big brain rather than on the color of his bike helmet.
This is not to say that blog design and individual style are unimportant. Aesthetics certainly has an essential place in blogging. I do believe, though, that when it comes to blogs, bad design is far more harmful than good design is helpful. Ultimately, though, content is king; which is why the RSS reader is supplanting the blogroll as a blog's throne room
For the past couple of days the web team at Family Research Council has been having some fun at the expense of Max Blumenthal (see here and here). After he made the rookie mistake of hotlinking to an image on FRC's website, we decided to use it to pull a silly, juvenile prank. We figured that he would be a bit miffed, a touch embarrassed, but that since he himself likes to annoy people (he even made it on a CNN segment on heckling) that he would be able to take a joke without becoming emotionally unhinged.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Max is purportedly a "journalist" with The Nation (yeah, that's still in print -- seriously, I checked) but his only apparent qualification is that he is the son of Sidney Blumenthal. Now I don’t begrudge someone their nepotistic due, particularly when the best it can get them is a job at a magazine that hasn't been relevant since 1937. But Max seems to be under the delusion that he is a genuine reporter. For the past few years he's tried to build his modest career by smearing my boss as a racist (a ludicrous claim, as hundreds of black pastors will attest.) Today, Max decided to get some payback for my prank by smearing me. And not just as a racist, but as the title of his post suggest, as a "racist's racist."
FRC webmaster Joe Carter has a lot more in common with his Klan-happy boss than I thought. Combing through the archives of Carter’s blog, evangelicaloutpost, I discovered several bizarre racialist postings about the identity and mental aptitude of blacks that I would have instead expected to find on white nationalist websites like American Renaissance.
In one post by Carter, he suggests that blacks should not attempt to become lawyers because law is not one of their “natural talents.” They are genetically better suited for professions that require less mental rigor, he seems to say. For some odd reason I was unable to retrieve this post directly from Carter’s blog (probably because I use Firefox) but Panda’s Thumb has reprinted this portion, which I find pretty representative of a racialist perspective:
Before we examine his claims, let's delve into Max's modus operandi as a journalist. The first step is to assume, based on the fact that I work at FRC, that I must be a racist. Using this clue and his reporting skills as a master journalist, he goes to Google and types in "Joe Carter racist."
Unfortunately, there are no images of me modeling the latest in Klanwear so Max has to settle for the sixteenth item down, the aforementioned post on Panda's Thumb. Even though PT provides the name of the post they mention (An Affirmative Mismatch: Do Racial Preferences Limit Black Lawyers?), Max is unable to find it himself, apparently because he uses Firefox. (Anyone else have that problem? Yeah, me neither.)
Even though he has not read the post himself, he finds it "pretty representative of a racialist perspective". He adds,
As Nick Matzke at Panda’s Thumb writes, Carter “more or less says that the statistically lower average qualifications of prospective black law students is equatable with the fact that Carter is not NFL linebacker material because he is 5’10”, 170 lbs. In short, it’s genetic.”
Nick Matzke, the author of the post at PT, says, "Let me be clear: I’m quite sure that Carter had no ill-will or ill-intent here, and hates racism like any good Christian." Matzke goes on to add that he thinks I've made a "little unconscious mistake" but believes I "will happily correct or retract." The author of the post, unlike Max, does not call me a racist. In fact, while I have had my differences with the gentlemen at PT, I don’t think you'll find a single one that would agree with Max's assessment.
Even so, as several of the commenters on the PT post point out, Matze appears to be misreading my intention. Indeed, in a follow up post (An Affirmative Mismatch: Do Racial Preferences Limit Black Lawyers? (Part II)) I clarify that "My claim is not that success in law school is based on genetic differences but rather that it is dependent on individual abilities." [Emphases in original]
In that post I also claim that while "racial labels [such] as 'black' or 'white' might be able tell us something informative about a person, the 'information' that can be conveyed by racial characteristics is normally trivial and tells us nothing significant about their abilities or personality." Is this opinion "pretty representative of a racialist perspective"?
Next he moves on to a post that I wrote that is actually about race.
