Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Blogging

  • Blogging/Essay Contest

    My company is sponsoring a Christianity related blogging/essay contest, with prizes to include gift cards from Barnes & Noble. Detail are on the Energion Publications blog.

  • FTC Disclosure Rules for Blogs

    Over on my company blog I indicated that these rules were generally common sense, as in if you make money off of something you should disclose the fact that you do.

    Of course, you can’t count on the government to use common sense even in implementing common sense. Thus somehow if print news organizations get free copies for review, they don’t have to disclose it, but bloggers must. Even an affiliate link is compensation and must be disclosed.

    I don’t have problem with the disclosure requirement. In fact, I try to be more forthcoming that is required. I do have a problem with the idea that we need government regulators to do this sort of thing. I think it’s a pretty clear example of how to waste taxpayer money while accomplishing less than good competition would manage.

    There’s a good article and discussion at Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits.

  • New Methodist Blogger – Rev. Geoffrey Lentz

    I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days, but it’s been busy, as you can tell from my low level of blogging. Geoffrey Lentz is the associate pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola, and a former student of mine. In fact, I met Geoffrey in the first class I taught for youth in a United Methodist church when he was just 14 and I had been a Methodist less than a year.

    No, I’m not going to go into all the embarrassing youth stories. Suffice it to say that everyone realized then that Geoffrey was going to be a minister, and that never changed. I now attend his Wednesday Bible study on the Lectionary passages and really enjoy learning from him. He has become quite conversant with church history and especially early church fathers, and makes extensive use of that knowledge in teaching. Since my training and inclination starts from the opposite perspective, i.e. I tend to study the Bible as a piece of ancient near eastern literature, I find his study to be a nice complement to my own.


    Luke Study Guide

    I have long tried to persuade Geoffrey to start blogging, and finally he has. His blog is at GeoffreyLentz.com, and I’d call attention to his thoughtful first post, What is a Preacher to Do?

    He also just wrote a study guide for the Participatory Study Series published by my company, Energion Publications. You can find out more about this excellent new guide to the Gospel According to St. Luke on its catalog page.

  • Advance/Review Copies of The Jesus Paradigm

    My company, Energion Publications, is about to send out free advance copies of The Jesus Paradigm, a new book from Dr. David Alan Black. If you’re interested in reviewing an advance copy and are a blogger or write for a print publication, please see this post and let me know.

  • There ought to be a law …

    A few days ago I wrote on my business blog about embracing Web 2.0 as a publisher. Today I read this op-ed from the Washington Post, in which Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown think there ought to be a law–or bunches of them, to protect print journalists from the pernicious arrival of the future.

    His article includes such gems as:

    But Google’s products (and profit) would look a lot different if, for example, the law said it had to obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index Web sites.

    Wow! Amazing.

    Of course, his argument is that it is only through special laws that sites like Google have done so well. I would argue that those laws are absolutely necessary to meet the needs of the information technology involved.

    What journalists and other writers and artists need to do is learn to work effectively with new technology. Information will flow more freely; that ship has sailed. Learn to live with it.

    (HT: The Agitator.)

  • Reality, Perception, and TEA

    One of the great experiences of my life was meeting a Calvinist evangelist. His name is John Blanchard, and I only “met” him in a fairly large group, but it was clear that he was genuinely an evangelist and genuinely a Calvinist. He was asked during a question and answer session just how he reconciled evangelism with predestination. He said: “Predestination is a doctrine and I believe it; evangelism is a command and I obey it.”

    Now I had grown up in a Seventh-day Adventist home, then left the church altogether, and returned in a United Methodist congregation. That is a solidly Wesleyan-Arminian background. To me, Calvinists were always “the other guys.” We knew what we believed, we knew what they believed, and they were incomprehensibly wrong. We couldn’t understand why they would evangelize or how they could stand the thought that God might unconditionally predestine someone to eternal torment.

    But my perception ran apace into an actual Calvinist, and he wasn’t what I thought he was. Now my disagreement with Calvinism is undiminished, but my perception of Calvinists has changed because of him, and because of numerous other Calvinists I have personally encountered.

    “Some of my best friends are black,” became a cliched excuse for racism in decades past. But if one applied it in reverse, it could be very helpful. Make “best friends” of some people who are not the same as you are, and you will learn things that you might not otherwise have any opportunity to learn.

    I have noticed this while watching responses to the tea parties. There are several odd things about this. I heard one person say that all the tea parties were simply racist and nothing more. The people involved were just upset that there was an African-American in the White House. Others focused on the word “tea-bagging” and its sexual meaning (Google if you don’t know–and want to), as though “tea-bagging” was the biggest part of the protest.

