Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone (A Note to Readers)

November 22, 2012 By 9 Comments

Dear readers and friends (both Americans and non),

Today, I will stop by the gym to ride the bike for a bit, then get the kids from their mom’s house — they’re with us from 9am-2pm. We will proceed to a traditional Puritan re-enactment/worship service at Colonial Church, the church of my youth. After that, we’ll finish baking the six pies that we’re responsible to bring to dinner and get in a game of touch football before sitting down to a feast.

Among the things for which I’m grateful is you, and I mean that quite sincerely. When I started blogging in 2004, it was a lonely enterprise. I was lonely — my early posts were composed in an empty apartment in Princeton, NJ. My family had left after my first year of coursework, and I commuted between Minneapolis and New Jersey. My desk in the apartment was a door propped up on two sawhorses. I slept on an air mattress. I blogged because I’d usually finished all my reading by dinnertime, and I didn’t have a TV. Like I say, it was a lonely enterprise.

Most everything has changed since then. I am now in a marriage that is brimming with love and acceptance, for which I am truly grateful. I am surrounded by friends and family in Minnesota who love me for who I am.

And blogging is no longer lonely. With your clicks and your comments, your likes and your retweets, you have transformed this space from a platform for my thoughts into an electronic space of conversation and debate. I am honored — even humbled — to be the convener of that. I don’t know that my thoughts are always worth reading, but you’ve given me the benefit of the doubt.

I am thankful.

Thanks for coming here to read.

Thanks for commenting.

Thanks for your friendship.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Filed Under: blogging 9 Comments

Christian Progressives Come Out of the Shadows

November 14, 2012 By 4 Comments

The NY Times rehash on the religious angle on the election is interesting. There is, of course, the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Bishop Ralph Reed and Bishop Al Mohler about the moral decay of our country and the changing face of the electorate.

Then there’s this sneaky paragraph:

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Filed Under: blogging, christianity in america Tagged With: , 4 Comments

Mark Driscoll and Rob Bell Embrace [Video]

October 30, 2012 By 25 Comments

This blog has just passed a milestone: 100,000 pageviews this month. I’ve been blogging since 2004, and that is a first. Many thanks to longtime readers and new readers. Glad to have you all.

Some bloggers are loathe to publicize their traffic numbers, but a couple of my favorite bloggers (Andrew Sullivan and Rachel Held Evans) routinely disclose their traffic. Like them, I want to be forthcoming with you. And I also want to say thank you.

I hope that this blog will continue to be a place where we can debate theology, consider the foibles of church life, and occasionally share a laugh.

Filed Under: blogging Tagged With: 25 Comments

A News Story and a Podcast

August 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In non-Sri Lanka news,

1) MinnPost ran a nice profile of me:

“What Tony is good at is being willing to call into question people’s assumptions about how the church should be,” said David Lose, a professor at Luther Seminary who knows Jones and invited him to speak this summer at a conference in Atlanta. “He does that outside a denomination and has a certain freedom or willingness to see things that you can’t perhaps from within. And he is also tremendously interested in making sense of the media environment we are in.”

2) And here I am on the Something Beautiful Podcast.

And stay tuned. Great, amazing things are happening here in Sri Lanka. Posts forthcoming…

Filed Under: blogging Tagged With: Leave a Comment

Going to Sri Lanka

July 24, 2012 By 7 Comments

Back in my youth ministry days, I took several trips to Peru. There, I visited the World Vision ADP (Area Development Project) in the Quiquijana district outside of Peru. They were amazing and life-changing trips, especially because I got to meet a boy that I had been sponsoring for years.

That boy grew up, and I let my World Vision sponsorship lapse.

Well, next month I’ll be joining a group of bloggers to visit World Vision sites around Sri Lanka.It’ll be great to meet these fellow bloggers and to travel halfway around the world. But, best of all, it will be a great opportunity to get back in touch with the amazing work that World Vision does.

In coming days, I’ll offer you, dear readers, a chance to sponsor a child. I’m going to sponsor one — one that I hope to meet. And WV is going to attempt to coordinate me meeting your sponsor children, too.

So watch this space for announcements. And, if you’re the praying type, please offer one up for me and my fellow travelers. We depart in a month.

Filed Under: blogging, Travels Tagged With: , 7 Comments

On Missing the Memes

July 19, 2012 By 18 Comments

As I wrote recently, I’ve been a bit down recently. Part of the consequence of that is that I just can’t keep up with all of the inputs in my life. I can’t both read and write, for instance. Another consequence is that big blogging memes have passed me by.

I’ll admit, it’s hard to see Rachel and Scot and Fred weigh in on Ross Douthat’s ignorance about liberal Christianity, John Piper’s latest idiocy, and the recent offense by a “complementarian.” Hard because they get big traffic and tons of comments. These topics are red meat for you, dear readers. And they are for me, too.

