Months in the making, it is finally finished: the Social Science Research Council’s report, “The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere,” of which I was the lead author. It’s a somewhat cumbersome overview of blogging, academic blogging, blogs about religion, and our blogging future.

Part of the process (and hence the cold sweats) was assembling a list of nearly 100 blogs upon which the report is based. Oh, goodness, I wanted so much for everyone to feel included! We’ve already been receiving complains from deserving bloggers who were overlooked. All you bloggers out there: we come in peace.

The purpose at hand is to foster a more self-reflective, collaborative, and mutually-aware religion blogosphere. Ideally, this report will spark discussion among religion bloggers that will take their work further, while also inviting new voices from outside existing networks to join in and take part.

At The Immanent Frame today, ten (all male, unfortunately) religion writers, scholars, and bloggers discuss the report and their experiences with religion in the dirt devil of (can we still call it that?) “new media.” My favorite bit of it comes from Frederick Clarkson of Talk to Action:

First, I invite everyone to consider the possibility that blogs may be one of the greatest gifts to writing and to writers in the history of the world.

Mark Silk of Spiritual Politics also makes a fine point, a reminder that a lot of blogging doesn’t have to be altogether different from forms that came before:

Analytically, what seems to me missing from most accounts of blogging, including this one, is how much it is like serving on the editorial board of a metropolitan newspaper. (There aren’t a lot of people with that experience; I had it for a few years in Atlanta.) What an editorial writer does ranges from short, easy takes—shooting fish in a barrel—to careful, fully researched analyses of public issues. On a good editorial page, the writing ranges from sharp and light to serious and sober. And you’ve always got to feed the beast. It seems to me that what can reasonably be hoped for in the religion blogosphere is more of the carefully reported and nuanced kind of opinion writing—posts that are actually meant to convince, rather than simply snap the wet towel. A good editorial can better and much more quickly orient a reader than an extended take-out by a reporter; but too often, bloggers don’t think they’re accomplishing anything unless they act as hanging judge.

Read the report. Join the discussion. I, for one, am gonna get offline and work on writing my actual, physical book.

Dawkins and I were recently asked to write articles for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe it. I don’t know what the rationale behind this is, or even if it will come off. I said that I would do so, provided that my last sentence would be, “Jesus Christ would never have been given a column in the Wall Street Journal.” It is indicative of the strangeness and intensity of this debate that it crops up in the most peculiar places. It crops up at the very temples of Mammon. But, you see, I think that’s because these people really do think it’s just about a set of ideas, of propositions. That’s a pretty comfortable debate. But the point I try to make when I enter on these forums is that it’s not just that. It has a strong political subtext.

Keep reading at The Immanent Frame. Also, see my earlier review of Reason, Faith, and Revolution for The American Prospect.

So why did I bother writing this piece in today’s Religion Dispatches? Well, how else could I get paid to sit on my couch all day reading pulp fiction and then, in the evening, rush off to Manhattan with a friend who’s the closest thing I could find to being a “symbologist” (he studies Freemasonry) to see the latest blockbuster? And I was lucky—it ended up touching on a lot of my recent work on multiverse physics and evolution and the Templeton Foundation.

Ewan McGregor portrays, to my knowledge, the first action-movie villain driven to his diabolical acts by an addiction to intelligent design theory.

In graduate school, I studied with the eminent scholar of Confucianism Tu Weiming. I used to refer to him as the original Confucian evangelical. He travels the world arguing for the revival of Confucianism as a living tradition. A critical moment came for me when I took a moral reasoning class with him. At some point I realized, “My goodness, I’m a Confucian!” I had been raised as a Confucian without being called a Confucian. All the categories of piety and reciprocity, the devotion to ritual, right practices, and certain kinds of respect—these were practices and ideas that I had always been living. Finding a moral and religious vocabulary is a very powerful experience. It’s a sign of moral maturity to be able to say: “I have this intellectual identity, I have this spiritual identity, I have this moral identity, all of which place me in a lineage, in a genealogy, in a tradition that’s bigger than me as an individual.”