    The picture you get in the media is that these are a group of really crazy people who are protesting nothing that is very important, and are probably not really patriotic Americans after all. Another line is that the protests are not spontaneous, but rather are corporate or party sponsored. (What protest doesn’t involve an element of both?)

    Where have I heard that before? Oh, I remember. It was in right wing comments about war protesters and pacifists. You could generate all this commentary with a computer program. Alternatively, you could just recycle it, inserting new slurs regarding all sides.

    Now doubtless there are racists at tea parties. Just how are you going to block them at the gate? Doubtless there were some people who truly did hate America at anti-war protests. How could you identify them and stop them? It’s the nature of protest that crazy people will latch on. It’s the nature of extremist commentary to latch on to the crazies on the other side while ignoring the crazies on one’s own side.

    Now my perception of tea parties is impacted by the fact that I know personally some of the people there, and the ones I know are not insane, or at least no more insane than I am (which may not be saying much!). I might prefer a protest of excessive spending and thus excessive deficits, though I actually think the worst threat to our economy right now is neither excessive spending as such, nor excessive taxation as such, but the offensive concept of government bailouts. Bailouts involve excessive spending of money we don’t have, thus building the deficit, and the money goes to reward people who have done stupid and destructive things, thus encouraging behavior that should be vigorously discouraged. Bailouts are, in my view, complete stupidity, carefully packaged, and not even reasonably well disguised.

    But you know, these weren’t my tea parties, so the people who organized and attended them get to protest what they want in whatever way they prefer.

    There are valid points for debate in here, but in general these valid points, some of which I addressed in my post on my business blog Democracy – Taxed by a Feeling–are not getting any attention. The simple fact is that most of us don’t really know what “fair” taxation might be. Just as we have been fighting terrorism for years without a real strategy, so we fight economic hardship without any sort of strategy or plan.

    (Note: A strategy requires a goal, a plan, and some reason to believe the plan will reach the goal. Lacking any of the above, it should not be called a strategy.)

    There is a way out of this approach to politics, and I think the internet facilitates it. Get to know people with a variety of perceptions. Read their blogs, follow their tweets, friend them on Facebook, or whatever method you prefer. Find some locally as well. The internet isn’t a substitute for personal contact; it’s an adjunct. I regularly read as diverse a set of blogs as Levellers, Pseudo-Polymath, Pursuing Holiness, Thoughts from the Heart on the Left, Shuck and Jive, and Elgin Hushbeck: Politics and Religion.

    And those aren’t all. I have 233 subscriptions in my Google reader, and I at least check the titles every day, reading a selection. I follow a variety of people on Twitter, and try to get to know as many as possible. (Twitter still challenges me with its 140 character limit and fast moving data stream, but TweetDeck helps.)

    The point is that meeting people who are different will challenge your perception of who they are and why they think the way they do. This may or may not impact what you believe yourself–that should be based on better reasons than the people you happen to know. What I’m interested in is your perception of the people involved. Get to know them, not a brief stereotype of them.

    For Christian readers, let me reference 1 Corinthians 12, often known as the “gifts chapter.” The thing is, I think we miss the point when we treat this as Paul’s dissertation on spiritual gifts. What Paul is doing here is drawing on the fact of different gifts, and the way in which they are necessary to a functioning church body, as a way to teach about Christian unity and service. The focus is not on a list of gifts and offices, but rather on how those are brought together.

    Diverse people with diverse gifts, called to different types of service are brought together by one Spirit to work in unity for a purpose. Note that we are not told that the people are made the same. Rather, they are made part of the same body.

    This would be a wonderful demonstration for Christians to make to the world. It will require us to behave differently, get to know one another, and learn to differ constructively. I think that starts by letting our perceptions crash headlong into reality.

    Yes, some of the people you think are crazy, probably are. Most of them, on the other hand, are probably much saner than you think, and if you stepped past the stereotypes, you might find you could learn from them. I have!

  • John Hobbins Leaves Complegalitarian

    Please don’t take the title here as some sort of rejoicing from either side. John gives his reasons here in a very thoughtful post.

    There are two reasons I want to respond with a full post. First, his reasons are worth reading and considering, even though ultimately I will continue to fall afoul of some of his guidelines and suggestions. Second, I think there’s a good point here about conversation in the blogosphere.

    I was never involved with Complegalitarian, and I was only an occasional reader, even though I count some of the authors as friends. The reason is simple: I don’t have the slightest pretense of being neutral on this issue, nor is there even a whiff of the irenic in my expression. If you found some it was either an accident or perhaps I had a cold that day.

