I don't claim to be the first New Church blogger. (Does anyone know to whom that honor belongs?) But when I started New Church Thought I was one of the only people with a New Church/Swedenborg related blog that updated it at all regularly. As a result I didn't see any particular reason to have a blogroll. Why give people a list of blogs that aren't going to have anything new for them to look at?
But, I'm happy to say that this is no longer the case and, to celebrate the fact that there are now other New Church/Swedenborg related blogs that are regularly updated, I have now added a blogroll. The fancy widget even tells you how recently the blogs were updated. Some of them were updated a couple of months ago but others were updated within hours. Here's to a lively New Church blogosphere!
4 comments:
I am happy too!
I think I was probably the first. (Eli Echols was also a very early New Church blogger, I believe.) I started anonymously blogging in early December 2001. I quickly dropped the anonymity. I've always done it from an explicitly New Church perspective, although often not with a theological or religious focus. In fact, I think I got into more religious discussions as a political and news blogger (I was one of the original "warbloggers"), than I ever did with my more religiously directed material.
But then I took a humungous hiatus. Which I sorta regret, now. At the height of things, I could count on getting an occasional mention from major traffic-drivers like Instapundit and the Wall Street Journal. Looking back, I think maybe I should have kept up the original site just so I could continue to build an audience.
Ah, well. Live and learn. It is indeed great to see that more and more of us are starting to have these public conversations, now.
Maybe here is a good spot for sopme history....
Patrick Rose, Jim Cooper and I were among the first ministers to communicate by file sharing and email. There were a couple of others, but they will need to identify themselves! It was before 1990. I was sending files back and forth with my editor as early as 1986. Likely none of you remember the "handshake" protocol. Patrick continues to serve the General Church Clergy as webmaster, as well as for the wider cybercouncil, which we called the first primitive listserve. Others may be able to increase the accuracy of this memory...
Perhaps the earliest online public Swedenborgian discussion forum was the Swedenborgian Ideas echo on Fidonet, started by yours truly (Lee Woofenden) in 1992.
You can read its original announcement on page 16 of FidoNews, Vol. 9 No. 50 (14 December 1992), available online here.
At its peak it was carried by five (count 'em!) Fidonet bulletin boards around the United States and (I believe) Canada.
Though most of its content seems to have been lost in the mists of time, it apparently lasted at least into 1994 before closing up shop under the onslaught of that newfangled Internet thing . . . .
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