Nick Knisely writing at Entangled States:

But things in the blogsphere have changed in the last year. Last spring saw the beginning of Episcopal Cafe, a team blog that Jim Naughton, I and others had been dreaming up for some time. It’s built up quite a readership in the 6 months or so since it went “live”. On a good day I might get 500 readers here. Episcopal Cafe can see upwards of 100,000. As one of the regular contributors and part of the news-team, much of what I would have once posted here is instead going to the Cafe. Which is a good thing because it's being seen by many more people.

And a few months ago I was invited by some friends to be part of Covenant Communion. That site is still figuring out how it wants to work and what sort of voice it will share, its given me a place to engage with other moderate and some conservative voices on what it does mean to be moderate/centrist within the Episcopal Church.

So with two major areas moved offsite, what’s left?

I think I’d like to return to my original thoughts here - how science and theology interact with each other. I’m particularly interested in how good science can inform good theology. I’m also interested in the more practical matters of the ethical challenges that decisions made from a scientific viewpoint have for the people effected by them.

Sean McConnell writes in Episcopal Life Online: They're like monks of old, scribing texts on Scripture and theology, prayer and meditation, church governance and liturgics -- topics that resonate with them and their experiences of faith in the current day.

They're bloggers -- writers of Internet weblogs ("blogs," for short) -- whose readers respond with comments for posting online. Episcopal Cafe lists bloggers at The Blogscape. Another listing of many of the Episcopal blogs are found at epiScope a news gathering blog edited by the Rev. Jan Nunley. executive editor of Episcopal Life Media

Together they populate the "blogosphere," a communication environment that, spiritually speaking, includes content that comes as fresh air to some and rhetorical smog to others.

But an informal sampling of blogs shows that Episcopalians, for the most part, blog to build Christian community. Mainly, these blogs are virtual locations for gathering groups of people who love their church and express that love in diverse ways. A few writers may sow discord, yet most work to widen connections and collegiality that might otherwise remain untapped.

Regarding Episcopal Cafe - Sean writes:

A virtual newcomer, but already a frequently visited site, is Episcopal Café. (See article, above.) The Café is the brainchild of author and journalist Jim Naughton (The New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, ESPN), who is now canon for communication and advancement for the Diocese of Washington.

Episcopal Café is what some call a group blog, because it is managed by a fairly substantial and geographically far-flung group of writers, editors and news aggregators. One striking difference between the Café and other blogs is its requirement that people who post comments on articles use their full names. This is an attempt to keep the discourse civil and an air of accountability for comments made on the site, Naughton said.

"If people don't want to put their names on a response, then I don't want to read it," he added.

On blogs that "allow anonymous comments -- people can speak from the id without having to worry about being held accountable," Naughton said when asked whether blogs had benefited discourse in the Episcopal Church.

"I don't discount that this is sometimes liberating," he said, "but if you can be anonymously vicious in a community of people who are anonymously vicious, then you have a sort of cyber-tribalism."

Read it all here

USA Today features faith bloggers from a variety of denominations and points of view. Episcopal Cafe, Louie Crew, TitusOneNine, and others are mentioned as Episcopal sites.

The 2003 triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, inspired scores of new blogs in full battle cry over the vote by bishops, clergy and lay leaders to accept the election of an openly homosexual bishop in New Hampshire.

Blogging your beliefs is a lonely venture [for David] Virtue, "Even my wife doesn't altogether agree with me."

"It's hard to keep your day job" given all the research and reading required, says conservative Anglican blogger the Rev. Kendall Harmon. Harmon is canon theologian for the diocese of South Carolina, along with blogging at TitusOneNine.

"There is a truth and reliability quotient. I post stuff I virulently disagree with. The idea is to influence the discussion," Harmon says.

Canon Jim Naughton of the Diocese of Washington, D.C., creator of the Daily Episcopalian, a liberal blog, has seen it transformed into a multi-blogger site featuring art, essays, news and posts on faith "in the spirit of charity," the home page of Episcopal Cafe says.

Read the full article by Cathy Lynn Grossman, who covers religion for USA Today here

Updated Washington Times religion correspondent, Julia Duin, joins the field of religion journalists with blogs. Here's how she describes her Belief Blog:

I plan to make this stand out amongst many of the current faith blogs, many of which are little more than daily religion digests with uplinks. Not here. I'm aiming at something closer to Ruth Gledhill's Articles of Faith blog in the London Times that has juicy details not in the dead tree version. I plan to go behind the scenes, add more details and do some original reporting. I hope to spread a wide net and touch on a non-Christian religion at least once a week.

Clarification: The blog "BabyBlueOnline" says that Ms. Duin is a member of The Falls Church which is part of CANA, a church in a property dispute with the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. In an earlier version of this post, we repeated that she was a member of The Falls Church. Ms. Duin herself has written to us to tell us: "I am not a member of the Falls Church. Nor am I a member of Truro. I don't belong to any church at present." We regret the error.

Cass Sunstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which the group's members were originally inclined. Enclave extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored by their members.”

Read it all, with particular attention to the "Colorado experiment."

Hat tip, Arts and Letters Daily.

