this blog is devoted to the stuff american evangelical culture likes
Friday, November 13, 2009
News bulletin
Dear darling reader,
Beliefnet asked if they could host this blog and I said sure. So next week it will move over there, but this link will still route to it. So, that's kind of exciting. Yips!
I'm sure you've considered this, but won't the move to a mainstream mushy-gush site run the risk of absorbing the shock of your unique voice simply by association? Won't you be playing into the hands of the slick fingered mass-market commercial franchisers--the routinizers of charisma?
My 2cents: Don't capitulate. But I'm sure your quick mind has an angle I'm not seeing.
Will you join only to break away with a neck pop?
You have something good going--a wry voice rasping in the wilderness. What if your new audience simply comes to think of it as the cry of a kute kitty kat? After all, everything else seems so fuzzy.
I'm happy that you'll get some dough, Stephy. But ime BN seriously blows for casual readers- slow servers, lots of popup ads and infuriatingly timekilling Javascript carp, a finicky spam filter. And that buggy thing called 'captcha'.
Yeah. I kinda think my un-kitty-cat-like perspective will be more of a contrast over there. I'm hoping people will read it expecting their worldview to be reinforced and then that won't be the case for a lot of them. I'm glad at least it's not a Christian site but it hosts a lot of different religion blogs (and has a category called Generic Inspiration, my personal favorite). And sorry about the slow server and pop-up ads, I know what you mean.
I surfed a few of the "Christian" blogs and was...underwhelmed. So I'm guessing you and your mouthy crowd of readers will shake things up a bit! Here's to the absence of censorship!
Stephy, how much of your current content is going to get transferred to the new site? I'm assuming you own all the articles and get to move them over. It'll be a shame to lose some of the more awesome comment threads...but as you say, not likely to be a shortage of crazies there.
So I am now going to have to see how many clicks into "Generic Inspiration" I can stand...
Thanks, yeah, all the archives will be imported and the blog will stay the same and I own everything (except some pictures of hot wives and youth pastors that I mock but those will remain up until the people in the pictures complain, muahahaha). My husband wrote something for Beliefnet once (about a Roaring Lambs book/cd) and it pissed off the singer from Jars of Clay and he wrote an angry response and Beliefnet loved it and posted it all. It was kind of great. They seem to welcome dissent. (Speaking of! Dart over to see what 3CirclesCommunity put at the Christian twitter post. In his profile he calls himself an author and visionary! VISIONARY!)
I agree with Chiastych. Well said and great strong love-filled questions for you to continually ponder which is a healthy form of accountability.
If any think your "selling out" they just have some wounds that still need healed. Keep them in mind though. They need to laugh a little more that's all.
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." -mark twain
Congrats, Stephy! I'm excited for this new development. And you can always leave if they go all establishment on you, right?
(Visionary? I personally love how he refers to himself in third person. That's how you can tell a person is a visionary; they write about themselves as if they have transcended ego.)
Hm, not finding the 3CirclesCommunity twitter account you're talking about...but I did find their website. There was enough gushing (in first person no less) about his own memoir that pretty much assures I won't read it. Is he posting the whole thing on twitter? Seriously? I still don't have a twitter account, still don't get it yet, but that seems to go against the grain of the medium. Or it's too Visionary for me to grasp.
Sarah, Facebook makes us all talk in the third person now! Bill too! Though he actually prefers the third-person pronoun, since as the center of the universe the antecedent is implied.
Too bad about Jars. I like some of their stuff--I haven't made it to their more recent albums yet--but their website makes them sound haughty. I've been tipping my toes back into the CCM water the last year or two (after tossing all my CCM albums along with the Carman ones, ha ha!). They hit while I was busy with my Bono man-crush, and I never paid much attention to them. I did think it was kind of cool about the whole R-rated movie soundtrack thing.
Also, how cool is it to have Steve Taylor address David's criticism directly in the pages of Christianity Today? Though I thought Taylor's comments were a bit vertigo-inducing.
Oh, and be sure and let us know if beliefnet counts by page views or ad click-throughs ;).
I can't find an apropos blog entry to post this under, so I'll put it here...
It's about the mind control- overwhelming a person's senses with misinformation so they'll do what you want. Intelligent people tend to be more resistant to mind control (especially the mass media mind control we're familiar with) and you see this reflected in online gatherings.
