Category Archives: Tech and religion

Blogging and religion

Way back on July 9, 2006, the Washington Post ran an article on ministers who write blogs, “Cyber-Savvy Pastors Blog When the Spirit Moves Them” by Megan Greenwell [link; and thanks World of Your Making for the link]. Some of the ministers Greenwell interviewed use blogs for evangelism and at least one uses a blog for personal reflection — but for me, the most interesting reflection on ministerial blogging was this…

The Rev. Jan Edmiston, pastor of Fairlington Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, said … the blogging phenomenon is part of a larger shift in the way religion is practiced — although she is unsure what form that change might take. She now devotes every other Monday to “monastery day,” when she sits in a coffee shop reflecting on the state of the church and expressing her thoughts on her blog, “A Church for Starving Artists.”

“I’m doing the things you would do in a monastery except with a cup of coffee and my laptop,” she said. “It’s completely spiritually energizing in ways a lot of people wouldn’t think possible. I think the church is going through a transformation similar to the Reformation, and blogging helps me work through where I fit into that.”

Now that’s an interesting new spiritual practice:– blogging in a coffee shop. Just as Edmiston calls her practice “monastic,” I think this is less a story of technology changing the way we do things, than it is a story of people finding and creating new ways to pursue spiritual growth and exploration. And as Edmiston says, it’s all very spiritually energizing — which doesn’t mean I have the faintest idea of what form this new change in religion will take.

Lotsa blogs

I’m sitting here in the Benton Room of the Renaissance Hotel, for the Unitarian Universalist Blogger’s Reception. We have several well known UU blogs sitting around the table: Philocrites, Jess and John, Ministrare, and several others. There are two laptops and a PDA out, live blogging is happening even as we speak.

As one person just said, “How self-referential can you get?”

A bit of conversation about what topics people write about on their blogs. Many of the bloggers here wrote about Hurricane Katrina, but no one wrote about the tsunami that happened just before that (although many of the bloggers here hadn’t started their blogs at the time of the tsunami).

More conversation about who we write for: friends, family, the people who comment on the blog, people who are new to unitarian universalism, for ourselves, lots of different reasons. (But you know, dear reader, that I write just for you.)

Tardis needed

Electronic communications room

A bunch of us are sitting around staring intently at computer screens, tapping at keyboards, when Julie, one of the webmistresses, breaks the silence with laughter.

“I just got an email from someone saying that the link to streamed video for one of the events isn’t working,” says Julie.

We all start giggling. Of course the streamed video isn’t working — General Assembly hasn’t begun yet — you can’t stream live video of events that haven’t happened yet. Unless maybe you have a Tardis.

Having said that, live coverage will be available here.

Getting ready for General Assembly

Early Monday morning, I’ll be headed off to St. Louis, for the annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association. As usual, I’ve put off some of the necessary preparations, so now I’m madly trying to get ready. Even though it’s a gorgeous sunny day here in New Bedford, I’ve spent the whole day inside, glued to the computer, finishing up preparations for my workshop “Creating Great Content for Unitarian Universalist Web Sites.”

One thing is easier about preparing for this workshop: in the past, I’ve had to carry handouts for the workshop, never knowing quite how many people will actually show up; but this year, there will be no handouts because the entire text of the presentation will go up on my Web site immediately after the workshop. No handouts to carry while I travel — hooray! (I’ll also take notes on questions that are asked during the question period, and post my responses, and any additional follow-up, on my Web site too.)

I’ll finish preparing for the workshop soon. The next problem will be figuring out what to pack to bring for a week in St. Louis. Laptop and charger. Cell phone and charger. Day planner. Ukulele. A book or two for the trip out. Guess I better bring some clothes. I’m never good at packing for a trip, and as usual I’m sure I’ll forget something.

Music for everyone

Every hymnal has its limitations. Recently, I’ve been feeling particularly limited by the current hymnals of my denomination. So over the past few months, I’ve been working on ways to generate simple lead sheets for use by congregations, with melody line, lyrics, and perhaps chord symbols.

I’ve looked over a number of music typesetting packages. I felt most were too difficult to use; some of them feel like you’re trying to code in Java or FORTRAN. About four months ago I found abc musical notation. abc was developed by Chris Walshaw, a folk musician who wanted to be able to notate tunes in ASCII format. Walshaw had a couple of other goals in mind:

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn’t of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

I found abc notation easy to learn, and I began to write up a few hymns in abc format. Using a free software program, Five Line Skink, I printed the abc files. Here’s a sample hymn produced by Five Line Skink, and saved as a PDF file courtesy of my printer driver: link. Skink will also play a simple MIDI version of the tune, which can be useful. Because Skink is a Java application, it will run under Mac OSX, Windows NT, Linux, and Solaris (as long as you’re running Java 1.4.2 or better).

I’m telling you all this because maybe you have some liberal religious hymns you could share. Now that you know about abc musical notation, you can easily write up your hymns and share them in a format that others can modify. I’ve posted a few early experiments with abc notation here; maybe other religious liberals will do the same.