Tim Schenck, priest, dad and FOTB (Friend of this blog) has begun a blog of his own. Even if we'd never met Tim, we'd drop by his blog hoping for more nuggets like this lovely little item about reading the Grinch to his son's first-grade class.

To me The Grinch is really a Christian parable — it’s a story of conversion, repentance, and forgiveness. Or at least I started seeing these themes the year I had to read it every night for three months. Pitchers and catchers had reported for Spring Training and I was still reading about all the Whos down in Who-ville.

It's hard not to like a guy who tells time by the liturgial calendar, and the start of spring training.

With all the furor about the Archbishop of Canterbury's statements (or lack thereof) about the Gospel accounts of the birth of Christ, we thought it might be useful to offer a host of Christmas related blog posts. But blogging religion professor James McGrath beat us to to. As he explains:

We've all heard of one-stop Christmas shopping, so I thought with the frenetic pace of holiday shopping, finding all the relevant holiday blogging experiences that are available might be a bit much to bear. Hence below are included links to many of the last couple of weeks' worth of blog entries on Christmas-related topics.

Read his full list of Christmas blog posts here. And his updated list here.

Feel free to list your own favorite Christmas blog posts in the comments.

Congratulations to Father Jake Stops the World which crossed the 1,000,000 mark in total visits yesterday evening. Jake is a worthy Thorn in the Anglican blogscape.

Some recent posts at Jakes Place (in reverse order):

Sorting Out the GAFCON Gaffes

Reactions to the Southern Cone's Seizure of St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Atwater

Should Lambeth be Cancelled?

Pittsburgh's Bizarre Scenarios

Paul Canady, deputy for youth in the Diocese of Washington, is also a candidate for Holy Orders. As part of his training he has just completed an immersion ministry at a truck stop in Carlisle, Pa. You can read about this off beat ministry and the people he met on this blog.

His story begins with the following item:

[O]n Monday, January 7th, 2008, I will head to Carlisle, PA, to spend two weeks with the Carlisle Trucker Ministry. You can go to this website to learn more about the ministry: http://www.pachurches.org/html/carlh.html

I'm not totally sure what to expect. But my phone call today with the chaplain overseeing the minsitry, Chaplain Dan Lehigh, made me feel a little bit better. "Ours is really just a ministry of presense," he said.

So a presense is what I will be to as many of the 20,000 truckers that come through Carlisle every day.

Please keep me, and this ministry, in your prayers. I'll do my best to update daily, but forgive me if I don't.

If you go along for the ride, you'll meet some interesting folks, and perhaps emerge with a new sense of what ministry means.

David Plotz, the Slate author who blogged the books of the Hebrew Bible last year is now digging the Bible--he is reporting his experiences at various archeological sites in the Holy Land. Here is a sample from his first post:

So, it's not exactly the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, it's not exactly much of anything—just a dirty shard of pottery the size of my big toe. But I found it. I had been scraping the floor of this Israeli cave when I spotted its sharp edge. I fished the piece out of the dirt and pushed on it, as instructed, to see if it crumbled. If it did, it was probably just the local limestone, which is as soft as a bar of soap. But my piece firmly resisted, so I brushed off the dirt until I could see smooth pottery, one side black, the other brick red. I'm the raider of the lost pot.

. . .

I've spent much of the last year blogging the Bible for Slate, writing about reading the Good Book for the first time. Now I've come to Israel to see the Bible, to dig it. I've read the stories. Now I want to see where they happened and to learn if they happened—to experience the Bible through archaeology, history, politics, and faith.

That's why I'm spending the day with Ian Stern. An American-born Israeli in his early 50s, Ian operates Dig for a Day, probably the biggest archaeology outreach program in the world. Every year, Stern's dig here at Maresha is visited by 30,000 to 50,000 tourists—most of them American Jews. They do spadework for Stern's academic research, get a hands-on crash course in archaeology, and experience their own history by digging in the dirt.

You can start with the entire series by reading the first entry here.

In what is supposed to be the most secular city in the nation, there is a whole of lot of religion going on this weekend in Seattle. But don't be surprised if it looks a lot different that what most of us are used to.

Tim Matthis, who describes himself as "your basic youth minister/AIDS activist, writes at "Relatively Faithful" about what's going on:

The Seattle Green Festival (HUGE! Tons of hippies, the Mayor, and so forth!)

Seeds of Compassion (HUGEST! The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Dave Matthews (blech), Rob Bell, Steven Charleston, sold out football stadiums...)

Healing our Planet Earth (A little less HUGE than Seeds of Compassion, but HUGER for Episcopalians than the Green Festival! Sally McFague, Katherine Jefferts Schori, ME (well, I'll be helping with sign-ins anyway))

Everything must Change (Less HUGE than the rest, but potentially HUGER for emerging church types. Brian McClaren and friends).

Why in the world is it all happening in the same city on the same weekend?! I can be at one of them anyway...

Relatively Faithful: The Weekend in Seattle....

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discusses the difficulties in covering religion during a polarized time. His description of his run in with the proprietor of Little Green Footballs will sound familiar to anyone who remembers a certain Anglican blog defending its right to discuss whether they would "waste a bullet" on the Presiding Bishop.

Hat tip: Religion News Service Blog