Lol. It’s a nice gesture, Andrew, but you have every right to reserve the list to your favorites. I subscribe to a (free) service that keeps continuous track of the (few) visitors to my blog — what time they clicked onto the site, how long they stayed, how many pages they viewed, what city thy clicked in from. People come from a wide scattering of places across the globe, and I often wonder how it is that they’ve managed to track me down. I scour the output every day hoping against hope for evidence that I’ve had a visitor from Den Haag. Based on that criterion I infer that my blog doesn’t qualify as one of your favorites, unless you’re just as infrequent a visitor to the others on your list as you are to mine. I know you’ve never commented on my blog, though that may be true of your other favorites as well.

Blogrolls are a source of anxiety for many bloggers. He’s on mine; how come I’m not on his? — that sort of thing. There are blog wars in which one blogger, irritated at someone else’s comments, deletes his blog from the roll, prompting retaliation from the other. Putting someone on one’s blogroll implies an endorsement of that blog, which might alienate others in one’s blogging network. And there’s no question that appearing on a popular blogger’s blogroll bestows a certain cachet on the less-popular blogger. Of course I’m above all these petty egoistic calculations of prestige, but hey, I’m a psychologist, I have profound insights into the human condition.

Anyhow, I was visiting your other (exclusive) blog yesterday, reading your latest post about "metavista," writing a comment in which I recounted a (mildly critical — though I do have witnesses) vignette involving an exchange on another well-known emerging-type blog. It wasn’t until after I submitted the comment that I noticed your "Personal Favourites" list and lo, there’s this other blog I just got finished citing, one of the chosen six!

I will say that, for a year and a half, OST appeared on my blogroll. It was on there because it really was one of my favorites, and having it listed on the blogroll made it convenient for me to click through to it. I can’t remember exactly why I eventually took OST off my blogroll, but I think it was after I finally started paying serious attention to implications of your theology which I find distasteful, and which we discussed here at some length. So deleting OST from the list constituted a kind of virtual book-burning. But I must confess that I do still visit OST on a regular basis, almost against my will — call it one of my guilty pleasures.

Of course you may do what you like with your Personal Favourites list, but for the sake of your personal integrity I encourage you to remove Ktismatics. If, however, you decide that it really is one of your favorites, I’d be honored to receive visits from Den Haag even if the honor isn’t publicly announced on your list.

 Best,

 John

P.S. This seems more like a Sir Toby’s topic of discussion, but I doubt whether those anachronistic theological adventurers know anything about blogs.