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Could we start again, please?

Could we start again, please?

Last updated on: March 7, 2011 at 7:34 pm by Fred Clark

Could we start again, please? 2011-03-07T19:34:40-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7pgUvirgM

OK, let’s try that again. Reboot. Reset. Restart. Reinstall. Seek to be born again, as it were.

Big news. Really big news. Very exciting news, I think, but also not terribly disruptive news if we do this right.

Well, safe to say I’m 0-for-1 so far.

Let me first address what the move won’t mean.

The good news is it won’t mean any changes in the substance, content or frequency of this blog.

And thus, of course, the bad news is it won’t mean any changes in the substance, content or frequency of this blog.

This will remain the same blog that readers here are accustomed to visiting …

That’s a promise made, a promise kept and a promise that I will continue to keep. And as far as I can tell, no one seems upset over this part of the relocation. What one sees on arrival at www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/ is a very close visual approximation of what one found on arrival at slacktivist.typepad.com, but more importantly it is an exact match for what one found in terms of content.

The content of the posts has not changed at all. For good or for ill it’s exactly the same, and anyone who found the posts at the old site worthwhile should find their opinions of the posts at the new site unchanged, because the posts themselves are unchanged.

That — no change in content — was Big Factor No. 1 in accepting the invitation to host the site at Patheos. My new hosts were just as adamant on this point as I was.

Big Factor No. 2 was that the ongoing discussion in comments would be able to continue as it has been. Here’s where things have gone sour, so let me bracket that for a moment and discus the other Big Factor and a couple of smaller ones first.

Big Factor No. 3, to be blunt, involved money. Cash. Geld. Mammon. Filthy lucre.

Terribly crass, I know, but the stuff turns out to be rather necessary. My income at the paper fell quite a bit from 2009 to 2010 with the loss of overtime and the introduction of occasional furloughs. In 2011, with the expectation of regular furloughs, it will drop below what it was in 2010 — provided the incredible shrinking newspaper biz keeps me employed for the entire year, which is probably likely, but by no means guaranteed. That all means that the opportunity cost of writing here has been approaching a point where it could become prohibitive, meaning that … well, I was trying really hard not to think about what that meant as it made my stomach hurt.

Patheos’ invitation to move to their site meant an opportunity to make blogging a net money gainer — promising a shift, in Mr. McCawber’s words, from something like “annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six” to something more like “annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six.” This was not the only factor, or a deciding factor, or even one of the top two factors, but it was still a big one. The difference between McCawber’s “happiness” and “misery” is not inconsequential. Nor is the difference between, “Yes, let’s sign you up” and “No, we can’t afford for you to take German IV this summer.” And that last example comes from actual reality, not from Dickens.

So, yeah, money. I’m sorry, but there it is. Not a huge sum, but enough — and the difference between “enough” and “not enough,” as Mr. McCawber noted, is quite a difference.

Having said that, though, we’d have somehow found some other way of getting back to enough if this new arrangement had required me to change the content of this blog or to derail the conversation and the community here in comments. The plan was to get everybody on the bus, not to throw anyone under it.*

The other, smaller, factors in the move included the opportunity to make the Typepad-to-WordPress leap. The options and capabilities of WordPress have been expanding while those of Typepad seem to be evaporating one by one, with what were once standard features being slowly replaced, it seems, by fee-for-service assistance from a shrinking tech-support staff. As far as this part of the switch goes, I’m afraid I must ask your patience as I relearn some of the things I used to know how to do in the old platform.

Another smaller factor in making this switch had to do with the potential for the door-opening possibilities that come from having an affiliation other than “some guy who writes stuff on the Internets.” Whether or not that ought to matter much is a separate question from whether or not it does matter to more people than I’d realized and become aware of due to my lack of such affiliation.

Let me put this in the context of one of my more urgent concerns. I have been arguing and advocating here for many years that American evangelical Christians ought to stop opposing full legal equality for GLBT folks and start supporting it. The effect of everything I’ve written on this subject has been approximately negligible in shifting or influencing opinions among my fellow evangelicals. A part of the reason for that — only a part, but a part nonetheless — has been that the lack of any institutional affiliation makes me easier to dismiss. “Says who?” should never be as important a question as “Is what this person is saying true?” But when the answer to “Says who?” is “some guy on the Web,” many people are less inclined to bother considering the more important question than they would be if the answer to “Says who?” is “some guy who writes for a website you’ve heard of.”

