Mea Culpa: I've been a slacker

So, I want to apologize. I know that I have been a slacker. Truth be told, there has been a lot going on with school that has preempted any attempt in the last week to update here. If you follow my twitter feed you will know that I have been silent there as well.

I figure the best that I can do for you at this point to tease about some stuff that I am working on.

First, in just a bit I will post the last blog post that I have in reserve from the posting for my Christian Theology class.

Second, I am working on a piece that ties in with the Table Talk project that we have going on at Wake Forest Divinity School of Theology. Let this also serve as a call to all of you to participate in this project in some way. If you live in the area, come to our in person meetings. The first one will be tomorrow at 8pm at Foothills in downtown Winston. If you are further away, please participate in the conversation online.

Third, I have been working on a paper for my Christian Theology class that, while too long to go up as one post, I hope to be able to split up into several smaller posts. I cover a lot of ground in the paper and some of the thoughts in paper might be of interests to folks if I just pull them out and post them on their own.

Fourth, I am currently doing a lot of reading (for a class) in the area of Queer studies and Queer theology. My intention is to engage some of that material here in some way.

Fifth, and finally, I have applied to be a part of the latest public theology blog project that Tripp over at Homebrewed Christianity is working on as part of the upcoming session on public theology at the American Academy of Religion. This would mean that I get a free book and some exposure. My "payment" for this would be to blog about the book, plug the blog tour, and post some video from AAR. Even if I don't get the free book this time around, I will still be posting about this project. If you are interested in participating in the project visit this post at Homebrewed Christianity and see what it is all about.

A little housekeeping

For those of you who read this and know me in real life, you know that I love sending out links to articles that I find interesting.

I have had multiple people complain about how I can clog up their Facebook feed with links. Thus, it is a battle not to post a whole bunch of links here at Rambling Rambles. However, I feel that social media has come to the point that there is no need to post lots of links on blogs. From now on I will be reserving posts for things that I write myself, either original posts, things that I write for class that I feel might interest people who would read this (although I have to ask, why are you wasting your time reading me anyway? :-) ) and finally post that I write that are a response to something that I read else where.

If you are interested in reading things that I simply find interesting, please either follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook. Just to the right you will see where I have posted my Twitter feed to this site. Also, for those of you who would like to follow the Twitter feed but don't want to create their own Twitter account, if you go to my profile page (link above) you can add my feed to your RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader).

I hope to have a post up about the endings of Mark by in the morning. I am also working on a post in regards fundamentalism, but it is taking more time and careful thought than I originally anticipated.

Over the last few days, as I have gotten more active in posting and in promoting posts through Twitter and Facebook, traffic has increased here. I appreciate all of you who are reading this. Please, please, please post comments and start conversation. I am under no illusions that I am any kind of expert. I engage in all of these different forms of social media to participate in and create conversation and collaboration. (for some of my thoughts about this, see some of my earlier posts about the Open Source movement)

Thanks again for reading, and I hope to hear from all of you soon.

One More Time

So, another school year has started, and that means that it is time, yet again, for me to pretend that I am going to start to regularly update this space. Truth be told, I am not sure how many people, if any, read this thing, so I am not sure that it matters.

One of the things that I have been thinking about is an idea that I had last year. I am doing a LOT of writing for class and such. I think that I am going to try and place some of the work that I am doing for class up here. Maybe some of you would be interested. In particular, for Christian Theology I have to write a bog entry once a week for class anyway, so I may as well post those here. If and when there are things that I think I need to explain, I will endeavor to do so.

Since I already have a back log of posts, I will place a couple over the next few days, starting here in just a minute.

So there we go. Another promise from me to do better and actually put some content up here. We will see if there effort is more successful than the others have been.

Postings from/based on Course Work

So, several people have suggested that I post some of the work that I am doing for classes on here as postings.  I have thought about it and think that it is actually a good idea.  There is some great stuff, and it is already pre-written.  Thus, I am going to try it, in an attempt to up the output here. 

If you think this is a bad idea, let me know.  If it seems to be wildly unpopular, I will stop. 

I will be posting the first one of these either tonight or tomorrow.  I need to be sure that the one that I am thinking about posting will make sense outside of the context of the class and if I need to edit it a little bit that that gets done.

Let me know what you think about this idea.   

Again with the laziness and thoughts on an Open Source World

Image via Wikipedia

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So, again I have started a project and have not followed through on it. I have been trying to figure out why, and I really think it is because I have little (read zero) accountability right now. I know that few, if any, people are going to be reading this anytime soon. So I don't write. And as I don't write, no one reads. Thus, I am caught in a widening gyre. So, I figure the only way out is to commit to doing it long enough to gather a readership that will then hold me accountable.

Chad over at Homebrewed Christanity just posted "25 Random Things about Jesus." It is his take on what Jesus may have written had the "25 Random Things" craze swept first century Palestine. There are some interesting tidbits for thought in there, so I urge you to take a look.

Also, Toby Sturgill has an interesting post that went up a couple of days ago about the 5 brands that "get" social media. In the list is one that is close to my heart, and that is Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, the shop that brings us OpenOffice.org. The lesson that Toby takes from this is that

Social media is a culture of transparency and honesty that must be embraced, leading by example is one of the best ways to introduce it to a company. Few things are better than a CEO that blogs or uses twitter.

I really don't think that we should be suprised by a company like Sun, that, in a lot of ways, has thrown itself behind the Open Source movement, to be interested in transparenct and honesty. In fact, Sun has recognized that these two qualities can play a significant role in their grabing a significant market share of the office application suite market.

As I mentioned on Toby's site, I think that there is a wierd zeitgeist right now that is pushing for these qualities across the board. I am not sure if social media and web 2.0 have influenced this, or if they are a result of this. I think the best place to look for this in the dominate culture right now is not only the Obama campaign, but also how is appears that he is going to govern. Just today at a Town Hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana Obama stated that they are going to launch a .gov website that people can go on and see where recovery money is being spent in thier area and then report on if it is being used effectivly or not. What we are talking about here is not just a campaign that had the markings of an open source campaign (the argument can be made that it was mainly show) but what appears to be open source governce, wikipedia governence. This idea, that perhaps an individual might be wrong, but the collective wisdom and insight will bend toward the truth, could have explosive and revolutionary consequences.

I think that this is a frame that we can begin to use to understand the Emergent Movement as well. I think that we can look on it as an open source church movement. I think that this is deffinitly an idea that is worth exploring in a little more detail, along with the other ideas that are represented here as well. Is this the true meaning/understanding as we move into a post-modern world, that we are moving into a world that is open source? It seems to me that this may be the case.

Emergent, open source, Jesus, meta, governance, politics, Obama