A lot of mind control resisters will be nonreligious because the dominant mind control paradigm is religious... but there is also political affiliation. I have definitely seen this from certain Obama followers who are letting Obama's broken promises on torture and the War slide, just because he's their guy. Or about how the New World Order - a Bushism - that was the inspiration for World Trade Organization protests during G.W.'s reign, but now apparently it's a right wing conspiracy theory.
I often find myself in the presence of people who fit the stereotypes you lampoon on this website because - again - the dominant culture in the US is this culture you make fun of, and therefore most of the Americans who are being persecuted the way I am are from that culture.
I bitterly resent being lumped in with Xian nutcases and whacked out conspiracy theorists. It turns out there are some conspiracy theories that really are based in truth.
I don't expect you to take me seriously, but there is some seriously messed up stuff happening in the US right now, and you might want to start thinking about what happens when the stuffed shirt in the Oval Office is a Republican.
Like I said... I don't expect you to take this seriously. But when the situation in the US gets a lot worse, just remember the stranger who wandered in here and started saying crazy things.
Crap, I'm getting nervous now. I'm trying to tell myself it'll be fine. My blog is just peripheral, it's just something I do on the side and it's not that big of a deal. You guys are nice and you really help me, it's good to know there are other people who had similar experiences to mine so far as church. (Bill - that guy's comment is on the post before this one.)
Hey, you've really helped a lot of US by being a voice of a body of believers I think some of us didn't know we had. I had almost given up on the corporate element of Christianity altogether, until I came across this blog.
It's a huge and wonderful thing, what you're doing -- and I'd be really, really nervous if I were you. But we've got your back (invited or no).
I was thinking, as far as getting angry emails from the defenders of the status quo...if I were you, I would consider making EVERYTHING public. If you get a super nasty email, put it up as a post. That way the various members of the body of Christ don't get away with being horrible in secret, and that way you don't have to do all your own defending. There's no reason you should have to suffer the crazy alone. Blare it from the rooftops.
Just my thoughts. :) Thanks for what you do here. It's been, and continues to be, a beacon to me.
I found your blog on accident Steph. If I hadn't been searching for 'hot pastor's wife' (with the best of intentions) I never would've come across SCCL, heheh,..
I sure as hell wouldn't have found you on BeliefNet, but, I'll continue to pipe up there too I suppose. Be prepared for s**tstorm when the mainstream fundies catch wind of you though. John Acuff's SCL is too watered down now for exactly the same reason. If you go over to BeliefNet, do it fearlessly and unapologetically. And don't write a book, for other people to edit.
So I ran across your site when I was working on a writing project about Christian Rock and decided to Google “Christian Culture.” I’ve been trying to sort out my child-hood lately and writing seems to help with that.
I was raised in a Christian home but lately I’ve resorted to telling people I was raised in a cult, as it seems to generate more sympathy. I suppose in all fairness you could say we lived on the fringes of Christianity, which included home schooling, (mind you, not the healthy, spelling bee champion version but rather controlled, sheltered, quasi-Mennonite model), boycotting Disney in protest of Gay Day and supporting Pat Robertson during his presidential bid in ’88 to name a few. Like clockwork, Sunday after church would find us at the Old Country Buffet armed with Chick Tracks for the awkward staff. Eventually I was able to get away from all of that and see that my initial brand of Christianity was less than, well Christ-like.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that your blog is fabulous and I feel like I can relate with almost every post. The Djembe is my favorite.
Perhaps I should start a blog entitled “Stuff Right Wing, Home Schooled, Fundamentalists Like.”
29 comments:
Wow! That's fantastic! Good luck and God bless!
[WV: rektora. Did Word Verification know I'm an Episcopalian?]
Will you still have the same feed link? I subscribe and enjoy your posts... Thanks for sharing!
Awesome!
Catharine, I'm not sure if it'll have the same feed link, I'm guessing not, but you can subscribe to the feed when it goes on Beliefnet...
"Mooovin' on up!"
Congrats Steph! Glad I could be a part of this from its humble beginnings! (Frosted tips will never get old...)
Thanks, I'm already nervous about increased notoriety and getting more angry/crazy emails, but it goes with the territory I guess.