But I cannot always keep up. I cannot always weigh in on the breaking news in the theological world.

I don’t want to be a bloggy ambulance chaser, taking every chance to drop the names Piper, Driscoll, and Bell, even though when I do my traffic spikes.*

So I’m going to keep at it. I’m not going to beat myself up when I miss a meme. I’m going to keep blogging every day — sometimes about Piper, but more often about God and prayer and theology.

And, while I’m on the topic, I’d love your ideas on themes you’d like to see explored here.

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Fighting the Darkness

July 17, 2012 By 26 Comments

I don’t struggle with depression. I know many who do, but that’s just not my constitution. (As Rhett Smith writes, male depression is more common than you might think, and it’s often masked by other, harmful lifestyles.)

For a couple years, around my divorce, I took an anti-depressant. I came off of Wellbutrin over two years ago, and I haven’t felt the need for any medication since.

However, there are times when various aspects of my life collide and collude — both personally and professionally — that lead me feel depression-like symptoms. Today is one of those days.

Of course, my life is good. My kids are healthy, and my marriage is better than I could have imagined that marriage could be. But both personal and professional struggles have — at least this week — gotten me down.

Nevertheless — or, better yet, even in the face of this sadness — I want to take a moment to thank you for reading this blog, for engaging with my ideas, and even for being friends through this strange electronic medium called the blogosphere.

Filed Under: blogging, divorce Tagged With: 26 Comments

Rest Easy. Bristol Isn’t Living with her Boyfriend

April 20, 2012 By 21 Comments

Bristol Palin

Bristol Palin blogs here at Patheos. You knew that, right? So, she and I are, like, colleagues. I cannot wait to see Bristol and Scot McKnight yucking it up at the office Christmas party.

This week, she took to the blog to put some rumors to rest:

In fact, you may have even recently heard rumors I’m living with my boyfriend.  As that gossip spread a couple of weeks ago, people all over America were applauding me for –finally! – coming to my senses and abandoning my no-sex-until-marriage policy.  Others are saying that me shacking up with my boyfriend is the height of hypocrisy.

Here’s the thing.  It’s not true. As I mentioned before, I recently bought a home across the lake from my parents’ house.  While it’s under renovation, I’m actually living in an apartment on their property.  Rest assured — there’s no way on earth my mom and dad would allow a guy to spend the night here with me.

via Bristol Palin —.

Filed Under: blogging, christianity in america 21 Comments

Blogging Controversies

February 20, 2012 By 12 Comments

Illustration from Pickling His Presence

Late last week, I took some heat in the comment section of a post that I meant to be a rather lighthearted way to slide into the weekend. Some readers took that as an opportunity to let me know how much I’ve disappointed them, saying that they used to think that I was interesting, but now I’m a whiney crybaby.

A couple commenters seemed to complain that I am classified in the Evangelical Portal at Patheos. I asked to be categorized there — as well as in the Progressive Portal — and these commenters insinuated that I did so only to increase my traffic. I can state, for the record, that being included in the Evangelical Portal has not increased my traffic.

(I can also state plainly that, despite what those commenters say, I have just as many grievances against mainline/progressive Christianity as I do against evangelicalism.)

Timothy Dalrymple is the editor of the Evangelical Portal at Patheos, and he’s got an intriguing post up about blogging controversies. He interviews some others from his camp, and he quotes the traffic from some bloggers in his stable whom you and I can both guess the identities of. Tim ends — as is an evangelical’s wont — with a list of prescriptions. I’m not much of one for lists of prescriptions, but I think Tim’s are pretty good.

But I also have some other thoughts about his post, and about blogging controversies:

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David Carr on Making – and Breaking – Bread with Clay Shirky

February 8, 2012 By 3 Comments

Clay Shirky's bread (David Carr/New York Times)

It seems that two of my heroes — NY Times columnist, David Carr, and media expert and professor, Clay Shirky — had dinner with a group of plugged in journalists and mediaistas recently at Shirky’s apartment. Carr wrote about the experience yesterday on the Media Decoder blog.

Carr’s reflections on the evening, however, don’t really center on how Twitter spurred the Arab Spring, or about the Facebook IPO. Instead, he writes about Shirky’s prowess at baking bread, which Carr only learned because Shirky had him over for dinner. (I, myself, am a bread-baker, so this story is even closer to my heart!) In fact, Carr was so enticed that he got Shirky’s recipe and has tried baking some bread for himself.

Carr’s column is, ultimately, a parable. For all the hand-wringing about what our online world does to us — how it depersonalizes everything, how everyone is glued to their mini-phone-screen all day — it turns out that social media has great power to bring people together, and to turn “friends” into friends.

At the end of the column-cum-parable, Carr quotes Shirky in what might be a good adage for our age:

“When people talk to one another long enough, they want to meet, and when they’ve been in one another’s presence, they want to keep in touch.”

Filed Under: blogging, technology Tagged With: 3 Comments