As with Carter’s post on black lawyers, I could not retrieve his post, “Is Colin Powell ‘Black’? A Christian View of Race and Identity (Part I),” directly from his archives, probably again because I use Firefox (original here). Instead, I pulled up a cached version in which he suggests that Colin Powell isn’t really black, a weird and obviously bigoted claim that I doubt Powell would agree with or like very much. It gets weirder from there.
Again, before we examine his argument I must point out that his technical incompetence is astounding. The post he "could not retrieve" is a cached version of the exact same post he links as the "original here." Can he not tell that they are the same post? Did he not actually read the two posts?
If not it might explain why he wasn't able to comprehend what he read. He claims that I have suggested that "Colin Powell isn’t really black." [Update: I thought that Blumenthal was calling me a racist for including this quote on my blog. I didn't realize that he thinks that I said this. This quote comes from Richard Dawkins, not me.]
Here is exactly what is said about Gen. Powell:
A man such as Colin Powell, of mixed race and intermediate physical characteristics, is not described as white by some observers and black by others. A small minority will describe him as mixed. All others will without fail describe Powell as black - and the same goes for anybody who shows the slightest trace of African ancestry, even if their percentage of European ancestors is overwhelming. Nobody describes Colin Powell as white.
I defy anyone with the reading comprehension level of a fourth grader to find anywhere in that post where I suggest that "Colin Powell isn't really black." It appears that Max is simply too lazy to actually read the post before making such an assertion.
(Max concludes by saying, "I’m sure the Council of Conservative Citizens would appreciate a reading of Carter’s series at one of their fundraisers." What makes that ridiculous claim particularly amusing is that the white supremacists (or "kinists" as they prefer) at Little Geneva took me to task for claiming that "information that can be conveyed by racial characteristics is normally trivial and tells us nothing significant about their abilities or personality.")
The claim that I am a racist--much less a "racist's racist"--is so laughable that I really didn’t need to expend the energy to rebut such an absurd charge. Even those who otherwise despise me and/or my views would concede that fact. But I wanted to expose the methods, the means, and the morals of Max Blumenthal. He is a fabulist, a sloppy seamstress who weaves lies from the barest threads of detail. He is an angry little son of a nepotist. A petulant boy who, unable to stand the taste of public embarrassment, spits out bile and slander.
All this is almost excusable. I can forgive someone for being a liar and a slanderer. I can even let it slide when someone impugns my integrity. But there is one thing that I just can't abide: I can't respect a man who, finding himself the butt of a harmless joke, can't endure it with grace and good humor. That is revealing of a person's character, Max. And you appear to have none.
Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly. -- Proverbs 26:11
Yesterday we had a bit of fun at the expense of professional gadfly Max Blumenthal. We enjoyed providing a lesson in web etiquette by showing what can happen when you hotlink images without permission. Although it took almost four hours, Max caught on and pulled the image from the Huffington Post. Thinking our prank had run its course, we returned the original image.
Then he did it again.
Not only did he hotlink the same image to the Huffington Post, he included it on The Smirking Chimp, Talk2Action, and on his own website, MaxBlumenthal.com. We've decided to provide a remedial lesson by exposing some of Max's favorite blogs and websites. Listed below are srceenshots of the various sites (click on the link to view the image):
Thanks, Max. You've provided us with hours of amusement here at FRC.
Hotlinking images, defined as using the graphic image of an external site in your own code, is an violation of internet etiquette. As Kevin Aylward from Wizbang! says, "It's all fine and good to give a hotlinker a break, but the best way to turn newbie hotlinkers into respectable Interweb citizens is a dose of public embarrassment."
Unfortunately, The Huffington Post hasn't learned its lesson so when they hotlinked to an image from Family Research Council:
My web editor Jared Bridges and I decided to replace it with another image:
(Note: No kittens were actually harmed in the making of this prank. The kitty is only sleeping. Here is a closeup of that image.)
Here's the direct link to that page. Eventually they should be smart enough to take it down...or not.
(UPDATE: After 3 1/2 hours, Max finally caught on and removed the image.)
As part of my work for the Family Research Council I host a weekly Bloggers' Briefing. Each week we have a conference call that gives bloggers the opportunity to communicate directly with politicians, policy makers, religious leaders, and others who set the agenda within our nation's Capital. Tomorrow at 12:00 PM EST (9:00 AM PST / 10:00 AM MST / 11:00 AM CST) we'll be talking with Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) about the embryonic stem cell bill currently being debated in the Senate.