:)
Wait, Stephy:
I'm sure you've considered this, but won't the move to a mainstream mushy-gush site run the risk of absorbing the shock of your unique voice simply by association? Won't you be playing into the hands of the slick fingered mass-market commercial franchisers--the routinizers of charisma?
My 2cents: Don't capitulate. But I'm sure your quick mind has an angle I'm not seeing.
Will you join only to break away with a neck pop?
You have something good going--a wry voice rasping in the wilderness. What if your new audience simply comes to think of it as the cry of a kute kitty kat? After all, everything else seems so fuzzy.
Belief.
Give me a B . . .
Jamin
I'm happy that you'll get some dough, Stephy. But ime BN seriously blows for casual readers- slow servers, lots of popup ads and infuriatingly timekilling Javascript carp, a finicky spam filter. And that buggy thing called 'captcha'.
Yeah. I kinda think my un-kitty-cat-like perspective will be more of a contrast over there. I'm hoping people will read it expecting their worldview to be reinforced and then that won't be the case for a lot of them. I'm glad at least it's not a Christian site but it hosts a lot of different religion blogs (and has a category called Generic Inspiration, my personal favorite). And sorry about the slow server and pop-up ads, I know what you mean.
PS - and they promised not to censor me.
That's really cool! Congratulations!
I'll add my congrats!
I surfed a few of the "Christian" blogs and was...underwhelmed. So I'm guessing you and your mouthy crowd of readers will shake things up a bit! Here's to the absence of censorship!
Stephy, how much of your current content is going to get transferred to the new site? I'm assuming you own all the articles and get to move them over. It'll be a shame to lose some of the more awesome comment threads...but as you say, not likely to be a shortage of crazies there.
So I am now going to have to see how many clicks into "Generic Inspiration" I can stand...
Thanks, yeah, all the archives will be imported and the blog will stay the same and I own everything (except some pictures of hot wives and youth pastors that I mock but those will remain up until the people in the pictures complain, muahahaha).
My husband wrote something for Beliefnet once (about a Roaring Lambs book/cd) and it pissed off the singer from Jars of Clay and he wrote an angry response and Beliefnet loved it and posted it all. It was kind of great. They seem to welcome dissent. (Speaking of! Dart over to see what 3CirclesCommunity put at the Christian twitter post. In his profile he calls himself an author and visionary! VISIONARY!)
Congrats for sure.
I agree with Chiastych. Well said and great strong love-filled questions for you to continually ponder which is a healthy form of accountability.
If any think your "selling out" they just have some wounds that still need healed. Keep them in mind though. They need to laugh a little more that's all.
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."
-mark twain
Congratulations, that's depressing.
Congrats, Stephy! I'm excited for this new development. And you can always leave if they go all establishment on you, right?
(Visionary? I personally love how he refers to himself in third person. That's how you can tell a person is a visionary; they write about themselves as if they have transcended ego.)
Hm, not finding the 3CirclesCommunity twitter account you're talking about...but I did find their website. There was enough gushing (in first person no less) about his own memoir that pretty much assures I won't read it. Is he posting the whole thing on twitter? Seriously? I still don't have a twitter account, still don't get it yet, but that seems to go against the grain of the medium. Or it's too Visionary for me to grasp.
Sarah, Facebook makes us all talk in the third person now! Bill too! Though he actually prefers the third-person pronoun, since as the center of the universe the antecedent is implied.
Too bad about Jars. I like some of their stuff--I haven't made it to their more recent albums yet--but their website makes them sound haughty. I've been tipping my toes back into the CCM water the last year or two (after tossing all my CCM albums along with the Carman ones, ha ha!). They hit while I was busy with my Bono man-crush, and I never paid much attention to them. I did think it was kind of cool about the whole R-rated movie soundtrack thing.
Also, how cool is it to have Steve Taylor address David's criticism directly in the pages of Christianity Today? Though I thought Taylor's comments were a bit vertigo-inducing.
Oh, and be sure and let us know if beliefnet counts by page views or ad click-throughs ;).
LOL. The center of the universe makes an excellent point. :)
I can't find an apropos blog entry to post this under, so I'll put it here...
