Blogging can often seem like a one way “broadcast”. The blogger writes up what interests him or her, posts it, and waits to see what happens. There are many posts, essays, books and articles out there advising bloggers on how to cultivate more engagement with their audience. I have even written a few posts encouraging other Indie bloggers. Indeed I have on more than one occasion argued that we need to be engaging with one another more in the OC/IC community than we currently do (or seem to do). There is however, a notable entropy in blog audiences. A quick survey of the overwhelming number of crackpot and thoughtless comments on the more lively blog comment feeds is enough to encourage any blogger to turn commenting off completely, and thank God for some peace and quiet.

Every morning I trawl through my various feeds and sources to look for interesting items that might be relevant to Indie life, or a snippet of an essay that inspires me to write a post. I enjoy this, don’t get me wrong, but this is still a one sided process. I am choosing things that interest me. There is therefore a bit of a bias, and perhaps because of it I’m not writing posts that could really be interesting not only for me as a writer, but also for you as the audience. I need to find a way to break through the one sided-ness of blogging, to make this less of a broadcast of my ideas and reflections, and more of a conversation with readers, whoever you might be. The basic idea then is for readers – yes, you – to “suggest a post”. I don’t care if you are a regular lurker who silently enjoys poking around the site, or someone who is merely passing by and wants to “see what’s under this rock”, I am inviting you to ask a question or suggest a topic for a post. Who knows, it could be your suggested topic that really gets a conversation going, and I believe that that would be a good thing.

Because successful blogs have a niche that they stick to, and because there are plenty of crackpots out there who just like being cyber-wankers (can I use that term in polite company?) this little project needs some structure, a few parameters to maintain focus and cultivate conversation. So when you are formulating your suggested post, or question please do so with the following in the forefront of your thinking:

• Keep it relevant: your suggested post or question will only see the light of day if it is relevant to Christian theology or practice, and it can be addressed or explored from an OC/IC ISM perspective.
• The importance of being Pith: If I need twenty minutes to figure out that there might be a question or suggested topic tangled amongst the morass of words, then it is unlikely that your suggested post will come into being. Keep your suggestions to three (3) sentences or less. This should be fun, engaging, and not painful for everyone concerned.
• Rudeness will be rewarded: It goes without saying that all thoughtless, rude and spurious suggested posts will be deleted, and you will be banned from commenting in future. Yeah, its harsh, but the goal is thoughtful conversation and not eating our young, or complaining about other communities.

If your suggested post is selected I will drop you a note and let you know when to expect it. This by way of pointing out that no anonymous comments or suggestions are accepted. Occasionally a suggested topic might be best answered by someone else – or by more than one person. When that happens I will reach out to that person and ask them to contribute a guest post (no guarantee that they will agree to it, but I will ask all the same). Generally I try to keep my posts short – between 300 and 500 words. As this post is already pushing 1000 words you can tell that the “ideal” is not always practical. If the answer to your suggested post is substantial I will do what I can to break it up into easy to read chunks. While the long-read movement in social media is gaining ground, I appreciate that many people are overloaded with posts, articles, and videos and aim to make posts here as easy and informative to the reader as possible (barring of course the limitations of my own skill, or lack there of, in writing).

One of the stated aims of this blog is to get the audience talking, and to encourage Indie folk to think and create outside the usual limited set of topics. I don’t want this to be a mere broadcast of my ideas and interests. Your suggested topic or question might be the spark that starts a very productive exploration of an idea or issue Indie folk generally don’t see or touch upon. If this trial run works then I will create a permanent page where you can suggest a post at any time. For the moment – at least once every two weeks I’ll “re-post” this post or reference it. While I am hopeful, I doubt that I shall be inundated with suggested posts. I will be happy to get one a month, happier if it is more, and ecstatic if it means that the actual posts results in a real conversation. Now its up to you, what would you like to read in a post here?

Check out Will Meyer’s new – well new to me – blog on the indie experience over at Vagrant Vicar. And if you know of other active indie bloggers you think we should be reading by all means drop a note in the comments.

Have a look at these videos over at the Guardian. I thought it was a very well put together “intro” to Green-theology. Where would you start if you were to put together an Indie Green Manifesto?

If you’re not already a fan of Retronaut – I cannot recommend it to you enough – it is one of the most interesting, quirky sites on the net.

In a recent edition are these pictures of an abandoned church in Buffalo, looking through them I started “feeling” a sense of loss, mourning even, for the many individuals who contributed to the life of that place.

Then I started thinking about the two churches my own family were associated with – one Old Catholic, the other Roman – both now defunct.

Nothing we do is permanent – but it is rather unsettling to view a place with so much individual and collective “spirit” invested in it – even during your own lifetime – as you would a Roman temple, or Egyptian tomb.

