Reviews
A New Kind of Conversation: Blogging toward a postmodern faith
Ed. Myron Bradley Penner and Hunter Barnes
Paternoster, 208pp
I looked forward to reviewing this book, thinking from the title that it would address the way new forms of media affect theological meaning. I confess to being slightly disappointed that it is, in fact, a book on the uneasy relationship between evangelicalism and postmodernism, but written in the style of a blog. (For the uninitiated, a ‘blog’, short for web-log, is a web-based journal.)
The editors explain that they adapted the blog format because they wanted the discussion to take place in a ‘postmodern’ form, with interaction between theologians, philosophers and practitioners, and including a good mix of male and female authors and voices from the west and the two-thirds world. To achieve this they set up a customised website for the project, where they posted short essays by each of the main contributors – the two editors, Brian McLaren, Mabiala Kenzo, Bruce Ellis Benson and Ellen Haroutunian. Other writers and bloggers were invited to respond online, and selected comments were edited and re-arranged thematically in the book.
Reading it at a pace usually afforded to pages of the internet, the book is fun. It takes the reader on a high-speed romp through jungles of theology, faith and philosophy, tackling the perceived clash of worlds between evangelical Christianity and postmodernism in a form that is unstuffy, assumes no specialist knowledge, and invites critique and questions from fellow authors - in fact, some of the best writing appears in the comments.
Taken as a serious book, though, it’s exactly these features that become annoying, as it is uneven in texture, with enormous sweeping statements, and some moments of dense academic language alongside little boxes containing definitions of relatively common words, or supplying one-line biographies of theologians or philosophers. Reading online, you would only click the links you need, but the visual presence of every reproduced hyperlink doesn’t translate well from screen to page.
The book was edited only a matter of months after the customised blog was launched, making it atypical in the world of blogging. Most blogs begin without the aim of being converted into book form, and amass their commenters randomly over time, rather than by personal and quick-fire invitation. So it doesn’t read to me either like a book or a blog, although one thing that does feel authentically blog-like is the inclusion of internet identities in the comments. Leighton Tebay, the blog’s designer, wrote, ‘There is a strange feel to the book…. some of the people didn’t use their real names and it seems just a little bit odd to observe scholars interact with “Moose Lips”’.
It’s laudable to aim for accessibility without dumbing down, but extremely difficult to pull off, and using essays as brief as blogposts seems a little thin in book form. The essay on postfoundationalism seems too short to tease out the weight of material it presents, and although good counterarguments appear in the comments, the debate isn’t really pursued by Benson beyond admitting that there is indeed more to be said. Similarly, although Penner covers an impressive amount of ground on hermeneutics in a very short essay, its weakness is that too many hares are set running without room to chase any of them. I think, then, that this book will appeal if you want a snapshot of quick-fire energetic conversation, but not if you want carefully thought out arguments.
I’m left wondering whether the editors’ aims would have been better served simply by adapting the idea of blogging, rather than creating a blog in order to produce a book. Steve Taylor imitated the blog format in The Out of Bounds Church by requesting blog-style comments from other authors and including them like marginalia in his final script, widening his arguments while leaving him room to clarify his own ideas. And writing in dialogue long predates the internet. In the 1988 book Essentials, David L Edwards and John Stott wrote several essays each, to which the other wrote a reply, and the author then wrote a reply to the reply. Certainly we need dialogue, which the blogosphere embodies, but sometimes the seductive world of the internet can lead us to mistake speed and volume of interaction for profundity.
I was intrigued by this book, then, especially as an inveterate blogger myself. It would certainly serve as a helpful, unstuffy introduction to the sometimes impenetrable arguments about faith and postmodernism. It contains a few real gems amid a sometimes distracting format. And it leaves hanging many interesting questions concerning the relationship between form and content. So despite the fact that the book doesn’t completely work, I’m glad to have read it, and found it thought provoking not only on the subject of postmodernism, but on the form-content relationship. I hope the ever-imaginative Robin Parry, its commissioning editor, might follow this book with a further volume on that subject.
Maggi Dawn
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