Category Archives: Culture: new media

How did I miss this?

Pamela Wood Browne, the administrator at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach, California, has a blog she calls “Finding my UU Soul.” I found some pretty good posts on church administration, one of my passions — such as this post about using automated phone answering systems in a church office: link. She’s also got a pretty cool office chair: link.

And of all the Unitarian Universalist blogs I have checked on Technorati, she has the second highest “authority” ranking, with over 200 blogs linking to her in the past 180 days. (In first place is a home schooling blog written by a Unitarian Universalist, with some 567 links from other blogs in the past 180 days, but you won’t find much mention of Unitarian Universalism on it.)

As Philocrites continues to cut back on his publication schedule — with a resulting dip in his Technorati rating — I’ve been waiting to see who will take his place as the most authoritative Unitarian Universalist blog. How appropriate that a church administrator would move upwards into the top blogging spot….

Odds and ends on books and blogs

I’m usually not a big fan of Internet quizzes, but I couldn’t resist “Which science fiction writer are you?” I knew I was going to be Ursula K. LeGuin, and that’s who the quiz said I was. Except of course that I’m not, because I don’t have her talent and skill.

*****

New blog by a religious professional called Open the Doors: The Ministry of Welcome, written by the thoughtful and insightful Chance Hunter. Chance has just become the Welcome Ministry Coordinator at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, Georgia. I’m looking forward to hearing about his thoughts and experiences in congregational hospitality and growth in a program/corporate size congregation.

*****

I miss going to the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago, which remains for my money the best academic bookstore in the United States — at least for the topics I’m interested in: religion, ecology, philosophy, cultural criticism. Today I discovered to my delight that their Web site now allows you to browse The Front Table, the books they currently stock on the famous front table of their 59th St. store — there’s always one or two books on that front table that I decide to buy.

****

Will Shetterly, the Unitarian Universalist and science fiction writer who writes the blog “It’s All One Thing,” has recently stopped eating meat as part of his Three Steps To Save the World. Since that first post, he’s done a number of other posts on vegetarianism and veganism (link, link, and most recently link). He’s convinced me — this week I went back to being a vegetarian. I still eat eggs and butter, and I’m willing to eat small amounts of locally-raised organic meat, but today’s meat and fishing industries are way too polluting and non-sustainable.

What makes a good religious blog?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about writing some critical reviews of other religious blogs. But what makes for a good religious blog? Below, I’ve listed some of the criteria I use for judging religious blogs (of course, no one blog will meet all these criteria).

I’d love to know what criteria you use to judge the quality of religious blogs, or of blogs in general — leave your criteria in the comments.

  1. Good writing
    • Well-crafted prose or verse
    • Distinctive voice
    • Aimed at a recognizable audience
    • Worthy subject matter [added per Jess’s suggestion in comments]
  2. Good blogging practices
    • Posts that appear with some regularity (daily, three times a week, weekly; but at least weekly)
    • Comments enabled and responded to; nasty comments and comment spam removed in a timely fashion
    • Posts corrected and/or updated as needed
    • Adherence to some style book, including consistent style for hyperlinks
    • Social networking in the form of some connection to other blogs
  3. Significant content about the faith tradition, including for example (examples are for my faith tradition):
    • Exploration of the distinctively Unitarian and Universalist theological traditions, and/or
    • Exploration of the Unitarian and Universalist historical traditions, and/or
    • A willingness to engage in defining boundaries of the tradition, and/or
    • Serious, frank, thoughtful discussion of contemporary issues facing Unitarian Universalism
  4. A focus on lived religion, including for example:
    • Reflections on what it means to live life as a Unitarian Universalist (or insert other religious tradition), and/or
    • Connecting events from everyday life with spiritual or religious concerns (at least sometimes), and/or
    • Discussions of politics and social action, if discussed from a religious perspective, and with a clear distinction made between, e.g., liberal religion and liberal politics
  5. An openness to those from other faith traditions
    • A majority of the writing is not aimed at “insiders”
    • All acronyms explained in every post; technical language explained frequently
    • Significant religious content or discussion that is not specific to the faith tradition

I’m not qualified

The annual Unitarian Universalist blog awards process has begun again. I do not plan to nominate or vote. There are something like 200 Unitarian Universalist blogs, but I can only seem to keep up with two or three them on a regular basis. So I don’t feel qualified to say which is the year’s best blog, or which is the year’s best blog entry.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t read lots of Unitarian Universalist blogs. But I like to read blogs written from other religious perspectives, like the blog entries aggregated at The Daily Scribe, with authors who write from Jewish, pagan, progressive Christian, Emergent Christian, humanist, and Buddhist perspectives. That kind of thing broadens my mind, and my mind could use some broadening.