Stepping away from the physical building for a moment I find I’m more interested in the loss of community, identity, and with it belonging. My grandmother lived through the change of her local parish church slowly shutting down, its community dissipating, people she’d sat with and visited in church for years no longer there – having had to find another parish – and there feeling like a stranger no doubt. She often commented on how she felt the loss, how sad it was, and how odd it felt.

Indie communities have an unfortunate tendancy to be highly fluid and very impermanent. It is perhaps one of the more difficult aspects of being active in the movement; you no sooner get settled in the life of a community when it shifts or dissipates.

I’m not merely talking about change – change is a natural part of life, and to think that it would not not also be reflected in our faith communities is naive (I guess this is perhaps one of the most effective arguments against “Traditionalists”?).

Some changes are more than that however, they quickly, dramatically alter the nature of a thing. The priest moves and the community dissipates because there is no replacement. A clique within the community “makes its move” and fractures the whole. A dispute with a bishop, or within the wider synod throws everything into chaos. Many of us in the movement have seen this, or lived through this at least once.

What if we were to reflect on the images of hollowed, empty, abandoned church buildings from a generation earlier and use these as a point of reference?

Consider how people, individuals and groups, invested their time, creative talent, hard earned money, and most importantly their spiritual activity and alliance in making this “place” (community) their spiritual home.This community was an integral part of their personal and collective identity. This community was an expression of their faith and devotion. These are only a few of the points we might reflect on.

Now put it in the context of our own Indie setting. For most of us the “building” can be little more than a metaphore – an “icon” if you will – drawing our conscious thinking to bear on our actions. If we kept in our mind’s eye the most haunting shadow of a former community – such as one of the images in this photo essay – asking some of these questions not only of ourselves, but those within whom we have each invested our own time, talent, and relational energy – would we then find that we have more creative ways to overcome the challenges of the historic fluidity and impermanence of our Indie communities?

The spirit of a place, the shadow of the soul of the community that called it home, can I believe be a moving “icon” for Indie folk seeking to invest in their long-term relationship with one another, and within the tradition.

I recently bought a Kindle. Yes by and large it was peer pressure – from one particular peer – but peer pressure all the same.

There was also a practical reason for my purchase. I like to read what I call “fluffy” books before going to bed – after a day of reading nothing but history and theology one needs a bit of “light” reading – very light reading as it happens, but light reading all the same so I don’t go to bed pondering theology texts (I get no sleep this way). Fluffy books serve a purpose, they are enjoyable, but they also take up space – lots of space (I have three plastic boxes of favoured fluffy books – many read multiple times – sitting in our loft, not to mention the stacks of them on the various book shelves and drawers around the house). Once I saw that I could get the genre and authors of fluffy books I like on the kindle I realised that this would solve a “real” problem – the need for space – in our house, and decided it was time to give this thing a go.

I have since learned that there is a wealth of good scholarly books also available – some, and this point is rather exciting to me, are chokingly expensive in hard/paperback but when available in kindle are half or a third of the cost making them more attractive. Others of the same vein, are now it seems only available in Kindle format – and again far more affordable than they were when orgininally published.

I think here the case is that these are niche books with a very small publishing run, and probably an even smaller audience (usually institutional libraries and specialists) so publishers like OUP know that the published price while too much for the general interest reader, is realistic for the “niche”. Now with the advent of Kindle and other e-readers, these books can be liberated from the limitations of a formal “print run” and become cheaper and easier for a larger (but still very much) niche.

There is, however, a catch. How do you easily and efficiently use a Kindle for research?

I’ve played with this for a few days now and have devised a “method” – and I would like to know what methods others have found that work (if only to improve my own).

Kindle has (recently?) added the capability of seeing and citing the page number of the printed copy. Apparantly this was a major issue for earlier versions. This is great – as long as the book you are reading was prepared for Kindle after this update in the program. I have learned that some of the Patristics books I’m now enjoying appear not to have this integrated feature “yet” (hint, hint, Amazon – please fix this!).

While this is inconvenient the fact is that most of the books I’ve purchased thus far do have the page numbering feature which means that making a note in Kindle automatically gives the page number with the citation.

Now the fun bit. . .

I’m a keen user of Zotero where I’ve been storing articles, books, and things to look up for my next trip to the British Library. Zotero also is great for taking notes – making them searchable, and interchangeable with various projects all in one place. Another great space saving feature as I’ve got notebooks scattered all over the house from various projects dating back over ten years – notes which because they are not immediately searchable are ostensibly “lost to posterity” unless I remember some fragment of a note and go hunting for it.

Kindle saves your notes and jottings in a text file, which means that when you plug your reader into your computer you have instant access to the notes you took. Double click and it opens in TextEdit (I use Mac, sorry PC users I have no idea what it is in your realm).