If you're a conservative and would like to join us please send me an email at jpc[@]frc.org. Because the issue is so important we'll also be opening up the call to non-bloggers so please pass this invitation along to anyone you think might be interested.
On Monday, January 22nd at 9:00 am, Family Research Council will host Blogs for Life, the second annual conference of pro-life bloggers. The event will be streamed live via webcast from FRC.org. (Visit the FRC homepage on the day of the conference for more details.)
Blogs for Life is scheduled to take place the day of the 34th annual March for Life, during which thousands of pro-life advocates gather in the Nation's capitol to celebrate life and demand the reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
The conference will feature Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA). Other featured speakers include Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schindler Schiavo and Ramesh Ponnuru, noted author of The Party of Death and senior editor at National Review.
A panel on new media will also be held with David All (David All Group), LaShawn Barber (LaShawn Barber's Corner), Mary Katherine Ham (TownHall.com), Rob Bluey (Heritage Foundation), Tim Ruchti (ProLifeBlogs.com), and Peter Shinn (ProLifeUnity.com).
Blogs for Life is an excellent opportunity for individuals and organizations to network with pro-life bloggers and develop an understanding of how weblog technology can be used to strategically promote life and transform ideas into action as we move toward a post-Roe America.
Who: Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)
Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA)
Bobby Schindler
Ramesh Ponnuru
What: The second annual conference dedicated to advancing the pro-life message via weblog technology.
When: Monday, January 22, 2007
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: Family Research Council
801 G. Street, NW Washington, DC 20001
RSVP: online at www.blogs4life.com
When I was a novice blogger, I spoke like a newbie, I understood like a newbie, I thought like a newbie: but when I became a Serious Blogger I put away my newbie ways. That’s why I no longer post blog memes.
But I was tagged by David Wayne, one of my favorite guys in the world (or at least in the Western Hemisphere), so I’ll make an exception. Here are my answers to his "Five(ish) Things I Don't Know About You":
1) What's the most fun work you've ever done, and why? (two sentences max)
Work is never fun. That’s why they call it work. If I had fun then I’d feel compelled to refund a portion of my paycheck. I don’t expect other people to pay for my amusement. (What’s that? Well, yes, I am a Calvinist…why do you ask…)
2) A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? (one sentence max)
Grew (i.e., taller, hair on the top of my head, wiser)
B. Name one thing you've always wanted to do but keep putting it off? (one sentence max)
Stop procrastinating.
3) A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? (two sentences max)
To learn: Natural law theory (A philosophy that I believe provides the most Biblically solid foundation for ethics and politics in our pluralistic society.)
To be better at: Writing and thinking (Which for me are generally the same process.)
B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)
St. Paul, discipleship and rhetoric.
4) A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?
Curmudgeonly. Lion-hearted. Felliniesque
B. Now list two more words you wish described you...
More. Handsomer.
5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes-- three sentences max)
Ideas. Books. God.
6) (sue me) Write--and answer--one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)
National-security expert Gregory Treverton makes a distinction between “puzzles”, questions that could be answered if we had the access to more information, and “mysteries”, questions that rely more on predictions than on additional information.
My question is: Do you consider your life to be a puzzle or a mystery?
My answer: Mystery.
And now I tag the following people: Time magazine’s Person of the Year
Yesterday I linked to a post by Eric Kintz, VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard, on "Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore." Kintz outlines 10 reasons why:
#1 - Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting.
#2 - Traffic is irrelevant to your blog's success anyway.
#3 - Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0.
#4 - Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty.
#5 - Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere.
#6 - Frequent posting drives poor content quality.
#7 - Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere.
#8 - Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies.
#9 - Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill.
#10 - I love my family too much.
Looking solely at the blogs that head up the blogosphere (those with the highest traffic) would seem to disprove Kintz's contention. But what about those of us in the "long tail"? I agree completly with point #2 and am sympathetic to some other (particularly #1, 3, and 6). How much does the frequency of a blogger matter to your loyalty as a reader? Has RSS
