I tend to find some ‘interviews’ with bloggers a bit stuffy and self-serving sometimes - this is an exceptional hoot.
Jordon Cooper interviews Wendy Cooper.
If you are going to interview cool friends, who better to start with than your spouse? (I think they have a healthy marriage;^)

BloggerCon
I haven’t seen much online about the BloggerCon religion and the internet session. Fructus Ventris attended the session and isn’t afraid to say answers don’t come as easily as the questions do.

Like any good discussion/seminar, there were more questions than answers in the room. We could have spent the whole session just chewing on the concept of what is a religion and what then is a religiously oriented blog? Given that the room included everything from atheists to zen buddhists, it went all over the field and nothing was really answered.

What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that I see reflected in blogs a core difference between Catholicism and other religions - I don’t exactly know how to phrase this but it has to do with having our religion infuse every aspect of our being for better or worse. The only other religion that I know of that has that kind of infusion into self is Orthodox Judaism, which also has a lot of authoritarian aspects. Catholics try to baptize the culture in which we live as far as possible, and yet also try to eschew the sins of the culture. It seems to be to be a dynamic that borders on paradox. But I digress.

This has become a common complaint. What I find interesting is that god-blog pundits aren’t addressing it. It has gotten to the stage that the civil pundits who don’t permit their comment threads to get abusive, are the exception, not the rule. And the US election is still seven months away. I wish I could ask several pundits what or who they believe they are serving with some of the puffery.

There was quite a bit of discussion about the generally polite tone of most religious blogs even when the discussion got heated. The exceptions seemed to be more in the area of politics than theology. Blogs and email are both asynchronous communication, but the structure of blogging seems to lead to a different dynamic. I wish we could have spent more time on this concept.

Blogging is a young medium and I doubt god-blogs are going to get neatly defined, slotted and labelled in a few discussions. I think it is great that religion and the internet is even on the radar screen.