Last week I attended a small conference in Nashville, where I enjoyed some really good conversations with several fellow bloggers/writers—Jim Palmer, Lauren Biggs, Gavin Richardson, Jay Voorhees, Andrew Thompson, Amy Smith, and Ronald Kidd to name a few. (Note that Ronald Kidd has written a novel about Monkey Town!)
At one point, as we were discussing our blogs, I was asked to describe my readers. “What do they have in common that draws them to your site?” the moderator asked.
I thought about the variety of faith backgrounds represented on this blog—Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, conservative evangelicals, agnostics, Mennonites, Methodists, Pentecostals, doubters, skeptics, fundamentalists, disenfranchised fundamentalists, religious scholars, and religious misfits—and all I could think to say was, “My blog attracts people who are in transition…or who have recently transitioned…from one way of approaching their faith to another.”
This sparked an interesting conversation around the table about our own faith journeys and how they have changed course in recent years, which raised some interesting questions that I would like to pose to you:
1. Have you recently transitioned from one way of approaching your faith to another? Are you in the midst of such a transition?
2. Are faith transitions merely a rite of passage for 18-30 year-olds or is there something larger going on in the broader culture, something like what Phyllis Tickle describes in the Great Emergence as postmoderns picking and choosing the best elements from each faith tradition and trying to weld those elements into one?
3. How would you describe the readership of this blog?
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