Tomorrow is my last day as national coordinator of Emergent Village.  We’ve decided to restructure (read, flatten) the organization.  You can read the long version of the decision HERE and the press release HERE.

Also, I will now be blogging for Beliefnet.  Find my new blog HERE, and be sure to add that your RSS feeds.  You can also subscribe to receive posts via email.

This site will be undergoing a complete overhaul in the next couple months.  It will be a place for content other than my blogging, so I hope you’ll keep checking here and/or keep this feed in reader.

Many blessings to all of you who have been so supportive and affirming through these changes.

First, I received a couple comments and then a personal email regarding a post that I wrote earlier in the week.  The correspondence came from a friend who is also an academic, and she challenged the lack of sophistication in my post, saying that I was slinging around terminology in a sloppy manner.  In an email response I agreed, and then went on to say that blogging is a medium that is different-in-kind than the kind of work she’s used to doing.  I then joked that I hoped she wouldn’t have the same criticism of my dissertation!

Next, I read this piece by my favorite blogger, Andrew Sullivan.  Andrew really has been a shaping force in the blogging medium.  In has Atlantic essay, he argues that the blogging form is still evolving, but that it is turning out to be a uniquely postmodern form of communication, one that lends itself to quick, timely, opinionated thoughts.

Money quote: “For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

Sullivan goes on to argue that traditional daily journalism (e.g., daily newspapers) and long-form journalism (The Atlantic, The New York Time Sunday Magazine) become more relevant and more important in this era.  Blogging merely represents a new facet in the evolving constellation of media.  Really, I urge you to read Sullivan’s whole essay if blogs are a part of your life.

Finally, I read this post by Jeff Jarvis on the death of newspaper journalism.  I have a great affinity for daily newspaper journalism, in that my grandfather rose from copy boy to executive editor of the Minneapolis Tribune (all without a college degree), and one of my good friends is a journalist at a daily.  Jarvis takes on the conventional wisdom of the day that says that blogs and craigslist have killed newspapers.  Not so fast, he says.  What is killing newspapers is the lack of imagination among journalists.

Money quote: “No, the essence of the problem is that we thought the internet represented just a new gadget and not a fundamental change in society, the economy, and thus journalism.”

As I prepare to move my blog over to Beliefnet in coming weeks, am thinking about exactly how I see blogging and my role in the blogosphere — particularly among those who are interested in reading about God and spirituality and church and religion.  It will be, I am sure, an evolving conversation.

I’ve been thinking most of the day about my contribution to Blog Action Day.  But, try as I might, I cannot think of anything more profound than the title of this post.  I want poverty to end, particularly the extreme poverty that kills 25,000 persons a day.

I’ve tried to explain to my son, Tanner, who has a burden for this issue, that, indeed, enough food exists for everyone in the world.  The problem is getting it to the places that need it most.  That, to an 8-year-old, is almost incomprehensible.

To me, it’s just depressing.

But depression isn’t the answer.  Action is.  So I urge you to get involved, even make a donation.

Now Obama continues unruffled in the face of McCain/Palin onslaught of negative ads and tenuous connections to Bill Ayers and ACORN.  I expect that we’ll see tonight, once again, Obama perform in the debate without any Goresque sighs or Nixonian flop sweats.  Clearly, as Sullivan convincingly argues, Obama’s calm demeanor in the face of the global economic crisis has contributed to his recent surge in the polls.

And now to venture into the land of pure speculation: It seems to me that BO could not maintain this unshakeable calm were he not an exceptionally grounded, centered, and spiritual person.  I suppose that some people are more “wired” toward calm than others, and I’m quite sure that our life experiences contribute to our personalities (like, say, 5 1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton).  But running a 2+ year presidential campaign entails an extraordinary amout of stress.  Embedded journalists have repeatedly reported both Hillary and McCain regularly exploding in rage at their campaign teams.  Unless I’ve missed it, there’s been nary a mention of Obama losing his cool, even behind the scenes.

As a person who tries, often unsuccessfully, to stay centered in the midst of crisis and stress, I cannot but believe that BO’s own spirituality contributes greatly to the preternatural calm that he exudes.

