Month: January 2005

It’s interesting to me that many Christians seem to place so much faith in the “marketplace of ideas.” The sub-sub-title of Hewitt’s book Blog, for example, is “Why you must know how the blogosphere is smashing the old media monopoly and giving individuals power in the marketplace of ideas.” (Emphasis added.) (No, sub-sub-title isn’t a typo, the book has two subtitles — go figure.)

The “marketplace of ideas” is a metaphor first employed by Justice Oliver Wendell Homes in a 1919 U.S. Supreme Court opinion concerning the First Amendment. It’s become a central metaphor in free speech jurisprudence. The idea is that censorship is unnecessary because bad ideas will lose in the marketplace to good ideas.

Many politically and intellectually active Christians, particularly those of us who blog, consciously or unconsciously have internalized this metaphor. We believe that we can win the “culture wars” if we gain access to, and perhaps control over, the fora of cultural communication. This seems to me to be on of the central messages of Hewitt’s “Blog”: Christian soldiers and conservatives should get into the blogsphere and flood it with our ideas, which will win on the merits over the pap served up in the mainstream media.

Why should we have such confidence? Scripture gives no hint that good ideas will triumph in the marketplace. In fact, it tells us the contrary: “First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” (2 Peter 3:3.) Scripture reminds us that the truth we proclaim is “foolishness” to the world:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” (I Cor. 1:18.)

In that same passage in First Corinthians, Paul continues with the exhortation that our principal responsibility is not to make arguments or perform miraculous signs, but to “preach Christ.” I love the balance Paul reaches here — a balance that’s as relevant to us in 2005 as it was to the first century church. The “proof” of our faith isn’t in the Catholic Scholastic’s syllogisms, the Evangelical’s neat apologetic, or the Presbyterian’s carefully worded confession; nor is it in the Pentacostal’s signs and wonders or the Charismatic’s emotional immediacy. Read it as Paul says it:

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength. (I Cor. 1:20-31.)

The “proof” of our faith, then, is the person of Christ working in and through His Church. And the person of Christ, along with His Church, will be rejected by the so-called wise and powerful of this world. The “marketplace of ideas” in this sense isn’t a functional market because the consumers of ideas lack perfect, or even decent, information about what they are consuming if they reject the person of Christ. We cannot expect our ideas to “win” in such a market.

What we can expect is the vindication of truth in Christ’s return. After Peter warns his readers about “scoffers,” he reminds them that Christ will indeed return one day “like a thief.” (2 Peter 3:10.) The Kindgom of God prevails, not because of the invisible hand of a marketplace of ideas functioning among enlightened people, not because a mass of Christian bloggers overwhelms the mainstream media, but because Christ returns as king and judge to bring to fruition the work He begain in the Church.

Should we then give up on promoting our ideas, in the blogsphere or elsehwere? No. Peter also tells us we should “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” — with “gentleness and respect”(!)(1 Peter 3:15). And the fact that the Church’s prophetic message will be rejected in the broader marketplace of ideas is no excuse to quit the bold proclamation of the gospel. We must always remember, however, that the idea of the gospel is not a market commodity that we must promote the way Nike promotes basketball shoes. It is the “power of God” and the “wisdom of God,” which we proclaim in faithful expectation of His return.

Version 1.o of the Emerging Blogroll is done. Go to this link to download the text file that contains the script. Click on the link and it will display the blogroll on a new page. Right click on the resulting page, select “view source,” and then copy the code. Past the code into the apropriate place in your blog template, and viola, you’ll have a ready-made blogroll of self-identified “Emerging” sites. For a sample, see the “Emerging Blogroll” on the left sidebar of this site.

If the method I described above doesn’t work, you can right click on the link to download the text file, open it in Notepad or another text editor, and then copy the code from there. If you have any problems with this, let me know, and I’ll try to fix them and/or help out.

For those who still wish to sign up for the blogroll, please send me an email with your blog URL and blog name. I’ll update the roll periodically. Also, keep watching this space for an OPML file that will allow you to quickly add each of the sites on the Roll to your newsreader.

Inspired by the Evangelical Blogroll created by Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, and following up on a discussion about blogrolls on The Ooze, I’m starting an “Emergent Blogroll.” This will result in a script generated through the Blogrolling service that anyone will be able to paste into their blog template, generating a ready-made “Emergent Blogroll” for your own site.

If you wish to participate, please leave the title and URL of your blog as a comment to this post. I’ll compile the blogroll and post the script code in a later post.

In Isaiah 30, God (through Isaiah) chides His people for wanting to hear only what they want to hear. These are cautionary words for us today as well. They speak so powerfully that I don’t have much commentary to add:

There are rebellious people, deceitful children,
children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction.
They say to the seers,
“See no more visions!”
and to the prophets,
“Give us no more visions of what is right!”
Tell us pleasant things,
prophesy illusions.
Leave this way,
get off this path,
and stop confronting us
with the Holy One of Israel!”

. . .

This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it.”