It's about the mind control- overwhelming a person's senses with misinformation so they'll do what you want. Intelligent people tend to be more resistant to mind control (especially the mass media mind control we're familiar with) and you see this reflected in online gatherings.
A lot of mind control resisters will be nonreligious because the dominant mind control paradigm is religious... but there is also political affiliation. I have definitely seen this from certain Obama followers who are letting Obama's broken promises on torture and the War slide, just because he's their guy. Or about how the New World Order - a Bushism - that was the inspiration for World Trade Organization protests during G.W.'s reign, but now apparently it's a right wing conspiracy theory.
I often find myself in the presence of people who fit the stereotypes you lampoon on this website because - again - the dominant culture in the US is this culture you make fun of, and therefore most of the Americans who are being persecuted the way I am are from that culture.
I bitterly resent being lumped in with Xian nutcases and whacked out conspiracy theorists. It turns out there are some conspiracy theories that really are based in truth.
I don't expect you to take me seriously, but there is some seriously messed up stuff happening in the US right now, and you might want to start thinking about what happens when the stuffed shirt in the Oval Office is a Republican.
Oh yeah, and some orientation blog entries.
1 in 20
An Army of Losers
Media Mirroring as Mind Control
The Rules of Gang Stalking
Like I said... I don't expect you to take this seriously. But when the situation in the US gets a lot worse, just remember the stranger who wandered in here and started saying crazy things.
Crap, I'm getting nervous now. I'm trying to tell myself it'll be fine. My blog is just peripheral, it's just something I do on the side and it's not that big of a deal. You guys are nice and you really help me, it's good to know there are other people who had similar experiences to mine so far as church.
(Bill - that guy's comment is on the post before this one.)
Hey, you've really helped a lot of US by being a voice of a body of believers I think some of us didn't know we had. I had almost given up on the corporate element of Christianity altogether, until I came across this blog.
It's a huge and wonderful thing, what you're doing -- and I'd be really, really nervous if I were you. But we've got your back (invited or no).
I was thinking, as far as getting angry emails from the defenders of the status quo...if I were you, I would consider making EVERYTHING public. If you get a super nasty email, put it up as a post. That way the various members of the body of Christ don't get away with being horrible in secret, and that way you don't have to do all your own defending. There's no reason you should have to suffer the crazy alone. Blare it from the rooftops.
Just my thoughts. :) Thanks for what you do here. It's been, and continues to be, a beacon to me.
I found your blog on accident Steph. If I hadn't been searching for 'hot pastor's wife' (with the best of intentions) I never would've come across SCCL, heheh,..
I sure as hell wouldn't have found you on BeliefNet, but, I'll continue to pipe up there too I suppose. Be prepared for s**tstorm when the mainstream fundies catch wind of you though. John Acuff's SCL is too watered down now for exactly the same reason. If you go over to BeliefNet, do it fearlessly and unapologetically. And don't write a book, for other people to edit.
Google will turn up "hot pastor's wife" even if it's at Beliefnet, I think. :)
No one can keep me down. Damn the Man!
Serpent up, Sarah. You're for sale.
So I ran across your site when I was working on a writing project about Christian Rock and decided to Google “Christian Culture.” I’ve been trying to sort out my child-hood lately and writing seems to help with that.
I was raised in a Christian home but lately I’ve resorted to telling people I was raised in a cult, as it seems to generate more sympathy. I suppose in all fairness you could say we lived on the fringes of Christianity, which included home schooling, (mind you, not the healthy, spelling bee champion version but rather controlled, sheltered, quasi-Mennonite model), boycotting Disney in protest of Gay Day and supporting Pat Robertson during his presidential bid in ’88 to name a few. Like clockwork, Sunday after church would find us at the Old Country Buffet armed with Chick Tracks for the awkward staff. Eventually I was able to get away from all of that and see that my initial brand of Christianity was less than, well Christ-like.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that your blog is fabulous and I feel like I can relate with almost every post. The Djembe is my favorite.
Perhaps I should start a blog entitled “Stuff Right Wing, Home Schooled, Fundamentalists Like.”
Oh, and if you care to relive a bit of Christian Music , go here...
http://www.storytellershandmedowns.blogspot.com/
Hot topics (or is it topic?) on Beliefnet right now:
"Sarah Palin Mammogram Thanksgiving Recipes"
Post a Comment