Five Line Skink is free, and it produces better printed output than the other abc software I’ve tried, but it does have quirks. Assuming that someday you might start using Five Line Skink, here’s how I printed out hymns that I felt were acceptable for congregational use. Five Line Skink prints lyrics in a tiny type face when I used the “w:” command, so I change it to the “W:” command which produces a larger typeface but which requires hand-spacing the lyrics. Five Line Skink prints as close to the edge of the paper as it can; to leave decent margins, I went into Page Setup and changed Scale to 90%.

“Web 2.0” and churches

“Web 2.0” is one of the new buzzwords in Silicon Valley. Proponents say that “Web 2.0” is the next step in the development of the Web, moving farther in the direction of democracy, openness, and participation. Some cynics say that “Web 2.0” should be translated as “a new phrase to suck money out of venture capitalists,” and other cynics say that “Web 2.0” should be translated as “the news media are finally paying attention to Web development again.” The cynics are probably right, and at the same time there are exciting things happening on the Web that churches should pay attention to: blogging of course, and social networking, and tags. Let’s take a look at how “Web 2.0” might pertain to development of church Web sites.

According to Tim O’Reilly, one of the chief proponents of the term, “Web 2.0” is a set of seven “design patterns,” or ways to think about designing a Web site. [You can find O’Reilly’s seven design patterns for “Web 2.0” here.] So how might these secven design patterns apply to creating church Web sites?

What most interests me about “Web 2.0” is O’Reilly’s idea that “users add value.” Most church Web sites do not allow users to add value. And in the few instances where church Web sites have tried to make it easy for church members to, for example, post committee information to the site, there has been little or no response. Yet at the same time, the religious blogosphere has become incredibly active, and social networking Web sites have also seen activity by religious folk — so what’s going on?

Put it this way: a typical church Web site is not LiveJournal or Blogger or del.icio.us. We occupy a different place in the Web. We should be thinking of church Web sites in terms of another one of O’Reilly’s principles, which points out that small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content, content that “Web 2.0” applications are going to reach out to. O’Reilly calls this the “long tail” of the Web — and your church Web site is part of that “long tail.”

As small niche sites, the question we should be asking is this: what can we offer that makes it worthwhile for a big site to reach out to us? Most church Web sites will probably look no farther than their sermon archives as their primary store of unique, niche information. But churches have other niche information to offer: local theology, local history, local social justice information, genealogical data, biographical data, architectural information, social justice education, etc. Which makes me ask myself: is it enough to offer sermons? Perhaps a better question is: what unique data or information can we offer that will attract potential newcomers and further our mission in the world?

Let me go back to O’Reilly’s idea that “users add value.” O’Reilly also recognizes that most Web sites find that their users simply don’t bother adding data or information. O’Reilly concludes that Web sites should “…set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.” I think of this as building in feedback loops to ongoing development of the church Web site. Because church Web sites are tiny, and serve tiny communities, much of the feedback is going to come, not through the Web site itself, but via face-to-face contact or via email messages. The principle here is to continuously search for ways to include feedback loops — with the assumption that the church Web site is not static but is constantly under devcelopment.

Finally, O’Reilly points out a technological fact that churches should consider: “The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected.” How does this apply to churches? The example that comes immediately to my mind is the newcomer who, while driving to your church, looks up driving directions on her cell phone. Which implies that we should start thinking about church Web sites that are readable on cell phone screens.

So is “Web 2.0” just another buzzword, or is it a radical new way of thinking about the Web? From the point of view of church Web sites, I think it’s both. On the one hand, it’s just another high-tech buzzword that comes with the usual array of acronyms like AJAX and PHP — stuff that mostly doesn’t apply to church Web sites. On the other hand, it’s a radical reminder that Web sites should not be static, one-way communication — that church Web sites should represent the ideals of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, who wanted to create a method to connect people together in meaningful, democratic, non-hierarchical ways.

Why do you visit liberal religious Web sites?

At this year’s General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists in the United states, I’ll be leading a workshop on creating great Web site content. Here’s the description that will appear in the program book:

You don’t need a huge budget or technical wizardry to create a great church website. What you need is great content. Learn how to create rich content to attract guests and to help existing UUs deepen their faith. From case studies and presentation get practical, immediately useful ideas and techniques. Keywords for GA program index: website, electronic technology.

Now I’m looking for some input from people who read religious Web sites, and also from people who create liberal religious Web sites.

On the one hand, I’d love to hear from readers….

  • What kind of content do you like to see on a liberal religious Web site?
  • What kind of content keeps you coming back to read a Web site, week after week?
  • What kind of content would make you tell a friend about a religious Web site?

On the other hand, I’d also love to hear from religious bloggers and people who maintain liberal religious Web sites….

