Entries from November 2007 ↓

Last night before we took the Christmas pictures, during our dinner prayer, my son acted like a three-year-old.

That’s okay, I guess. He is three after all. But here’s what that looks like during a prayer.

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Stephen Lawhead may just have the perfect author’s name, and the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour is featuring his new book, Scarlet, this week.

Since I was at an N. T. Wright retreat at Laity Lodge, I couldn’t post until today. (”Bishop Tom” is one of my heroes, and this weekend was about as wonderful as I could have dreamed. We talked about everything from theology to poetry to fantasy. After I dropped him and Mrs. Wright at the airport, I cried.)

Speaking of fantasy, I’m supposed to be reviewing page one of Lawhead’s fantasy of King Raven.

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In one sense, I’m a few days late on this Amazon Kindle thing. Newsweek already reviewed it for goodness sakes. I’ve been scooped by the lethargic print media. What can I say? It’s been a whole week squeezed into two and half work days. In another sense, I saw it coming months ago. (Not that is was so hard to see this one coming.)

Publishers are going to compete with free content.

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My wife wants to be Rachel Ray. Based on the dinner, she cooked last night, I’d say she’s well on her way! Pork chops with cooked apples. Homemade macaroni and cheddar with broccoli and curly, spiral noodles instead of tube macaroni.

At our house the Food Network is a favorite channel. We subscribe to Rachel Ray’s magazine. We buy her books. Our daughter has even adopted Rachel Ray’s signature word.

“Mommy, this is YUM-o!” she says.

Which got me thinking about context. I’ve heard statistics about cookbooks being one of the most popular selling genres in publishing. And travel books. Why is that?

Read the rest of this article at Writer… Interrupted.

I’m not sure how I feel about book publishers trying to use video to promote books, but this book looks pretty cool for my six-year-old daughter.

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My friend, Liz, is thinking about the universe today. She’s like that. And her wonderful essay culminates (for me) with the recognition that everything is interconnected.

With every breath, I change the atmosphere.
With every step, I change the ground we share.

There’s another side to that kind of thinking. Sometimes I like to remember exactly how small I am.

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Another poem today.

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 Practice Is an Art- poetry reading [3:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

First, Mark D. Roberts posted his notes from yesterday’s session on his site. The GodblogCon folks put Mark’s audio online as well. Here’s a full list of all audio files from GodblogCon, made available on the Scriptorium.)

Second, Hugh Hewitt invited us to be on his radio show this afternoon. (Mark has been on Hugh’s show several times, like yesterday, but this is a first for me!) We’re taping it at 1:30 PST, and it will go on the show later today. I think you’ll be able to stream it from his site this evening as well.

John Mark Reynolds said he was going to talk about focus and motivation. Like the notes on Al Mohler’s presentation, these are just the details I could jot down. They are not direct quotes, though they are my attempt to transcribe the essence of what was presented, often word for word.

John Mark Reynolds said…

The problem with virtual reality is that it is in fact reality. The real you will eventually come out. You can recreate yourself through a shiny website in self-declaration.

If you know nothing about theology, you can’t start a theology blog and suddenly become a theologian. You will just embarrass yourself.

Tolkein says we are “subcreators created in the image of God.” We can take things that have no value and give them value by naming them.

My daughter took a toy from the dollar store (it cost a dollar) and give it a name, Pumpkin. In doing so, she doesn’t create false value, but real value and meaning.

There is truth in the Velveteen Rabbit. You can’t love a rabbit and make it real, but you can create value where there was none before.

This is the power you have on your blog. You can’t recreate yourself or someone else. You can’t dehumanize anyone (except maybe yourself). But you can take an idea that is not a human being and give it more value.

You do not have the power to harm or change a soul. But you have the power to create a new story. What Plato calls a bastard reality. You can give things dignity that lacked it.

Jesus picked up a cup and it became the holy grail. One day before it was just a cup.

What we forget when we blog, is that we are naming a kind of reality and creating in our blog a narrative and a story.

Three Phases of Blogging: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven. Often we go through them all everyday as we blog. Or twice a day.

First, you woke up and you named your blog.

You create a middle reality the way Tolkein created Middleearth. Or Lewis created Narnia. Your blog is Narnia.

Good virtual space is coherent and touches real space. Things shouldn’t happen for utterly incoherent reasons. You can’t become arbitrary.