So reports a fascinating article in AdWeek (HT: Bob Carlton, finder of all articles stimulating).  The point of the article is to once again remind advertising and marketing peeps that Americans are a very religious people.  In fact, we are surely the most religious of all industrialized countries.

This is a point I try to make repeatedly, like I did a couple weeks ago when reflecting on my time in Australia.  And I make it right at the outset of The New Christians.  In Australia, committed Christians really are dealing with a large segment of the population with no Christian background.  It makes catechesis particularly relevant, and you can see why programs like the Alpha Course catch on there and in the U.K.

But in the U.S. in general, and in my locale in particular, Christianity is in the drinking water.  Every year that I taught confirmation class at Colonial Church while on staff there, parents with no connection to the church would arrive in September with their 15-year-olds and enroll them in the program.  Confirmation at Colonial was a fairly rigorous, 12-month process that included lots of church history and theology, two retreats, spiritual disciplines and a summer mission trip.

To this day, the churches in my hometown have between 50 and 200 ninth graders in their confirmation classes.  And while those numbers skew higher than other parts of the country, Minnesota is still one of the most progressive (read, liberal) places in the country.  And yet, here we are, full of big churches and big youth groups.

Nevertheless, erstwhile church planters journey around this land, claiming that they’re going to save the “most unchurched city in America.”  Which city is that?  Depends on whom you ask (as we discovered this summer on the Church Basement Roadshow).

While it’s true that too often those who work in advertising, marketing, journalism, and politics have underestimated the religiosity of Americans, those of us in the church world dare not make that same mistake.

By the way, in answer to the opening question: The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust.

I know, it’s all the rage right now among progressive Christians to say that we are an empire.  But we’re not.  An empire has, by definition, an emperor.  As frustrated as you may be by the malicious buffoonery of the Bush-Cheney oligarchy, they do not represent an emperor.  Exhibit A: They won’t be in office as of January 20.  In fact, it looks as though they will have virtually no power in the governance of the United States as of that date (unlike, for instance, Vladimir Putin, who set himself up as prime minister of Russia after constitutional term limits ended his presidency).

I was a classics major in college (geez, I hate it when people tell me that what they majored in during college makes them an expert in that topic), and I lived in Rome.  I know how and why the Roman Empire fell, and it did, indeed, have a lot to do with office of emperor and the abuses inherent thereto.

We, on the other hand, are about to elect a new president.  And with an Obama presidency (barring some unforeseen tragedy), there will be thoroughgoing housecleaning in Washington.  This is what never happened in Rome.  Julius Caesar, who overcame the other two members of the Triumvirate, ruled Rome pretty well.  His adopted heir, Augustus (nee Gaius Octavius) was arguably the greatest ruler of that empire.  And from there it was pretty much downhill (with notable exceptions).  Why?  Graft.  Immorality.  And the “divine right of kings.”

These are the very things that, centuries later, the social contract theory of John Locke overcame, and that the American Republic reacted against.  Now, it can surely be argued about whether the U.S. is really a representative democracy or a republic, etc.  But the U.S. can simply not be considered an empire in the governance sense of the word.

But I know that many of the aforementioned neo-monastic Hauerwasians are concerned less with the US government and more about the imperial nature of the US economy.  I agree with them insofar as free market capitalism, no longer curbed by Calvinism, has no moral impediment to unmitigated greed.  Capitalism worked when the “Protestant work ethic” was its engine, but it works less well when it’s primarily driven by speculation and greed.  This is surely a problem that we’ve got to face.

But free-market capitalism run amok is not an American problem.  It’s a global problem.  Iceland’s banks are frozen because a few investors gambled more than the entire country even has.  Maybe the US invented capitalism on a massive scale, but the bird has flown the coop.  Globalization has made these attacks on the US economy in particular moot.

We are in the waning days, but not of the American empire, because there is no such thing.  We’re in the waning days of a particular economic model.  Thank God we’ve got a better form of government than an Empire to sort this mess out.