A new site recommendation. the church and postmodern culture: conversation

I’ve been doing my best to search the vast blogosphere for what I need, but I figured some of you might have some good referrals. I am looking to link up with some college interns/ministers/priests in Catholic campus ministries, whether they are on-campus, or off-campus. If any of you have some good suggestions, or some good blogs in this area that you are reading let me know. As a Protestant I am beginning to realize how little I sometimes tend to get out of my own little bubble.

Please let me know.

If you have noticed that my blogging has been sparse at best, well, that’s because I’m trying to take my own advice, and follow something of the principle that I listed in my last entry: “Stress, Recover, Improve.” I have been realizing how drained I have been in different areas of my life, especially in the blogging arena.

Therefore, my thinking usually goes something like this: “Rhett, I know you don’t want to write a blog entry, nor do you feel like you have anything worthwhile to say, but if you don’t just put something out there, then people will stop coming to your blog, and you will lose traffic, and all that hard work will go down the drain.” Totally crazy, right? Totally irrational, right? And anyways, isn’t blogging supposed to be fun as well as informative. This is something of the wrestling I have been going through.

I have also found that blogging has sapped other areas of my intellectual, creative, and reflective life. It’s hard for me to sit down and work on some writing when I spend good time working on a blog.

So I’m just wondering where blogging fits into my life. How to properly integrate it, so that I’m not driven by blogging, or vice-versa. For now, I find blogging to be a great outlet to connect with others, to share ideas, to challenge one another. How that looks, I’m not sure.

I admire bloggers like Mark Roberts who are so disciplined and can blog so eloquently and comprehensive on one topic for months. It’s like the unfolding of a book before our eyes. I also admire Brent Thomas who post different issues everyday that he is very passionate about. It’s like a sermon everyday. I couldn’t do that.

Then I also admire bloggers like Mike DeVries who seems to really enjoy blogging for itself, and doesn’t seem to feel the pressure of putting out material everyday. He posts on what interests him, from what he is reading, to what is happening in his community, to what he thinks on issues relating to the church, theology, culture, etc. I admire someone like Andrew Jones who seems like he blogs non-stop, except when he is on one of his amazing pilgrimages, but even then he seems to find a wireless connection. Amazing. The breadth of his blogging, and the issues he tackles, from the “emerging church” to technology, to theology, etc. I love his blog.

These are just four of the bloggers I like to visit everyday, and they are all different in style, technique and theological outlook. But somehow, their differences contribute to a broader understanding of what the theological, Christian, blogging community looks like and I think we are all richer for it. So I guess I’m just wondering where I fit into all of this? What are my gifts? What should be my contribution?

I have been blogging about a year and a half…or since December 2004. I remember setting up my first blog on our college group website in August of 2004, but only making a few attempts and later deleting them. It’s hard to believe, but two years ago when I started telling people I wanted to add a blog to our website they looked at me like I was crazy, or like I was speaking some foreign language.

But it has been fun, and I eventually moved the blogging site over to where it is now in May of 2005.

I tell you all of that, so that I can let you know that I am going to make some changes to the site. Even after a year it seems a little behind the times. There are some new features I would like to add, as well as some new writing themes I would like to add as well. Oh, and if you have any features that you would like to see added, please let me know.

So if you visit the blog and it looks like it is incomplete in some way…well, that probably means I am busy changing pieces of it bit by bit. So bear with me. But more than likely, you won’t notice the process because one of the gifts of being a night owl is that I can get everything done while you all are sleeping…uh, actually, aren’t all bloggers night owls?