GodBlogCon Recap

I'm back home, and I've had my nap after staying up late and getting up early for a couple days. Now I can think again.

At GodBlogCon, I took a lot of notes--Plenary Panels and Breakout Sessions--but I haven't posted them. In a moment of great lucidity (after the first evening's post), I realized that most of the people who would be reading my posts would be bored to tears by the details, but there are a few who would want to know what we talked about. So here are some impressions and highlights of the weekend.

There were a lot of bloggers at the conference who count Hugh Hewitt as their "Blogfather," either through one of his books (here or here) or through listening to his radio show. I'm one of them.

Joe Carter, of Evangelical Outpost and now the Family Research Council blog (a group blog), made a statement during the first Plenary Panel, "Bridging the Christian Divide," which was quoted throughout the conference. He said, "If we want to have graceful Christian bloggers, we need to have graceful Christians." Then he added that if we aren't better Christians, it's because we don't want to be, or we'd be spending more time on it. (Ouch!)

Another issue was the interrelated questions of motivation and reality. Each blogger needs to examine his motivations. Are we in it for fame? Are we pursuing hits and ranking, rather than seeking meaningful contact with other people? At the same time, do we neglect in-the-flesh relationships for the virtual ones?

In the end, there was agreement that blogging allows new "communities" to develop. There are real people at the other end of our blogs, people whose lives are touched in some way by what we say. Mark Roberts told about having been contacted by a man who was a new Christian, and after reading The Da Vinci Code, the man began to doubt his faith. Then he came across Mark's post critiquing the book, and it erased the man's doubts, and he had to let Mark know how grateful he was. Roberts said that touching one life like that outweighs 200,000 hits.

In the third Plenary Panel, "The New Media Political Revolution," Hugh asked a question about the future of presidential politics and the importance of candidates having served in the military.
John Mark Reynolds, of Biola University's Torrey Honors Institute, answered first. He said he advises the young men that if they aren't sure about what they should do, in a time of war they have their call. Unless a gentleman has a clear call to do something else, he has a duty to serve this nation in a time of war. Self-service and sacrifice are acts that most people don't want to do, but anyone who wants to operate as commander-in-chief will have to show that he did something that is self-evidently sacrificial and serving.

The unanimous consensus of the panel (including La Shawn Barber, who "at the risk of sounding retro" said, "There's something about a man in a uniform who serves.") was that 25 to 30 years from now, when the Biola students are at presidential age, their failure to have served in the military during a time of war will disqualify them, in the eyes of the American people, from being elected as President. Bill Clinton, who didn't serve in the military, was able to be elected because the Cold War had ended and we didn't see any threats to our nation's existence on the horizon.

Next, Wikipedia was held up as a truly new thing made possible by the phenomenon of the internet. It's not just an online version of an encyclopedia. It's a compilation of knowledge, contributed to by people around the world, with depth and breadth that was never possible with any other technology. That's the kind of thing John Mark Reynolds envisioned in his opening talk Thursday--though not just a "Christian Wikipedia"--when he talked about the virtual reality of Christian life and about connecting Christian bloggers to each other, with other internet media, to create something with depth as well as breadth.

[Update: At one point he (I think) said, "Imagine clicking on a Bible verse, and having access to every painting, every piece of music, every Shakespeare reference, every piece of literature related to that verse for the last 2,000 years." That's the potential the internet brings.]

We discussed this during the roundtable discussion (which Jimmy Akin pointed out was being held around a square table) at the end of the conference, trying to picture what this would look like. One person talked about needing a kind of index (my word, not his), where if a blogger has an excellent post on abortion, other bloggers could find and link to it instead of writing their own post that says nothing more than "You're an idiot if you want abortion." Another person--I think it was Andrew Jackson--described a kind of portal people could use to get to the Christian blogosphere, where they could find Christians blogging about different things, not just theology. Joe Carter talked about the way megachurches are held together with small groups, and he suggested Christian blogs could form groups of ten. For example, I (my blog) would belong to two groups, of which I'm the only common member, and each member of each group would also belong to two groups, and this way there's connection in the blogosphere without the hierarchy that can degenerate into content filtering.

Kevin Wang, the web designer for the GodBlogCon site was beside himself trying to get the attention of the moderator, Matt Anderson. When it was finally Kevin's turn, he drew pictures on the marker board of what he called "syndicates," where bloggers with mutual respect would form a syndicate, and their posts could be syndicated or not, and the syndicates could list or link to or syndicate with other syndicates as expressions of trust. And this would give us community without hierarchy, but what Kevin brings to this that the small group idea doesn't have yet is underlying "massively powerful databases and massively easy-to-use programs," provided he can get the grants to work on it. I'm not describing it well, but it looks promising to me.

Finally, I admitted to some of the people there that, although I'm a mainframe programmer, I am not only not a PC programmer, I'm not very PC savvy either. I've wanted to add a section of links to the sidebar of my blog for quite a while, but I haven't been able to figure out how. One woman said, "Oh, that's easy," and explained it in a way that I (with my basic HTML training) could understand. So I'm going to give it a whirl soon. It might even work.

That's it for GodBlogCon. That's plenty--except that I overheard someone saying they'd like to take GBC on the road...