  • What kind of content gives you the most hits on your Web site or blog?
  • How much time do you spend each week creating content for your blog or Web site?
  • What strategies do you use to organize your content so visitors will have easy access to it?
  • And of course, if you have a magic formula for great Web content, let me know!

If you are moved to do so, spread the word — I’d love to get input from people other than the people who read this blog. You can leave a comment below, or if you’d prefer you can send an email message.

Instant communication and religion

Back on Sunday, February 5, I mentioned the anti-gay hate crime in New Bedford during the worship service in the prayer. I wasn’t impressed with that prayer, so I tossed it into the file and forgot about it. Then excerpts from that prayer appeared on the Boston Globe Web site (thanks for the tip, Stoney). I’m grateful the reporter did some heavy edits to the prayer, because it reads much better now, but I have no idea where he got the text of that prayer.

All of which raises the issue about how religion is being changed by the communication revolution. What a minister says in a worship service today could wind up on a Web site tomorrow, and from there who knows where those words will spread. I have to admit, I’m slightly unsettled by this phenomenon. At the same time, it’s good to be aware of this phenomenon, and to start thinking of it as a fundamental part of the religious landscape.

Update: Turns out I did give the text to a reporter who called — I just misunderstood which newspaper he was calling from. Mystery solved: it was just my own lousy memory. Sigh.

More on Theological BarCamp…

I ran into Chris Walton at a meeting today, and he wanted to know what the heck I was talking about in my post on porting BarCamp to religion. Obivously, creating a religious BarCamp isn’t as obvious to others as it is to me, so here’s a more explicit description:

It starts out with half a dozen people excited about creating new liberal religious theology, and excited about spreading that theology through new media like blogs and wikis and podcasts. These half dozen people plug into their social networks and get another dozen people who share this passion. A date is set, a Web site goes up, the words spreads through the blogosphere, people commit to showing up and their names are posted on the Web site. Everyone who attends will be both presenter and participant, and everyone who commits to attending is planning their presentation.

The actual event starts at (for example) eleven a.m. one Saturday. You walk into the site, and you see a whole bunch of blank schedules for the weekend. You write your presentation on the schedule. Since this event focusses on theology, five of the presentations are worship services (opening worship, vespers, evening worship, midnight worship, sunrise worship), times and places where the entire gathered community will embody theology together. You see other presentations: a book discussion, a scripture study, a workshop on embodied theology and dance, a workshop on blogging (bring your own computer), a workshop on producing podcasts, a panel discussion with a pagan and a Christian, an experiential outdoor workshop on ecological theology, several discussion groups on theological topics, a project to read aloud the entire Torah and record it, a group who will work on a liberal theology Wiki together, and so on.

Opening worship is led by a neo-pagan. You go straight from there into lunch, and sit at the table table where people discuss the theological aspects of eating (one is vegan, one’s keeping kosher, one is macrobiotic, one is a hunter who eats what she kills, etc.). The afternoon starts with a workshop on blogging, and you get into a discussion on how Cascading Style Sheets can carry a theological message. You drop on the group doing the Wiki, learn how to edit a Wiki article, and actually contribute a paragraph about liberal theology. You drop into the blogger’s room, which has a T1 line and Wifi, and you do a quick update of your blog. You wind up in the outdoor workshop on ecological theology walking a labyrinth.

Off to Vespers, which is a Taize style worship led by a humanist. Dinner — you signed up to help clean up, and get into this intense theological discussion with a humanist while operating the dishwasher. More workshops and discussions. You had promised yourself that you’d go to bed early, but find yourself at midnight worship, because it is being led by the workshop called “Emergent Liberal PoMo Church,” with music supplied by the “Music-and-Theology Geeks” workshop. Lot of candles, a meditative video assembled in FinalCut during a workshop on video theology, the homily spoken over a meditative hip-hop soundtrack the music geeks put together in GarageBand (both audio and video put up during worship on the event’s Web site), then a swaying moody chant one of the musicians wrote during the scripture reading workshop. Somehow, all the theology you talked about during the day gets totally embodied for you during this worship service, or maybe it’s lack of sleep.

Anyway, you have to get up for the sunrise communion worship led by this guy Scott, and then after breakfast (eaten in silence, as decided by the community the night before), you lead your workshop on [fill in the blank], which is attended by five lay leaders, four ministers, three seminarians, two random geeks, and a denominational staffer. You run to the blogger’s room to do another quickie post. The whole thing ends with the host church’s worship service, the sermon preached by one of the conference attendees. After lunch, you go home to sleep — and to put into practice in your own religious community all the theological insights you gained over the course of the 24 hour un-conference. ((Did someone ask about child care? Yup, the children’s program, run by this guy Dan Harper, did their own theological workshops.))

There you have it. Maybe it’s not exactly BarCamp the way the technogeeks know it. But it’s one person’s vision for what a theological, embodied, geeky un-conference could look like. Totally open source. Totally participatory. Very rich theologically. Totally energizing. And we could make it happen if we wanted to.