And I am just as likely to read non-religious blogs: my two sisters’ blogs (Jean, Abby); the Horn Books Magazine blog Read Roger; and maybe Boing Boing and Bad Astronomy. Then there are the many newspapers, magazines, books, and the reading matter I get from Carol. Sitting on the dining room table waiting for me right now are: The Small-Mart Revolution (from Carol), The Shorebird Guide, rattapallax 13, Asimov’s science fiction magazine, The Post-Corporate World (also from Carol), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a book on religions of the African diaspora, and Harvard Business Review.

Not that I’ll get around to reading everything on that list. But I never wanted to be a specialist, and I can only do so much specialized reading. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said, “Those who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.” Not that I’d count myself wise, but I’m certainly not qualified to judge Unitarian Universalist blogs.

Update: An attempt at defining a set of criteria for what constitutes a “good religious blog” here.

Word counts and Sturgeon’s Law

First of all, remember Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of anything is crap. Originally developed for science fiction, the same law applies to all writing.

I write a 2,500 word sermon three out of four weeks, along with a 250 word prayer and perhaps other incidental material for the worship service. I write a 700 word column for the church newsletter every two weeks. I write another 1,500 words of reports each month. So as a minister, I write nearly 11,500 words a month, ten months a year — or 115,000 words a year.

Then for fun and relaxation I write this blog, for which I’ve been averaging about 500 words a day, or about 15,000 words a month. This month I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month, which should result in another 50,000 words (I’m already ahead of schedule — as of today, my official NaNoWriMo word count stands at 12,589). In the last week of June, I wrote stories for the denominational Web site as part of the coverage of the annual denominational meeting, for a total of about 8,500 words. My total recreational output this year will be about 238,000 words.

Add recreational output to professional output, and you get over 350,000 words. Now apply Sturgeon’s Law, which predicts that I will write no more than 17,500 words that aren’t crap.

The problem is, how do I sift through all the crap to find the 17,500 words that aren’t crap?

(244 words, not counting the title or this parenthetical note; of which 12.1 words are worth reading.)

NaNoWriMo, day one

…this is for all you who are doing the same thing…

I logged onto the National Novel Writing Month Web site to update my word count. I thought the connection was going to time out before my user page would load. Obviously, the NaNoWriMo site is seeing a lot of traffic presumably people are madly updating their user profiles or something.

As far as my own writing project (I can’t really call it a novel), it is continuing along nicely in its non-linear way. Current word count stands at 5,245 — which means that I’m a tenth of the way towards my goal, and it’s only the first day of the month. I’ll attribute some of that to my own (non-pathological) hypergraphia. But I attribute more of my progress to using WordPress blogging software as a kind of simple CMS. The chronological ordering of the blogging software allows me to arrange and rearrange chunks of writing, as I figure out the chronology of the writing project. I’m also assigning categories to different chunks of writing based on various topics, and assigning authors based on the principal personality in each chunk of writing.

I’m making this sound hopelessly complex, but it’s really not. It’s as if I’m writing on big index cards which I then file according to chronology; and it’s as if I’m using different color index cards for different topics; and somehow the index cards can also be sorted out according to principal personality (and a few other categories). Or to put it another way, instead of developing an elaborate filing system with character files, scene files, etc., I’m just using blogging software to automate all that. The end result is that it’s easy to make big changes really fast in response to the developing writing — how freeing!

Forget broadcast TV…

…and check out Chasing Windmills, a Web-based video series. Pretty good concept, decent acting, interesting script (if a little too, shall we say, interior). Personally, I like the surrealism, and the contemporary black-and-white noir filming style. But the reason you should really watch Chasing Windmills is that it’s a whole new way of doing a video series, starting with the fact that it’s a daily video blog. But there’s more….

The second season of Chasing Windmills officially kicked off today. This is the biggest experiment we have taken on so far. We have 8 people who will play characters, and each character has a blog through which the audience can interact…. The audience interacts with the characters through their blogs, and the characters are influenced by the dialogue. Interactivity through influence. [Link]

A couple of warnings: First, remember that these are video files so if you have a dial-up connection, forget it. Second, this series is not for kids, with foul language, sex scenes, etc. (not as bad as The Sopranos though).