Now I open my Zotero panel, if I’ve not already got a file set up for the book in question, I find it on the British Library site (I use the BL because they’re saavy and have the website Zotero ready), click the zotero button, hey presto, I’ve got the detailed bibliography for the book. I can now open an existing note, or create a new one, and drag and drop the relevant note from the Kindle into my Zotero file and its ready to use for my research project. Simples!

Back in August, having just handed in the official final draft of the thesis,  I wrote asking what you would include in an “Indie Manifesto”. I found myself asking the question in relation to a number of sites I visited in the morning trawl that had manifestos of their own. I observed that these manifestos gave a point of reference, a cause for the voice of the particular blog and its contributor(s) – and that there does not appear to be anything similar in the Independent Catholic movement as a whole.

The historical reasons for this lack of a grounding statement, an arc of purpose and action are, I think, well known to most who might visit here. The very fluid, often confusing state of the movement as a whole does not lend itself easily to cohesion of any sort.

This morning – in the back of my mind I started thinking about the idea of “manifesto” again. I pulled out the dictionary – what exactly is a manifesto? If you were to compose one – what would it look like? What purpose does it serve? My questions went on and on. Why am I revisiting this question? I think because as I am now able to turn back towards researching the history and ideas of the OC/IC movement – I am faced with two oft recurring and while not original, very important questions: Why are we here, and what makes us who we are?

Lets face it – in many respects – even in our 18th and 19th century origins – the OC/IC movement is born out of chaos – and (with very few exceptions) we’ve never escaped it. It is as though we revel in chaos. Again, I think there might be a historical precedent at work here – the movement originates as a response to rigid order, an enforced party line that must not be questioned. Seen in this light – it is easy to understand how anything that even suggests order is treated with suspicion.

I remember how, back in the early 1990s when the community I belonged to found itself cut adrift because of the breakup of our synod we spent three months in regular gatherings, praying, discerning, discussing a way forward – in a way we were looking for a way to create our own “manifesto” our declaration of purpose and action. We were trying to recover a sense of order out of the chaos created by others. And we were realising in the process that it was much more difficult than it at first might appear. While we mostly had personal loyalties to one another, and to our local community – that is not a solid foundation for moving forward when you are looking at a living, disciplined life of faith and praxis.

So this morning, thinking about manifestos what they are, how they work, and how they come into being – I fell into this rather fun collection of manifestos – mostly from political and artistic movements. Reading through them I was struck by the sense of passion and committment the authors and their communities had for the issues. It made me wonder – do Indie Christians have the same passion for the OC/IC ethos (whatever that might be now)? Or is it just “church” – the fulfillment of a need or sense of obligation?

I found, that in one source at least, a religious manifesto is described as a creed – rather than a “manifesto”. But when I think about the 39 Articles, and Luther’s 99 Theses I cannot help but think of them as manifestos not creeds. I could be wrong – it seems to me that the difference between a manifesto and a creed is that a manifesto is not just a statement of believe and conviction, rather it adds strategy and action – “this is what we believe, and this is how we (aspire to) do it.”

Is there an existing Indie manifesto that I don’t know about (perhaps an unwritten one)? What would you include in such a statement of priniciple and action?

I’m a huge fan (read pusher) of home-grown scholarship in the Independent Catholic community. I’ve argued many times on this blog that we “appropriate” too much from other traditions without necessarily thinking it through in our own context. I also think that with the availability of modern technology it is now, more than ever before, more feasable to circulate Indie scholarship within the community and beyond – cultivating our own voice, rather than simply riding on the coat-tails of the voices of other traditions.

Recently I’ve been playing with a great new research tool called Zotero – it is a plugin for Firefox (and I think Explorer and Chrome) that allows you to archive articles from the web, take notes in them, sort them, and tag them. It also handles PDFs, pics, video clips and collects all the relevant bibliographical data so you can automatically create a bibliography when working in say Word.

Speaking of working in Word – Zotero makes inserting citations and your own notes a snap with a handy plugin.

I could go on and on about how useful this little program has been for me in my own research projects over the past two months; and cannot reccomend Zotero enough.

Bread is a core symbole of the sacramental Christian tradition. We use it in the liturgy, and its symbolic value is freqnently cited in Scripture.

This is the same recipie we use for making prosphora (bread for the liturgy) – sans sugar (which is optional anyway). What does your community do?

Not long ago I posted asking how we OC/IC types use the Bible – how does it fit into our praxis as individuals and as a community. This morning’s trawl uncovered this fun post at the Scriptorum which explored the little book “Mastering the English Bible” by James Gray.

