OK, so, what happened was I made a list. And then, as sometimes happens, I got kind of carried away.
See, this guy had published his list of The Top 200 Christian Blogs or some such, and it turned out to be, like, almost all men. And then when people asked him why he hadn’t included more women, he was all, like, “I would have, but there just aren’t any out there.”
This seemed like one of those rare occasions on which being a smartass might actually be constructive, so I first posted the text of the guy’s flaccid mansplanation of his exclusion of women’s voices, turning each word into a link to a different blog by a Christian woman. But that was only 120-some blogs, and it seemed that if some guy was going to claim that it was impossible to find 200 such blogs, well then the only proper response was to list 200 of them for him.
“It only takes a spark,” as the song says. Many of those blogs had blogrolls leading me to discover even more fantastic sites, many of which also had blogrolls. Two hundred quickly turned into 400, and I figured I’d stop at 500. That seemed like a big enough number to make the point.
But then I got past 500, and still had dozens of blogrolls to explore, and I got caught up in the logic of the thing, which was that all of these voices deserved to be included. And so I kept going …
The result is that I’ve now got this list, The Bonfire, of more than 2,500 blogs.
It’s a really good list. It’s not just long, it’s deep — full of hundreds of amazing people, fantastic writers and unique voices.
One problem with this list, though, is that it’s in some ways too long. I’ve steadfastly resisted curating it or attempting to categorize it beyond those initial three criteria: Christian. Woman. Blog. I didn’t want to filter or edit or limit or censor the list in any way beyond that, imposing any sort of theological or political qualifications. That’s a strength of this list, but it can also be a weakness. It’s great if you’re looking for lots of things, but it’s overwhelming if you’re looking for something in particular. The unfiltered, uncurated, uncategorized Internet can be a bit of a mess — and any list of 2,565 blogs is bound to be messy.
So this giant list of blogs by Christian women really needs to get organized … but not by me. Which leads to a second problem with this list: I don’t think it belongs here. I’m a Christian blogger, but ideally, if someone is going to manage and expand and organize and publicize a list like this one, that person ought to do better than two-out-of-three. Or, to put it more bluntly, it just seems wrong for a man to be “in charge of” such a project.
In the right hands, I can imagine a list like this one helping to amplify women’s voices in the church and on the Web. In the right hands, such a list could provide the basis for a terrific Tumblr or Twitter feed aggregating the best of these voices and driving more traffic, readers, commenters, friends, listeners and learners their way. In the right hands, it could at the very least be a terrific resource for people seeking Christian women’s voices online.
But I don’t think that mine are the right hands. So I’d like to, as the song also says, pass it on, into the right hands. Into more than one set of the right hands, even.
At the moment, I don’t quite know whose hands those would be. I’m open to suggestions, requests, invitations, volunteers, etc.
Any ideas?
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