Some people believe in free markets no matter who it kills. Some people believe in ideologies more than they believe in real people.

As we blog, we are creating a middle world of ideas between the world God made and Nothing. If your middle world gets disconnected from the real world, it will move toward Nothing and Evil. Make sure your real life isn’t suffering for Narnia.
Good virtual space is coherent and consistent with real space.

If you get a divorce because you built a better Narnia, your virtual world will have the same flaw that let to your divorce.

This is the Christian who would rather win an argument on his blog rather than be charitable.

I have been blogging for as long as my kids can remember. Literally.

How is this virtual argument important and connecting to the real world? If you can’t answer that question, you will get into the long dark night of the blogging soul. And you will stop blogging.

Write less about self, more about an external idea that is demonstrated through self.

If you write about yourself, you will gradually discover that you are really boring.

Hell is the place where you get to say I to the IAM. So you get to be. Hell is the place where you get to be yourself with yourself forever.

Everything should be your self engaged with something else.

You need to interact with the external world, rather than force the external world through your narrow and limited vision.

You need to be functionally in a group blog by finding three or four bloggers who you are constantly interacting with and reading.

In old media, the goal of a magazine was to find a niche and publish to those people. Blogging is strange because it is somewhere between permanent (like a book) and temporary (like a conversation).

Blogs that fail are constantly dealing with the immediate. But a person is too boring to have a good immediate thought on a regular basis.

How can this form a successful blog? The Long Tail will eventually drive a successful blog. Don’t write things that are only of immediate interest.

Write more posts as if you are Penguin. They sell 40,000 copies of Jane Austen every year forever.

Blogging Hell is this attitude: “I didn’t write anything today so no one will visit.”

An interesting blog post is when you are wrong and you respond.

You will never escape the albatross of the bad post you wrote.

You are learning publicly. The only person who should be pontificating is Benedict. But you can learn publicly.

Where am I going? What do I know? How can I create a metastory on my blog that is going someplace?

Purgatory of blogging… it begins when you write a bad post. If you blog every day you will write a disasterously bad post every month if you are careful.

Most of us can blog or edit, but we can’t do both because we aren’t getting paid. Anything you read on Scriptorium has been written in 20 minutes and read through once.

Go through the purgatory of admitting and publishing your mistakes as publicly as you made them.

Rotate your blog around three pillar ideas:
1) Goodness
2) Truth
3) Beauty.

If you constantly ask yourself, is it good, is it true, is it beautiful, you’ll answer no, no, no. But you at least tried.

We need to believe in noble pagans.

Godblogcon is part of the blogworld not because we have something to say to them, but because they have something to say to us! Dante learned from Virgil.

Find a noble pagan that you can learn from. It will help you avoid becoming stale.

My goal is to see the face of God. No Christian lives for the sake of a task. If you blog for the sake of blogging, you will quit. Ask yourself, “Is my blogging proceeding by hope through faith in charity? Am I seeing the face of God through the experience of blogging.”

The tone of your blog should always be humility with hope. We’re not sure of what we think we know, but we are sure that there is something we don’t know that we can know. Have the temerity of hope.

Go forward in hope. And go forward in faith. There are somethings that you hope in more than others. Connect them to reality, which is so dubious.

If you are going to blog, read books. The worst new media relies on new media. More Churchhill. More Lincoln. Less Rush Limbaugh.

God doesn’t need our defense. Don’t destroy the thing you love in your attempt to defend the thing you love.

Step back from the world in holiness, not so we can abandon the world, but so we can see it.

These are my notes from the keynote session at GodblogCon in Las Vegas. They are rough notes, not direct quotations. I apologize in advance if I accidentally misrepresented anything.

Opening Remarks, John Mark Reynolds… says “skepticism is a Christian virtue.” That’s the philosophy of the Tory Honors program (a great books degree program).

Introduction, Dustin Steve says… Las Vegas is a city of promises.. but they often come up short. For many, new media works the same way.

Some fellow Christians see us chasing new media as if the medium is more important than our message.

What do GodBloggers bring to new media? Teleology. Purpose. We understand that things pass away. Cutting edge technologies today will be replaced by cutting edge technologies of tomorrow.

This expo is more than just another tradeshow. It represents the birth of an entirely new industry… that will change the way news is distributed, ideas are exchanged and stories are told.

Our motivation for blogging is not rooted in technology, hype, or hysteria. It is a high calling for us.