Gray was an early Dean of the Moody Bible Institute, and wrote a book in 1905 about how to read the Bible. More correctly how to become a “master” of the bible. His method is simple – read it – just read it – over and over again, one book at a time. “Master” each individual book – know it.

What he warns against is trying to analyse it to “study” it before you “know” it. And this simple statement is I think rather revelatory. Think about it in order to study something you first need to know something about its constituent parts, and about the “whole” thing – otherwise you end up with a very skewed (inaccurate) understanding of the whole.

When doing the first half of my BA at the University of Pittsburgh, I took a Bible as literature class. The professor was a total nut – in the best possible sense – but one thing we did do was to read the Bible – the whole Bible. Approaching it as a “book” with chapters, and narratives rather than as a verse by verse “manual” for life, and enlightenment. Without realising it at the time, this method totally changed my approach to then “studying” scripture. When you appreciate the whoe, when you “know” the whole – you are better placed to analyse indvidual parts.

There is another aspect of this “method” and that is – you make knowing the content and substance of scripture natural – that is to say while you might not be able to spew forth chapter and verse – you are in a position to know its content, and talk about it substantively, and put the information to good use. You effectively make what the text has to offer a natural element of your praxis.

I unexpectedly fell into this post, which led me to this post and it made me stop and think for a moment. Does blogging matter? Should “every” Christian blog?

I have been God-blogging now for four years (I have another non-theology blog too) and average just over 100 posts a year.

I would like to think that during this time I’ve passed through the novelty of blogging, into a tool, an arena of asking questions, and playing with ideas. I would also like to think that I’m not just talking out loud, or worse – to myself.

Throughout this experiment in thinking out loud theologically I think I’ve learned how to be more focussed. Though I am breaking the “custom” with this post; generally limiting my posts to around 300 words has helped me “stick to the point”. I think I’ve also become bolder expressing my thoughts on OC/IC issues more directly than I think I would have 10 years ago.

Do my “stats” reflect the hope that I’m not just talking to the empty ether? Do the stats actually matter? How much of what goes into the blog happens off screen so to speak? I average between 300 and 400 “unique visitors” per day who, on average stick around for 3 minutes – long enough to read the most recent post. I’m not entirely sure how to “read” that. At least 10% of that figure are un-desirables (I’d say the word but my “un-desirable” filter will go through the roof for the next four days – you know what I mean).

And what about the level of commenting? As with many blogs, understanding the nature of commenting is un-predictable. Blog readers tend to lurk. They have an arena of blogs they read regularly, but rarely comment. I know this because I read dozens of blogs a day and almost never comment. Sometimes I’ll have an exchange with someone and they’ll say: “Oh yes, you wrote something about that on your blog some months ago.” Clearly getting others to “join in” the conversation is harder than it seems.

But then, when you do get readers commenting you sometimes find yourself having to quickly get a degree in mediation and abherrant psychology! A quick look at un-moderated comment streams, will demonstrate this point nicely. Comments are a double edged sword.

So the numbers and off screen interactions say people are reading – even if there is not the river of comments you’ll see on some other sites. While the stats give a fleeting glimpse of what is happening they clearly don’t give the full picture, and as interpreting the numbers is a fallable exercise, I’m not about to waste time fretting over them one way or the other.

I could keep a theology journal and find that I’m becoming a better writer – I don’t “need” to blog. Indeed I only started blogging because I noticed other indie folks doing it! The numbers can only tell me that people are visiting, and even reading posts. It does not tell me that they are interested, engaged, or are in any way benefitting from my God-blogging. So, is my “talking out loud” contributing to the mix of OC/IC engagement? Does blogging matter?

At this point I think I’m going to refine the question: Does God-blogging matter in an OC/IC context? I think that on reflection the only answer can be yes, it does matter. Regardless of what I or others might think of the content of any one particular Independent Catholic blog – more OC/IC people ought to blog (and blog thoughtfully).

There are not enough thoughtful Independent Catholic voices in the public sphere. There is not enough awareness of, or active development of OC/IC theology and scholarship – only we can change that. Through blogging we meet other OC/IC folk, make friends, and begin the much needed and very important process of collaboration – building a continuity of short and long-term projects, as well as helping one another with individual projects. Blogging offers the perfect platform for our small communities to sit together and push the boundaries a bit, and develop and practice some awesome theology.

Blogging has the potential of making resources that are currently stuffed in drawers and boxes, resources which are all too frequently lost when the current holder or steward dies, available to the wider OC/IC community – to our researchers and scholars, as well as to a small but growing community of academics who are interested in the history and development of the OC/IC movement.

Blogging takes discipline, and it is a committment. Thus, the thoughtful blogger participates in ministry and outreach, sharing his or her experience of life in the OC/IC community.