Bloggers dancing, bloggers changing, bloggers down.

The community of bloggers in Anglican-Land constitute an odd sort of community. Across the barriers of time, space, practice, theology, music and gastronomy, we begin to engage one another as real, not cyber, persons. Sometimes the cyber and the flesh combine in an odd way to produce such things as Padre Mickey's ongoing dance party or the Mad Priest's musical offerings. Sometimes, in the midst of wild disagreements someone will rearrange the furniture in her blogspot and voila, BabyBlue has new clothes. So this blog entry is to note several things:

(i) I missed a fine blogger party in New Jersey. Things went a bit crazy here in the village by the bay and the big water making it impossible to go, but the extensive and quietly mad report of the even by Elizabeth, telling secrets, Kaeton tells all. Wish I could have been there. Incarnational living means jumping from cyber to bodily space. And beside, I have loved Ms. Kaeton for longer than I can say, Tobias likewise and Padre Mickey from across the miles. Ah, to have been with them there.

(ii) Fred Schwartz, whose real name is a variation on "wonderful," has been holding forth on Real Anglican. He announced yesterday that whether or not it was a town for losers, he was pulling out of there to win. It seems he has a dissertation to finish. Go for it Fred!

Fred in the land of San Joaquin has been a vocal, sometimes quirky, critic of the madness of the purity gang and likewise a critic of the bumbling ol' Episcopal Church. He does not suffer fools gladly and I will miss his commentary as a faithful Episcopalian in a confused world.

(iii) Mad Priest has been trying to work up some reinvention of the blogging vocation because on some cultural level blogging has been replaced by twittering, texting, facebooking, picking one's nose, and making love in the grass.

Some of his ideas for expanding the community of people that find MP - land home are interesting but don't seem to be taken up by many folk. I like the voting block. I am not sure I need the separate pages for this or that function (conversation, essays, etc.) He wrote a fine essay on the problem of the blogger's place in cyber culture HERE. I think all bloggers, even the less imaginative of us, wonder about the future of this venue in its "pure" essay form. But I'm putting my money on the mad priest blogger to lead the way into new uses of this part of the cyber world. One of the best parts of his blog is the prayer postings. I can attest to the fact that he not only posts on the basis of what he picks up and what is given to him, he reaches out to check in on the health and welfare of some of us in our hour of need. Mad Priest keep at it madly, but mind the gap.

So friends in the blogsphere meet, dance, change, and sometimes stop. Kind of like real life.

"Just remember to leave a little tip, to help your neighbor on his one way trip." (Frank Zappa, some time ago.)