Throughout history, Christians have engaged in culture through a variety of media with one message.

We need think how we ought to convey the timeless message of Christianity through this medium.

Keynote, Al Mohler says..

It is an incredible anamolie for a Southern Baptist to be in Las Vegas… especially when I tell people

“We are here in LV because we believe that the Lord will hold us accountable for our stewardship in this new media.”

“We come to this place of deception in order to talk about the truth.”

Calvin Coolidge had very little to say and he was proud of saying very little. When he died, Dorothy Parker was told, “Calvin Coolidge is dead.” She said, How can you tell?

The Christian faith is tied to words. To be a Christian is to bear a responsibility to communicate, and to communicate in a way that bears witness to the truth of what we believe.

Christianity and the mandate of communication—imago dei. We are linguistic creatures—we communicate in symbols and abstractions. That must be at least a part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

The gift of language is one of God’s good gifts. Genesis three describes our communication difficulties. Sin affects every dimension of our lives, including communication.

Communication can now be measured in terms of whether it is a truth or a lie.

Biblical faith involves words.

God forfeited his own personal privacy so that his own creatures might know him.

We are here [at godblogcon] because we have confidence that God has spoken to us. Before we spoke, we heard. Before we speak, we are confident that we will be heard.

Francis Schaeffer’s most important book… He Is There and He Is Not Silent. I read that when I was fifteen and I don’t know how much I understood. I lived on the title for a long time.

The incarnation is more than communication, but it is never less than communication.

The church is a speaking and communicating people. Teach, learn, preach, tell.

The church is a communicating people of urgency. We are to be ready to speak. Ready to give an answer.

Romans 10. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. Speaking, hearing, word.

“Wherever you go preach, if necessary use words.” Words are always necessary. Let our words be righteous, true, but let our words be words.

The missionary movement is a wordy movement. It is more than that, but it can’t be less than wordy.

2) Christianity and the technologies of communication
Heb. 1 God himself utilized various means of communication. A pillar of fire. A column of smoke. Balaam’s donkey. God uses whatever mechanism is to his holy choosing in order to communicate. Tablets. Scrolls. Letters. Books and the early age of the codex, a book between covers.

The jewish people were among the most literate and literary of the ancient world. And continue to be.

The first four centuries of the Roman empire, nearly all of the written material is Christian material.

Paul warns that rhetoric is not to overcome the message. He uses a classic Greek rhetorical style to suggest that you can’t trust rhetoric.

Guttenberg press was the emergence of a technology whose future was very uncertain at the time.

Books are less expensive now than they have ever been in all of history—especially in terms of consumer buying power.

Jerome was able to pull the library together because of some rich patrons.

Gutenberg made the cost of a book go down, but it was a massive undertaking to produce a book.

It was the movement it became until it became unstoppable. If you can do this with one press, you can do this with many presses.

Luther was one of the first people to publish pamphlets. Normal people could hold in their hands what was previously only available to the elite.

300 years after Gutenberg… first newspaper… nothing like freedom of the press… Kings knew printing press was not to their advantage, and they were right.

About half of all material printed until about 1900 was explicitly Christian material. Devotional, theological, moral…

Go back to the highwater mark of printed age in Victorian England. 16 daily newspapers in London.

Spurgeon’s sermons preached on Sunday were available by Wednesday. Called “penny sermons.”

The average Victorian home had at least three books. KJV. Shakespeare’s Plays. Pilgrim’s Progress.

Mass market paper backs were originally an embarrassment to publishers and early authors. Paper covers were undignified.

30% of all books published now are never in hardcover, only in trade paperback.

Radio had many early adopters. It spread very fast. It’s secret was its simplicity. Early Boyscout movement had the badge: how to create a radio. People discovered that they could listen while they did other things. Radio allowed communication to be part of the background noise.

30% of people who listen to radio are doing so while they are driving.

It can be used for good or for ill. Christians have often misused radio for hateful speeches.

Revolution of the cassette tape came in the 1970s. And finally there is didactic material available.

Film is often an embarrassment to Christian communication because of two great deficits in the Christian community: money and artistic ability.

Microprocessor changes everything. It is made out of silicon. Sand! And a little bit of wire. It is beyond inexpensive. It is freely available almost anywhere.

Just twenty years ago, you’re looking at the introduction of the IBM pc. And even then IBM wasn’t sure most homes needed one. The market was to nerds. They thought businesses might consider the PC dangerous.

