Last fall I started collecting links and making lists.
I had seen one too many other lists of “Christian bloggers” that seemed to be almost entirely straight white men talking to other straight white men about the concerns of straight white men. So I started making lists of Christian bloggers who didn’t fall into that category.
This was partly for my own benefit — a way of expanding my own blog-reading, feed-subscribing circle. But it was also in part an attempt to highlight and amplify a diversity of voices within the church, because silencing or ignoring those other voices is unjust, and because silencing or ignoring those other voices means we all miss out on hearing what we couldn’t otherwise hear and learning what we couldn’t otherwise learn.
(That’s the positive way of saying this: Homogeneity makes you stupid. Which is also why, although these three lists are limited to blogs by Christians, no one should limit their circle of reading to these three lists.)
I’m very pleased that the list of LGBT Christian bloggers now includes 101 blogs. I invite you to share this list and to trumpet it as a ranking of the “Top-Ranked, Most Influential 101 Blogs by LGBT Christians That Everyone Should Be Reading.”
That list is full of excellent, thoughtful writing by some really wonderful people, and I do hope that my list can help to leverage a bit more exposure for them, expanding their audience and influence.
I also think just the fact of the list can be a positive thing. There are still people in the church who say there’s no such thing as an LGBT Christian. Oh yeah? Here’s a list of 101 of the people you’re pretending don’t exist. I dare you to go read their blogs and then come back and try to tell me that these are not your brothers and sisters in Christ.
We’ve also got whole branches of the church that continue to insist that women cannot be permitted to teach or that they are incapable of teaching. I know this is nonsense, because I am learning from them. And again I would dare those folks to work their way through the blogs written by Christian women in the Bonfire list and then come back and try to tell me that women cannot teach or preach or lead.
The Bonfire list now stands at 1,368 blogs, by the way.
I haven’t been as diligent in building and maintaining the other two lists linked by tabs up there at the top of this blog. The Mosaic — a list of Christian blogs beyond the wall of whiteness — now stands at 133 blogs, which reflects my own constrained outlook more than it does the scope of the universe that could and should be reflected there.
And my own blogroll is in desperate need of updating, expanding, pruning and revising.
So help me out here. If you know of any additions or corrections that need to be made to any of these lists, please let me know.
Please consider this an open thread for blog recommendations. Self-promotion, nepotism, logrolling and favoritism are all enthusiastically invited.
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