The blog initiative
Posted by wisdomtree on October 4, 2007
The wisdomtree blog initiative was launched soon after I launched wisdomtree – The Academy of the faithful. I was aware that blogs were hugely popular. I wonder why I stayed away from blogging for the last 2 – 3 years. I did try getting into blogs once but I couldn’t keep pace with the demands of keeping a blog up and running. Blogs are a great way to tell your story.
For the uninitiated blogs are personal log/entries on the web. The modern blog has evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. The term ‘weblog’ was coined by John Barger and its shortened form ‘blog’ was coined by Peter Merholz. After a slow start, blogging has gained rapid popularity. When it was launched the Xanga site had only 100 diaries by 1997 but by Dec 2005 it crossed over 20 million. In May 2007, blog search engine Technorati tracked close to 71 million blogs. Surely, blogs are a big thing on the net.
We live in a wired (weird) world. The audience are the emperors of choice. The choice of the topic (taste) and truth (perspective), not to mention the time to listen, depend entirely on the audience/seeker. In the ‘nu’ world, we need ‘nu’ methods to re-tell the gospel. I find blogs as a great tool to reach out to the new generation. We meet them where they want to read. We speak when they want to read. They get to listen when they want to read. Believe me, there are many people with questions google-searching on the look out for answers in the blogosphere.
Let me share the wisdomtree experience. Wisdomtree (wisdomtree.wordpress.com) is a team blog. We have a small (four member) blog team and we have so far posted 52 articles/write-ups. Wisdomtree has already registered 3733 hits.
The following are some of the search tags that brought people to wisdomtree blog articles.
- movies portraying perfect marriages
- harry potter
- Creating a new future forgetting past
- value of life moral movies
- Rajni-mania
- controversy related to shivaji the boss
- youth apologetics
- spiderman lessons
- Popularity of shivaji
- blood diamond danny archer
- Sometimes I wonder if God will ever forgive
- my experience tells me otherwise
- Social themes in tamil films
- i feel like there is something missing
- movies moral
- is marriage relevant?
- moral themes in Spiderman the movie
- film theology culture
- Mirrors and truth
- do people fall in love only for lust
- youth luke 12:13-21 bible study
I am sure you’d agree that wisdomtree blog has met the ‘questions’ out there. The list above is just a sample of what young people are looking for. Even today, the blog entries dealing with Spiderman, Harry Potter, Failure, Blood Diamond, Kabhi Advida Na Kehna, Nishabd are top posts. The blog entry “Is life worth living? is also regularly visited. We had 513 hits in three days ( I’m pleasantly shocked!). Danny Archers question in Blood Diamond: ” Will God ever forgive us for the things we’ve done to each other” is a favourite search tag.
It is obvious that they are looking for meaning, identity, significance and to make sense of news/views/reviews around them. What an opportunity to share the counterperspectives of Jesus to “Generation WHY”. We have been able to present christian (counter) perspectives to bear on popular cultural texts such as movies, news stories, music vedios, magazine articles and advertisements etc. We don’t claim we have done much but at least we have been able to reach out to the ‘nu’ generation with the attractive, intelligible and responsible gospel.
At the seminary, I have been challenged by Paul Tillich’s method of corelation. We must co-relate the answers implied in the gospel with the questions that emerges in the (cultural) context. Afterall questions are ‘quest’-ions.
It is said that he who captures the epoch, captures the story. Conversely, he who captures the story, captures the epoch. Who are the storytellers of our times? J.K Rowling, Dan Brown, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Carl Sagan and a host of Hollywood/Bollywood producers are the story tellers who capture the imagination of our generation. We are called to be Story tellers/keepers. We need to re-tell the gospel story in a manner that would capture the imagination of contemporary audiences. It is not just enough to re-tell the gospel “attractively” and “intelligently” to command a listening by contemporary audience. It is important that we re-tell the gospel story “responsibly”.
True, telling the gospel story in an information age isn’t easy. But then, every generation of story keepers have done it facing the odds. We can (and we must) re-tell the story of Jesus and keep the story alive. Believe me, blogs are a great way of connecting with Generation WHY?
