Good article on Rev. Dan Schultz of Street Prophets in The New York Times.

I’ve had the opportunity to steer NYT reporters to US bloggers, (no I’m not telling who) and the opportunity to mention Street Prophets never came up.
I’ve also had the opportunity to steer other US media to bloggers, but the topics haven’t fit the Street Prophet genre.
This unique community and this pastor deserve thoughtful media attention and I’m glad the NYT has chosen to do so.

Somehow this balancing act seems to work, meeting the needs of two wildly disparate flocks and reconciling Mr. Schultz to himself. As someone who suffers from, and is medicated for, bipolar disorder, Mr. Schultz has, of necessity, become an expert on reckoning with extremes. “There’s a part of me that’s been angry since I was a kid,” Mr. Schultz, 39, said in an interview. “Part of that is my illness, and part of it is a deep sense that the world isn’t the place it was meant to be. I had to find a productive place to put that anger or it would swallow me whole. And part of my spiritual journey has been to claim that anger as spiritual.”

Dan is more acerbic than Gordon Atkinson of Real Live Preacher (who wrestles with depression) and not as witty as the UK’s Mad Priest of Of Course I could be Wrong, who has also wrestled with mental health issues. As has yours truly.
All three of these hard working ministers bring valuable insights through blogging and all three write with a tough and fair compassion that has been born in the school of hard knocks that many in the US religious right find intolerable.
The internet gives people a voice many churches wouldn’t tolerate.
Dan, Gordon and Jonathan have strong communities and people of faith supporting them in real life and online.

Mr. Schultz embodied both familiarity and new vigor. He was a “P.K.” – a preacher’s kid – who had grown up in his father’s church 80 miles away in Madison. After earning degrees in English and history at the University of Wisconsin, and in the process falling away from religious observance, Mr. Schultz returned to it as he earned a master’s degree in divinity from Emory University in Atlanta. He had pastored a church in Georgia and substituted at several congregations in Pennsylvania before being called by Salem.

Along the way, Mr. Schultz chose as his theological heroes Reinhold Neibuhr, Martin Buber and Jack Kerouac. What impresses many congregants here far more, though, is the way Mr. Schultz and his wife, Jennifer Milazzo-Schultz, have enacted their faith by taking in two foster children. He has also managed to express his politics without imposing them. Over all, we’re a fairly conservative congregation, but everybody loves him,” said Denise Goetsch, a member of the church’s governing board. “Whatever people’s personal politics are, they’re here because they believe in God. And Dan’s been good at making friends with pretty much anybody.”

Street Prophets
Real Live Preacher
Of course I could be wrong
(Now, maybe The Times of London or The Guardian will profile our beloved Mad Priest. Stranger things have happened.:^)