78% have immediate access to a personal computer. The younger you go, the higher it gets. It is just as likely that an adolescent will have his own computer as that he will have his own tv (almost one to one).

Current Rolling Stone has an interview with one of the founders of the internet. It was anything but inevitable that there would suddenly be a system for connecting normal people to this, much less making it possible for anyone to find anything.

We needed the necessity for an economic incentive to drive this. That was apparently email. If you have the capacity for email, then you have the capacity for an internet browser.

Blogging platforms are just seven years old. Ipod is only 5 years old.

You are not human anymore if you are not pod. Cogito ergo pod.

1990 new media vs. old media. Old world was atoms. New world was bits. Old world was static and very expensive. Highly edited because it was highly controlled. New media is poorly edited, relatively edited, or completely UNEDITED. Often, nobody sees it. That’s the problem with blogging. You are posting to the world, what no eyes have ever seen. It is always possible to say something colossally wrong.

Control by elite in old media is becoming even more so with the big conglomerates. New media is democratic in the same way that the telephone is democratic. Everyone has access to the telephone. There is no way that the gov. can keep up with 5 billion people who have access to a technology.

Old media is old generation.
New media is new generation.

There is no sixteen year old in America that can’t have a blog or a myspace page. It isn’t even remarkable. They have the expertise and the time and they are really good at. They can tell us what breakfast cereal they had this morning.

Old media hires creative talent. New media IS creative talent.
Old media was always delayed. The process requires delay.

New media supplanting old media?
1) It’s never as fast as its prophets predict. Television is still a very valuable commodity. Newspapers are declining, but profits are not. More books are being sold right now than ever before. Radio is still a hot commodity because you can multitask. When you blog, are you blogging in silence? [I do…]

WORD OF CAUTION: Don’t forget old media! If you want to reach large, strategic portions of the population, you have to use old media. New media is highly segmented. Old media is mass market.

TWO METAPHORS: Wild Wild West. Unclaimed, untamed territory. There is no sheriff and this is a problem. It doesn’t mean we don’t go there, but it means we need to be careful.

In new media there is a tremendous danger of misrepresentation and manipulation.

Making mistakes in old media is costly. In new media it is just not that way yet!
Should Christians go into the wild wild west? YES! But don’t be stupid. There isn’t a sheriff out there.

It is a mission field.
Concern: quality. Pay attention to quality in terms of the content (more so than images, etc.)

Christians and the ethics of communication. Our words will judge us. James warns against the power of the tongue (and printed word by implication). Chrsitians are to be compassionate, courageous truth tellers. This is just as true for the blog as for the book. Any media can be misused. A book can be Mein Kampf or the Bible.

We need to make very certain that we are not manipulating. We should persuade, but not with half truths and faulty logic.

We need to resist snarkiness and sarcasm and amusement.

Quality. Credibility. Accountability.

In old media, the accountability was always who can fire you if you get it wrong. In new media is you get it wrong, there is no one who can pull the plug.

We need to make sure that our blogs are accountable to the Christian church. Someone ought to be able to call us on this. Our fellow Christians in the local church need to be reading our blogs and holding us personally accountable.

Credibility must be personal. There should be no anonymity. Walter Cronkite was a real person. We knew who he was, where he came from. We knew his story and it gave us a filter for how to listen to him.

Anonymous blogs are a scandal. More about me: My name is Daniel. That is a crime.

Intellectual credibility. We must make serious arguments. We can’t post something and just say, “Isn’t that stupid.”

This is a time for serious intellectual engagement from the Crhsitan community and that means a rhetorical argument.

Regardless of length, make an argument. Put yourself on the line. Don’t just be a commentator. Be accountable to the larger world of

Cultural credibility. This is a big issue. We need to talk to people where they are.

Theological credibility. Don’t be a heretic! If you are going to pose as a Christian writer, know what Christianity is! We need that on a bumper sticker. Don’t Be A Heretic.

We need to have technological sophistication and credibility. Our links and pictures need to work.

Don’t write anything you don’t want your parents, children, friends, or pastor to read. Use language that you can live with over time. Write for more than today.

Someone, somewhere is going to find your blog in the future. Don’t do things that will embarrass you.

The digital generation is the most unevangelized generation since the beginning of the 19th century.

Blogging is here to stay. The revolution is going to expand. It is the wild, wild west. There is no sheriff, but we will answer.