May we find repentance, rest, quietness and trust.

This is the second in my “Spiritual Perils of Bogging” series. Today I focus on Envy.

Envy is a danger inherent in any “public” work. As an academic, for example, publication is the coin of the realm. All academics compete for space in the presigious journals within their fields. It can be extraordinarily difficult to appreciate the work of other academics without thinking “why should he have gotten this great article placement — I could have done it better.” Sometimes there’s a temptation to criticize and discredit others out of envy. This is particularly the case early in an academic career when life is “publish or perish.”

The same dynamic can apply, I think, in the blogsphere. I know I’ve thought many times, “why does so-and-so get all that traffic? He doesn’t say anything remarkable. I should be the guy mentioned in Hugh Hewitt’s book, not him.” The motivation for maintaining and promoting a blog can become more to compete than to participate in a conversation.

Most of us in the “tail” of the faith-based blogsphere will need to make peace with the fact that we will never get to the fat part of the traffic curve. Maybe sometimes we “tail-ers” will have more of substance to say than the “big guys,” but our responsibility is to keep saying it as well as we can and to make it available as best we can. If God has plans to expand the influence of my little blog He’ll accomplish them, and if He doesn’t, I’ll try to be faithful to whatever His purposes might be.

For those of us who name Christ as Lord, our blogs, like anything else, are His to use as He sees fit. There’s no place, then, for any of us to envy the “success” of other bloggers. “Success,” after all, shouldn’t be counted in page hits, unique visits, or Instapundit mentions, but in faithfulness.

I’m a big fan of “Ambient” music, particularly electronic Ambient. Ambient music is more concerned with tones and sounds than with structure or traditional harmony. In this sense, Ambient is a very “postmodern” form of music. I love playing with sound, what in Ambient music we call painting a “soundscape.” So here is a link to an Ambient composition of mine called Psalm 23. As you might guess, it’s inspired by Psalm 23. I’d encourage you to read the Psalm as you listen to the composition.

Technical data: sequenced using Cakewalk Project 5 running three instances of Native Instruments Absynth 3..

By day I’m a mild mannered (usually) law professor, on Sundays I’m a rocking guitarist and worship leader. I love writing music and producing songs in my basement digital studio. I’d like to highlight some of my original songs here. This one is called Glorious (click on the link to hear the Mp3 file.) It’s just me, my guitar and my voice. See the extended entry for the lyrics and technical notes, and drop my a note if you like it. Enjoy!

I just got a copy of Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth, another book that’s been burning up the faith-based blogsphere. This looks like a winner. I’ve only skimmed a few sections, but here’s a thought from the section titled “Enlightenment Idol”:

The hubris of the Enlightenment lay in thinking that Reason was . . . a transcendent power, providing infallible knowledge. Reason became nothing less than an idol, taking the place of God as the source of absolute Truth.

Mainstream Evangelicaldom may be learning from postmodern thought after all. . . .

I received my copy of Hugh Hewitt’snew book, Blog. It’s a book that’s having a significant impact in the blogsphere, particularly among Evangelical bloggers. What’s the fuss?

I’m afraid I don’t have a great answer to that question. I liked the book — I really wanted to like it — but I didn’t love it.

Here’s what I liked: Hewitt does a good job of demonstrating how the blogsphere has grown to rival, and in some celebrated recent examples such as “Rathergate,” to supplant or at least upstage, traditional print and broadcast media. And, he makes some cogent, although not revolutionary, observations about how business organizations should utilize blogs and bloggers. He also refers to some useful blogs that newbies in the blogsphere will want to visit, although at times he seems mostly to be shilling for his blogging friends and promoting his own site.

Here’s what I didn’t like. The book reads like it was cranked out over a few long weekends. If you’re looking for serious analysis of blogging as a social or political phenomenon, this isn’t it. There are many breathless sections about how the blogsphere has “shattered” the “MSM” (Main Stream Media), interrupted with long block quotes and padded with filler such as an “Appendix” comprised of Hewitt’s “early writings on blogging” and a second “Appendix” comprised of e-mails from visitors to Hewitt’s website. Any 220 page book with nearly 70 pages of appendices from old, disjointed writings suggests, to me, that the book’s main themes perhaps aren’t that well developed. It also lacks an index, which again suggests perhaps some haste in getting to press.

The book’s brevity might be understandable if it were a monograph on one or two tightly argued points. It isn’t. In fact, it’s difficult to tease out the book’s main focus. Is it primarily a call to arms for conservative bloggers, or more of a business blogger’s how-to? Is this book in the tradition of Sean Hannity or Stephen Covey? It seems to want to be both, and as a result does strike oil with either.

In addition to problems of style and organization, I think the book includes several important substantive missteps. It seems to me that Hewitt suffers from myopia when he compares blogging to the information revolution that followed Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press. Blogging isn’t the revolution — the Internet is the revolution. Blogging is just the latest tool made possible by the Internet. The sorts of discussions now happening in blogs once happened (and still do happen) on bulletin boards and chat rooms. Years ago they happened mostly on the Usenet and on proprietary boards such as The Well and Delphi.