A part of me, though, has a fantasy. You see, the Times is in huge trouble. Stock value is down, the shimmering new building is mortgaged, subscriptions are dropping, and the website isn’t remotely paying for itself. And they’re not alone. The Tribune is in big trouble. So is trying to sell news on paper. A new business model is necessary. My fantasy is to go back there and make it my mission to save the institution. Come up with a new plan, implement it, and rescue the precious newspaper somehow with my youthful ingenuity. But… I guess I’m just going to sit around and write articles about stuff instead.

Regardless of what I do, all this anxiety has got some really interesting articles about publishing into the Times lately. Yesterday, there was a solution-minded op-ed, “News You Can Endow.” The author, the chief investment officer at Yale, suggests that newspapers should take a hint from universities: go non-profit, get an endowment, drop the political endorsements, and play the august cultural institution. It might just work.

The next one’s a quickie from a Times blog. A video of “How the Future of Online News Looked in 1981.” Gives us a sense of how dinosaur-like everything in media is gonna look in 30 years.

And another sign of systemic demise: the Washington Post Book World, an old standby for me in my Arlington days, will no longer appear in a separate section. Makes sense—nobody’s reading books, nobody’s buying newspapers, so nobody needs a newspaper section about books. Too bad book reviews are where some of the most exciting intellectual exchanges happen.

Finally, speaking of books, there was a front page article yesterday on print-on-demand book publishing. I’ve been a big proponent of this since my own Small’s Clone Press switched from hand-made crafts to PoD. It is an incredibly exciting phenomenon that puts book publishing within reach of people without big investment capital. The sad casualty of PoD, however, is design. Almost without exception (I like to think that my books lean toward the exception), these things are ugly. And, as the head of PoD company Lulu.com admits,

“We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind,” Mr. Young said.

As my fantasy suggests, I really hope that we can take these trials and troubles as an opportunity. Don’t wait for Rupert Murdoch to buy everything up, but work to develop new, economically-sound ways to keep intellectual and civic discussion alive. I’m not staying at the Times, but I am testing out the pamphlet as a new/old medium for exchanging crazy ideas. Not to mention some websites here and there and other, secret things not yet unleashed. This is a plea. Let’s think hard about this and exchange our ideas. Who knows, maybe we’ll even make a buck or two in the process.

*

P.S. Another goodie not from the Times but the Review, “Google and the Future of Books.” A reminder that these are critical times:

Yet this is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.

Each pamphlet should be an abrupt introduction to truth, or some aspect of it, for consumption by the masses. Fascinate them. Bare your soul or tell on others, as you like. Whatever you care about deeply or whatever pisses you off. Tell a story. Manifesto-ize. Together, the series will announce the undercurrents of our time that have gone yet unnoticed.

The pamphlet medium blasts from the past. Pamphlet wars built the groundwork of the American and French revolutions. They were the blogs of times before the internet, and they’re better than the internet because you can hold them in your hand. Pamphlets have a special place among religions. You’ve been offered thousands of them in public places of all sorts, with a smile and a prayer for your eternal soul. Many go so far as to say, “If this pamphlet has changed your life the way we want it to, CALL NOW AND RECEIVE YOUR FREE [whatever].” That’s how powerful they’re supposed to be, and that’s how powerful they are. Think of this series as a big opportunity to shake the world out of its dogmatic slumber.

These pamphlets will be classy. ISBNs, professional design, publicity, and distribution far and wide. Five bucks a pop or less. The length we’re looking at is around 50 small pages. Six to eight thousand words, give or take. Fewer, obviously, if pictures are involved (any black-and-white, 2-d media welcome). You’ll earn royalties on sales.

To join in, send me a short proposal about what you’d like to create, and we’ll go from there. If you know someone else who may be interested, feel free to pass this invitation along.

Happy New Year!

Nathan Schneider (nathan [at] therowboat.com)
Editor, “What Is Missing?”

Incidentally, coherent personhood has been the assumption behind rational government (all but Louis XIV’s Le etat, c’est moi), especially republican democracy. Voting, opinion polls, representation, and constitutions all depend on the assumption that citizens are coherent persons.