Bloggers’ picnic

Today was the 2nd annual Boston area blogger’s picnic, held at the First Parish Church in Milton (Unitarian Universalist). In what appears to becoming a tradition, it rained and the picnic was held inside. Actually, it did more than rain. It poured. Traffic on Interstate 95 heading to Milton slowed to 40 miles an hour at times — this on a road where the average speed on a Saturday morning is 70+ miles an hour.

But I arrived at last, and when I walked in to the kitchen at the Milton church, dripping wet, there was Philocrites, big as life, tearing lettuce leaves off a head of Romaine lettuce. Unity arrived, with the new baby, the baby’s older borthers, and the baby’s mom. We all admired the baby, then wandered in to the dining room, where Free and Responsible Search and Rick were having a deep discussion about politics. So I chatted with Fausto, our gracious host, about the state of UU blogging.

Pretty soon the hamburgers were done (no vegetarians in this crowd, though I personally passed on the burgers because they weren’t organic or otherwise politically correct). At lunch, I sat next to Free and Responsible Search, with whom I’ll be working as one of the General Assembly Web site reporters. Peacebang regaled us with a stories of her “beauty tips for ministers” series on her blog. Recently, Peacebang said, she went into the Harvard Divinity School bookstore, got to talking to the young woman (a new seminarian) working behind the counter, who upon finding out that this was the one-and-only-Peacebang burst out with, “Oh no, here I’m talking to Peacebang, and I’m really not looking my best!”

Under the leadership of Philocrites, we made plans for General Assembly. Looks like bloggers will meet for dinner on Friday night, and Philocrites is planning another informal “meet the bloggers” session, both for existing bloggers and for anyone who wants to know what blogging is all about. Watch Philocrites’ blog for details.

As we were cleaning up, Peacebang looked out the window and said, “Wow, it’s stopped raining so hard.” “Don’t say that!” I said. Sure enough, the weather gods were listening in, and by the time Peacebang and I walked out the door it was pouring again.

Maybe next year the sun will shine…

(Not present at the picnic were Paul Wilczynski’s Observations, Radical Hapa, Debitage, and a few others. No excuses next year: be there.)

Liberal religious tracts?

“The Internet is the tract publishing venue of the 21st century.” Thus spake Chris Walton, editor at UU World magazine and uuworld.org, as well as the author of the blog Philocrites. Chris was speaking to a meeting of ministers this morning at the Braintree, Mass., Unitarian Universalist church.

Unitarian and Universalist denominational organizations began as tract publishing organizations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The two organizations continued to focus on generating and disseminating ideas through the 19th C. and into the 20th C. “We’ve lost that momentum,” said Chris, over the past few decades. Today, we’re neither generating nor disseminating many religious ideas.

Chris also noted how the number of publishing venues for Unitarian Universalists has been dropping — UU World magazine, for example, is down to a quarterly schedule –and he urged us to find new ways to disseminate our liberal religious ideas. “Sometimes what you have to say has a much larger audience” than your local congregation, Chris asserted. The Internet could be a good vehicle for distributing this writing to a national or even international audience.

Chris summed up by saying that currently the religious right is focussing on ideas. But that’s not happening on the religious left, and it’s time we got back into the world of ideas.

A great, thought-provoking presentation. At lunch afterwards, I happened to wind up talking with two ministers about blogs, the Internet, and liberal religion. One of my lunch companions said that all this technology is fine and good, “But who’s our William F. Buckley of Unitarian Universalism?” — in other words, who’s the writer whom people will read, and who will excite people about religious liberalism today?

I said, “He’s got red hair and he’s sitting two tables over from us — it’s Chris Walton. He was in the right place at the right time with his blog, he’s a darned good writer, and he stays abreast of all the current debates about Unitarian Universalism. Because he’s at the center of things, people keep sending him their ideas, and so he becomes more at the center of things,” I continued, waxing eloquent. “I got introduced to his blog by a minister in her thirties who said, ‘Do you read Philocrites? I find it to be the one essential Unitarian Universalist publication I read.’ And I think she’s right, especially for people forty and under. It’s partly by luck and partly through skill, but whatever the reason, his is the one blog you have to read.”

It’s all true, and I’ll go further than that. If you’re looking for something to give to friends whom you think should be Unitarian Universalists, send them to Chris’s blog (www.philocrites.com). So far, it’s the best example of a 21st C. Unitarian Universalist tract.