When I first happened upon open source theology and after reading the manifesto and a few postings I thought, this is an idea that is good bordering on great, bright bordering on brilliant. Why not use processes and procedures developed and adopted by the computing community to move away from expending time, energy and money on just making the hardware do what it is capable of doing toward unleashing the creativity of the community on applications and actual work? Of course, we all know that another agenda of the open source code effort was to beat Microsoft, or any other player for that matter that might acheive a stranglehold on what insisted on being a totaly unfettered exercise in human creativity and freedom.

My second thought was, okay, I get it, here is a fellow who wants to use the internet to float his own theories, benefit from the comments, questions and critique of an unpaid staff of contributors, all for the purpose of publishing, promoting and selling books, and therby, I suppose, enhancing a reputation in the community.

Upon reflection at the time, and as to the second point, I concluded that there was absolutely nothing wrong with using the website for the purpose of generating publishable material, a fact I think that was not hidden from anyone. I might comment that this activity is going on all over the internet, and elsewhere for that matter, with far less disclosure than Andrew has made, also with far less attribution of thoughts and ideas not one’s own.

As to the first point on open source code, the idea there is to take a core set of 0’s and 1’s, a compiled (who’s compiler?) kernel that has universal applicability (get the irony?) and publish it to the world such that there is no gatekeeper as far as simply making the machine run. History suggests that the original source of the open source code is almost always one person who happened upon a solution that worked. Taking that kernel, then, the computing community is free, because of the nature of the project, to go forward and develop applications, routines, and sub-routines that do work, regardless of the machine that they are run on.

So, open source code needs a center, an object, a target (a universal?) that can be adopted, adapted, appropriated or otherwise taken freely and applied, or refined and criticized, or argued about or… .

Is it any surprise then, Andrew, that your theories, comments, opinions and beliefs have been the center to this website? It is the center, core, kernel, for the time being, that serves as the object or target, around which and against which a conversation may take place. I think David Tracy’s work on conversation and the need for an exemplar is useful here, although this website and the material posted on it is far from being a "classic" as Tracy defines the term, and would refer you to his work Plurality and Ambiguity.

Also, it is my experience that every project needs a "sparkplug," an igniting force that causes combustion that keeps the pistons moving up and down and the engine running. My guess is that this particular function has proven to require far more time, energy and involvement than you, Andrew, anticipated.

For example, there seems to be a need for an editorial function. I know that the immediate reaction to this suggestion from this particular community will probably be "God forbid." Nonetheless, there is a reason why other,  institutionally sponsored websites attempting to build a stream of coherent questions and responses imposes some kind of a screening function on the comments being posted. As an example, I mention Blackwell Publishing’s (now Wiley) forums, most notably Religious Compass, known to me only because I am on the user group review team. Another site I monitor is "the church and postmodern culture." I have seen you, Andrew, exercise your prerogative by breaking off streams that seem to be wandering of course. I have also seen some contributors, on occasion, try to summarize and distill the comments on a particular thread, before commenting further. This is a useful organizing function. But it is time-consuming and tedious, to be sure.

But it was Barth who said words to the effect that doing theology is time consuming and tedious and anyone who doesn’t love it shouldn’t be doing it. I submit it is the cost of admission.

I wonder if anyone reading this post will actually see what I am doing. It will be interesting to see although my experience with my posts on this website is that they usually stop the particular dialogue dead in its tracks.

I express my gratitude to you, Andrew, for devising and implementing this website. I follow the comments closely, and have, on occasion, found useful text that is both informative and transformative. It is a worthy effort, I think, and I hope you get it dialed in the way you want it. I note that you have offered somewhere on the site that anyone who wants to share the administration of the site is more than welcome to volunteer. I take it you haven’t received many offers.

Please accept my comments in the caring spirit in which they are offered.

 Tracy

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.