Seems silly, perhaps, but I’m trying to roll a very big rock up a very steep hill and I’ll take all the leverage I can get.

So, OK, that’s a bit more context.

Now let’s turn to where things have gotten ugly.

And nothing should change with the discussions in the comment section.

Epic fail.

This is my fault, and I am sorry.

It’s true that the whole runaway italics bug has been resolved, but apart from that things really seem to have gone off the rails, for which I apologize because most of the blame here lies with me for making several assumptions so thoroughly assumed that I wasn’t even aware I was assuming them.

I almost never moderated the comments at the old site. Over the course of many years, I banned a total of two posters, both of whom had become too abusive to ignore. Over time, the comments became self-policing. Drive-by-trollers arrived at their own peril. Some were laughed away. Others were invited to stay and discus things more civilly — and more than a few, kind of wonderfully, actually did so. I didn’t have to intervene and so I never did.

And rather stupidly, I simply hadn’t given any thought to the fact that I might have to start moderating comments at the new site or that anyone else might be stepping into that role. I played around a bit with Disqus, figured we could test-drive the threading feature and ditch it if it proved unhelpful (am I wrong in thinking that most would vote to ditch it?), and then went back to writing about Rob Bell and Team Hell or whatever it was I was writing about at the time without ever asking the important and necessary questions about policies and procedures and all the other things I ought to have been asking about.

I apologize for that.

I’m asking those questions now and making sure the answers won’t in any way interfere with the conversation or the community. I should have done this before the move and having to do so now is an imposition on you all. I apologize for that imposition and ask for your patience while we get this worked out.

Another thing I need to apologize for is a lack of clarity in my “Big News” post about the relationship between www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/ and any/everything else you may encounter at the parent domain.

The views and opinions expressed on slacktivist do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Patheos.com. The views and opinions expressed on Patheos.com do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of me. Some of them do, others decidedly do not. Some I embrace, others I oppose. I want to encourage the former and transform the latter. I am not certain that such transformation is always possible, but it is always necessary and so I believe the attempt is always worthwhile. That attempt, however, will be mostly indirect, as there is no direct need or cause or reason for the disparate blogs hosted here to interact with one another.

Is Patheos a model of diversity and inclusiveness? Not by a long shot. But that is their aspiration, even if their achievement of that aspiration is a long ways off. I want to help them come closer to that achievement, not just rail against them for their shortcomings. Is Patheos a model of robust pluralism? No, because there is no good model of that, only various attempts that have all failed to one degree or another. Real pluralism is really, really hard.

But I clearly oversold them on that score, causing some here to feel betrayed that the reality wasn’t as fully formed as I made it sound. I am sorry that I misled you. I represented aspiration as achievement, intent as reality, desire as capacity. That was wrong of me. I apologize for that. I am sorry.

I mentioned the book How To Be A Perfect Stranger, noting that it seems driven by a desire for mutual respect based on the Golden Rule. In service of that mutual respect, it offers guidance for navigating the ceremonies of many different religious traditions almost like an etiquette book. The nice thing, usually, is that even if you do bungle the etiquette, most people are graciously willing to gently correct you, allowing your attempt at goodwill — or the presumption of your goodwill — to count to your credit even if you make what might otherwise be an appalling error. I would ask that you try to regard the evolving site my new hosts are building with a similar graciousness. The root word there is grace — unmerited favor, a free gift from you to them, undeserved and unearned.

And I would ask that you also show such grace toward me as I try to work out the problems here and to set things right. I am deeply sorry for the difficulties of the past week. These are my fault and I will correct them.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* FWIW, I don’t think the phrase “threw them under the bus” so much connotes an attribution of malice as it does an attribution of careless disregard or of an apathetic nonchalance or lack of thought/concern. Not premeditation, but negligence. I would offer my assurances that I’m not intending either malice or a lack of concern, but I think an actual demonstration of said concern, rather than any such reassurances, is what is called for here to address people’s, um, concerns. This post is not in itself such a demonstration, merely the request to allow such a demonstration to be made and the apology that I hope will afford the space for that demonstration.

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