The same goes, of course, for all rational organizations. Since Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we know well enough that working in industrial systems means becoming at least somewhat cog-like. It demands a spiritual shift, so to speak, because one’s ultimate aims, or at least proximate aims, become reconfigured.

Because of my own difficulties at day jobs—seemingly part of the transition from academic life to the workaday—I have been polling friends and family about professionalism. My father wrote, among other generous things:

You must learn to enjoy being useful as a first step.

This is truly a shift of scale, a shift of orientation. My difficulties at work, I realize, stem from the fact of spending the work day looking out for my own interests, and being mainly interested in them. But doing things right means thinking differently. Sitting in the office, my interests have to become one with the office, one with the people I work with. It enables them to trust me and me to trust myself. Professionalism is a technology, in that it makes one useful to others; the person becomes technology.

With the discovery of any new technology there is something gained and something lost. My generation has grown up being acutely aware of this, to the point of cliche. When I first saw the movie Fight Club in high school, nothing could possibly feel more true and obvious than that a successful young professional life, decorated by Ikea and so forth, was empty at its root. Spontaneity gets systematically eliminated. Danger, too. The fundamental facts of existence, death and so forth, are put aside as less significant concerns than the minutiae of office life. The only difference between this and outright slavery is that slaves are? aware of their condition; professionals are under the delusion that they are, in fact, self-actualized and coherent persons.

Over at Garzuela, Kurt has been tossing these concerns around as well (beware of obscenity):

Do you like my new office? I think that it’s good to get some professionalism out of my system, so I can start to live like a real human. Let’s talk about dehumanization of the human race, and how we are being pushed to act more like mindless drones in order to be financially stable in the world? Actually, I think that some people will find it refreshing, and I actually landed the most professional job I’ve ever had yet, as a result of this kind of behavior. Or maybe it was getting this behavior out of my system, that allowed for me to get into my niche. Maybe I should say moist professional job, put hand on top of her head, and slowly guide it toward my crotch. Careful not to let her know that I’m unzipping my pants with my other hand, and getting a sweet ding a ling ready for her.

The obscenity to beware of is a prerequisite of such resistance against professionalism. Just like the fistfights in Fight Club it shocks the system, or shocks the person out of the system.

Yet these things I grew up knowing don’t feel quite known anymore. I’m twenty three years old, seeking my fortune and so forth, and a little professionalism has become required. Without it, I definitely can’t do my job. Without it, I keep messing up in little tasks, letting my personal interests overshadow my functional purpose. Doing the job right demands a little …?inauthenticity, though in my life so far, evading professions, I have always denied the possibility of that concept. How, I have thought, can one be other than oneself, or be more or less oneself?

Professionalism demands a line of separation between person and public face, an segregation of spheres so that each might be coherent—all in such a way that invents, for the first time, the dialectic of authenticity. It becomes a question possible to ask: Am I being authentic? Authentic to what?

Today two men climbed the outside of my office building, the fifty-something story New York Times Building in midtown Manhattan (one and two). Meanwhile I was in meetings or sitting at my computer. Metaphors begin in things that are real. I can still hear the sirens outside and the cheering of the crowd below.

Both guys made it all the way up the fifty-something stories and were arrested at the top. The first carried a banner about global warning. The second wore a t-shirt saying, “MALARIA NO MORE.” Indeed.

I have never seen the point so much of climbing mountains—deep down, at least. But I have hardly seen anything so beautiful as climbing buildings.

Having been at computers and meetings all day, with none of the incredible fear or exhilaration, metaphor remains. It is Babel, it is Icarus, it is a glorious mis-use. Imagination, salvation, persecution. I heard there were police officers running through the building, trying to pull off the glass to stop him (the first one) but he went up more quickly than they could ride the elevators.

Man against machine. Suicide. David and Goliath.

And there were two of them. Copycats. It’s like the pillar-sitters of late antiquity, who were saints, sitting on top of pillars for years and bestowing miracles. When the fad showed up again in the 1920s, the flagpole sitters were less saints than fools.

The wind was no less strong. Death to malaria.