The Tony Jones Blog at Patheos
This week, The 40 Day Journey, a Lenten video blog by Patheos, will feature a video by me each day. They were filmed in the north woods of Minnesota, and they’re each about 90 seconds long. The first one is below. I hope you’ll visit The 40 Day Journey each day this week to see the rest.
No, not really. In fact, Hement Mehta (aka, The Friendly Atheist) and I had a very nice chat on the Drew Marshall Show last weekend. It did get a little spicy at the very end.
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:
My latest book, The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement, is part of the Patheos Book Club for the next couple weeks. You can read an interview with me, and read an excerpt from the book about the christological office of “friend.”
Patheos has partnered with Emergent Village to create a new portal for innovative and experimental thoughts around church, mission, and faith. It’s called the Emergent Village Voice, and it’s a community blog that launched just this week. It will be created by dozens of contributors.
In his initial post, Andrew Jones draws a line between the ECM and café churches in Asia:
Coming off an emerging church conference featuring Brian McLaren and Nadia Bolz-Weber, Fred Schmidt is ambivalent about the ECM. And he’s got some questions:
If the Emerging Church movement has a contribution to make to Christianity, it is in reconnecting the spiritual and religious dots. It will need to demonstrate that it is not only possible to do God and church, but that it might also be necessary.
But the Emerging Church movement has its own challenge: If, as some have said, emerging Christianity is “evangelical, Protestant, Catholic, post-evangelical, anabaptist, Adventist, liberal, post-liberal, reformed, charismatic, neo-charismatic, post-charismatic, conservative, and post-conservative“—and that’s a quote—then the problem is obvious. How do you belong to a movement that is all of these things and none of them, all at the same time?
I can’t say what that answer will be. But, from where I stand, meeting the challenge lies in the ability of the movement to connect the dots for itself and for others:
- Can the church explain how doing God and doing church are related?
- Can it create a community that is genuinely grounded in those priorities?
- Can it draw effectively on its inheritance? [Read the rest at Patheos: Doing God and Doing Church]
This is a sponsored post and part of the Patheos Book Club. Check out the Book Club for more posts on this book and for responses from the author.
Years ago, I received a manuscript in the mail from my dear friends at Jossey-Bass. It was in the midst of a glut of books in the suddenly popular sub-genre of religious memoir (think Kathleen Norris, Anne Lamott, and Lauren Winner), and it was a book by a guy who had attended ORU and then seen the error of his ways. I declined, writing something like, “The world needs another memoir by a 27-year-old like I need another hole in my head.”
The book was by Patton Dodd, who has become a friend of mine and, as fate would have it, is now the managing editor of Patheos. (I’ve told Patton this story, and he has forgiven me for not endorsing his book.)
I’ve generally held to this in the years since; few memoirs hold my attention — a recent exception is David Carr’s riveting Night of the Gun, about which I’ve already blogged.
Alisa Harris’s Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from My Politics is just this: a religious memoir by a young woman who has seen the error of her parents’ ways.
I mosied over to the fellow Patheos blogger, Roger Olson’s blog, and there found a guest post by Brandon Morgan of the Void Collective (which, I must say, I like very much — the Void Collective, that is). Morgan claims to be sympathetic with the emerging church movement (ECM), though he consistently uses the third person plural (“they”) as opposed to the first person plural (“we”) when describing the movement.
Morgan’s experience at the Wild Goose Festival gives rise to his criticism of the ECM:
Upon returning from the Wild Goose festival, I felt that the festival was, among others things, a blatant attempt to show how well Emergent folks and mainline folks get along (particularly regarding the LGBTQ community) and how they generally have the same enemies (conservative evangelicals).
He goes on to use some anecdotal evidence — what he saw and heard at the festival — to conclude that the ECM doesn’t have anything new to offer the American church. Well, to be fair, most of his post is phrased in the form of rhetorical questions, which allows him to ask questions of the ECM without really landing the plane.* But it’s pretty clear that he’s disappointed with the ECM (he’s not the first).
This week, I’m going to be posting on different aspects of the Wild Goose Festival, which was, from my perpective, an overwhelmingly successful gathering. Truly, I cannot imagine that it could have gone much better than it did, and I’m proud to have been a volunteer at the first Goose.
I’ve got lots to say, so I’ll address different aspects of the festival, like the music, the talks, sexuality, and even some of my friendly suggestions to make the festival better next year.
But to begin, I want to post my thanksgivings:
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