    If you’re wondering how I can claim to be a moderate (remember also passionate!) in this case I would simply point out that I have never claimed to be centrist, but rather that I consider all variations. Occasionally, as in this case, I come out fairly far to an extreme. Note, however, that if your view of the egalitarian extreme is that women and men are somehow not different from one another, then that is not my view. I merely believe that each should be permitted and encouraged to do what he or she is gifted to do, whatever that is, whether it’s pastor, fighter pilot, homemaker, nurturer, or gardener. I do not believe that there will be parity between men and women in each of those groups–I simply won’t prejudice the possibilities.

    But that is not my topic. My concern is the idea of the neutral forum. I think it is a potentially dangerous idea. News outlets, for example, are all prejudiced. This would be fine if we could identify the prejudice and account for it. It becomes dangerous when we try to pretend there is no prejudice.

    My suggestion for the best way in which to conduct such a discussion would be via a multi-blog conversation. One could even set up a tag in Google Reader or some other such service that would aggregate all the blogs that wanted to be part of the conversation. Then everyone could express themselves as they saw fit on their own blogs, but be linked in as part of a conversation. In many ways the comment system on blogs tends to keep us in the past, treating our blogs as one of the old internet forums.

    In the good old days–and I’ve been at this since 1985 when I operated the Wind Dragon Inn bulletin board in Bellevue, NE–you joined a particular board or forum and all conversation went on there. Since my first bulletin board cost me around $2,000 to set up, it was unlikely that most of my readers/commenters were going to set up their own in competition. So they all had to call my number and follow my rules.

    Now anyone can create a blog for free, and the software permits all of the wonders of a forum to develop around it. Thus we can all comment as we desire, which is one of the reasons I generally post on my own blogs.

    Comment moderation, as necessary as it is, is very hard to do in a balanced fashion. I tend to let just about anything by, but those who are sensitive to attacks might feel that this is not a safe place to discuss. They’re right. It isn’t. If you’re even slightly inclined to get offended, you’ll probably find that I allow a comment that offends you.

    On the other hand, stricter comment policies often tie people down from expressing what they think is simply the truth. Complementarians that I know in real life really do believe I’ve taken leave of my senses and started ignoring scripture because I’m an egalitarian. These are people with whom I remain friends. I’ve always been amazed at what will anger people online, because I’ve generally heard worse in person. I think we tend not to attach a real live person with whom we already have a relationship to the comments, and thus only the hurtful part remains, unimpeded by any human considerations.

    In summary, I don’t think it’s possible to create a single blog or single forum as a truly neutral solution. When we trim people’s expression in order to produce dialogue, we often lose the expression of the very issues under discussion. The blogosphere gives us an opportunity to break that logjam.

    One final note–I really don’t like extended conversations in comments. I prefer exchanges of blog posts. I’ll do extended discussions when they’re interesting, but I always think that more than a couple of paragraphs at a time would be better served in separate posts.

  • Christian Carnival Hosting

    I believe there are a number of Christian readers of this blog who have never participated in or hosted the Christian Carnival. If you are one of these, let me suggest participation. If you don’t want to do it for the fun of reading all those entries, consider doing it for the incoming links and traffic.

    I normally host this over at my Participatory Bible Study Blog when it’s my turn, but I thought I’d put this notice here since I believe this blog reaches more people.

    You can find more information on hosting and contact information here.

    I’m maintaining an archive of carnival posts here.

  • New Blog – Caraleisa

    A long time friend of mine has just started a blog, Caraleisa, with her first post, Giving Thanks, this year . . .. I have hopes she’ll get more controversial, as I know very well she can.

    Welcome to the blogosphere!

  • Culture11

    I received an e-mail from Joe Carter suggesting that I check out Culture11, of which he’s a managing editor. I’d feel real special, but I know that a bunch of my friends got such invitations as well, so probably Joe was inviting all the bloggers with whom he has contact, which is, after all, a good idea!

    I’m checking out Culture11, and thus far I’d say it looks a bit like Facebook, except that it is built around ideas more than light social interaction. It’s not that Facebook is not useful for exchanging ideas, though things tend to move too fast for me there, or that Culture11 doesn’t appear to have all the possibilities for social interaction, but it appears to be designed to keep the focus on ideas.

    Of course, this is just preliminary. I’ve barely started looking. If it is, in fact, an idea centered site, I’ll probably spend some time there. It will be interesting to see how people use it. The atmosphere cannot always be controlled by the management.

    In any case, I’d suggest checking it out, and if you do, look me up. My profile, such as it is, is here.

    Have fun!