I would agree that blogging has accelerated this trend by making this sort of informal information exchange easier. Yet it’s important to place blogging in context. Blogging may persist, or it may go the way of the Usenet as new tools arise. The Internet, though, is here to stay. A truly strategic vision for communication will embrace this new tool while recognizing its possibly transitory nature. That Hewitt fails to mention, for example, the growing importance of RSS feeds and newsreaders is a major omission in a book like this.

Hewitt also spends little time on the potential dangers of the blogsphere. He does recognize that jihadist groups have taken to the Internet and blogging, which he seems to employ as a call to arms for good people to occupy the space. Yet, he seems so enchanted by the blogsphere’s potential to correct perceived bias in the traditional print and broadcast media that he never addresses the way network effects can magnify the impact of false information. A case in point, which Hewitt ignores, is the post-election blogswarm about vote fraud started by a blogger whose statistical analysis of the exit polls was inaccurate. Hewitt even briefly refers to the concept of memes, without acknowledging that memes are often bits of false information that replicate virulently over a network. (I’d give a cite to Hewitt’s book where he references memes, but the lack of an index makes the job of searching too difficult).

Finally, Hewitt seems too sanguine about the commercialization of blogging. He goes so far as to suggest pricing models for blog banner ads. Call me a purist, but the last thing I want to see is the extensive commoditization of blogs. In fact, there’s a real danger that the commercialization of blogs will signal the decline of the blogsphere. Public relations professionals have already recognized the importance of the blogsphere and are becoming adept at “seeding” stories in influential blogs, just as they seed stories through “leaks” to the traditional news media. A commercialized, coopted blogsphere will lose its authenticity. Surprisingly, Hewitt doesn’t seem concerned about this. In my view, what we need in the blogsphere is writers who say what they think regardless of the consequences. Once you begin eating from the hands of sponsors, advertisers, and public relations flackers, you become the MSM.

So, if you’re new to blogging or just curious about it and want to learn more, get Biz Stone’s Blogging, which contains much more nuts and bolts information about blog culture and tools. If you’re an active blogger, read Hewitt’s book, but blog about how much more interesting a book it could have been if it had been a more thorough analysis of the blogsphere’s place in the Internet and the culture at large.

The first “spiritual peril” of blogging on which I want to focus is the temptation to self-aggrandizement. If we’re honest about it, many of us who blog will have to admit that we want readers and traffic not so much to win, influence or learn from other people as to be validated by them. Lots of traffic and links means I’m valued. It means there is a pseudo-community over which I command influence. It means — or at least I’m tempted to believe it means — I can think, argue and write better than lots of the “other guys.” A blog can become sort of a “Temple to Me” on the web.

The temptation toward self-aggrandizement manifests itself in a few key ways. A few influential Evangelical bloggers, for example, display gushingly laudatory blurbs received about their blogs from other bloggers or public figures. I mention this not to point fingers, but it seems to me that there’s no purpose for this other than naked self-promotion. This becomes particularly evident if you trace the sources of the blurbs — they often seem to lead in circles. Many Evangelical bloggers also display their ranking in the TLB Ecosystem. Again, to me there seems to be little purpose in this other than to display pride in a high ranking. Self-promotion can also become a factor in the choice to display information in sidebars about books we read or other personal activities. Are we listing those books to show how smart and well-read we are, or to promote conversation about the books?

Perhaps the most insidious form of self-aggrandizement in blogging, however, is “link love” abuse. It’s curious, and frustrating, to me that many of the “elite” Evangelical bloggers seem sometimes to engage in an incestuous link love cycle. They link to each other and then announce on their own sites how the other guy mentioned them in a post. There seems to be at least an implicit understanding that this cycle exists primarily for the purpose of mutual self-promotion. And the “little guy” bloggers, like me, aren’t exempt from this practice. How often do we troll on the “big guys'” blogs hoping to get a link back to our own sites?

Of course, promotion and publicity aren’t evil per se. If you do have something valuable to say, and you want to engage in a conversation with others about it, it’s appropriate and necessary to try your best to get the word out. The blogsphere’s social convention of link love can be a good thing if done in the spirit of sustaining a quality conversation. A nice looking, well designed site, even one with positive blurbs and book listings, lends credibility and can contribute to positive discussion.

My concern is more the spirit in which we practice our blogging. Do we approach our blog in a spirit of humility, of “speaking the truth in love” ( Eph. 4:15), or do we approach it like a wanna-be division of a commercial publishing house? Do we take time now and then to examine our motives for constructing and maintaining our sites?

As a follower of Christ I’m called to be part of a Kingdom in which the “last” are “first.” If my blog is to be an extension of my role in that Kingdom, I must recognize and fight this temptation toward using my blog for self-aggrandizement. As we Evangelicals weigh our role in the blogsphere, I hope we each individually and all collectively always “do it all for the glory of God.” ( I Cor. 10:31.)