DISQUS

Good point about the name America being eurocentric, as Vespucci was Italian.

So would this essentially be a matter of the descendants of Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans fighting over the name of an Italian explorer?

I guess it just surprises me that people would self-identify (to the point of taking offense) by continent rather than by nationality, since in my experience most people prefer national rather than continental designations (e.g. "Korean" over "Asian"). But a lot of it is historical and contextual; I would guess that in parts of the world where national boundaries are a legacy of the colonial era, people place more value on ethnic or tribal group identifiers.

I don't think citizens of the US have any problem with other people in the Western hemisphere calling themselves Latin Americans or Central Americans or North Americans or South Americans. If we're talking about nationality (which refers to country, not continent or hemisphere), citizens of the USA have every right to call themselves Americans. I don't see anyone else clamoring to use the title.

You can read arrogance into it if you want, but what's the alternative to self-describing as American? We can't call ourselves "United Statesians" because:
A) It doesn't make sense - it's ungrammatical, and
B) It's not unique - Mexico is also a United States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos according to Wikipedia)

Maybe there's a valid theological point to be made somewhere in González' argument, but quibbling about a name like this seems to me to be its own kind of conceit. And the hemisphere is not called America - it's the Western hemisphere. Now there's a good thing to get your feathers ruffled about - eurocentrism! :)

Oh, and I should add that empire and democracy are not the same thing. If you want a democracy that's not an empire...vote for one!

I would challenge your assertion that voting "perpetuates" the system for four more years, and that Americans' involvement in the elections constitutes a religion in itself.

On the contrary, I would suggest that one's vote is a necessary and appropriate expression of one's faith - not because one candidate perfectly embodies the hopes of one's faith, but because we have an obligation to vote in a way that we believe will take our country in the right direction.

You criticize democracy and capitalism as if there were better alternatives that would leave us more free to live out our faith and live in a Kingdom reality. When you call voting "idolatry" you act as if we have to choose between voting and living out our faith. When you say there's a high price to pay for keeping this idol around, you imply that there are alternatives. Show me an alternative that's not more oppressive and more of an idol, and I'll listen.

I think you are right to redirect our thoughts to the Kingdom of God. However, the Kingdom of God does not come in a vacuum. We must still have a government and an economic system; to imply otherwise is the same pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die Kingdom theology that you seem to be arguing against.

I think it's also pie-in-the-sky to pray for justice while ignoring the obvious ways we could bring about justice through governmental reform. I think good government - ethical, accountable, competent government - is one of the greatest needs across the globe right now.

I used to watch everything Nicholas Cage was in, but his acting in "Next" was so bad (and such a Memento ripoff) that he's off my do-see list, and maybe on my never-see list. I do want to see Lord of War, though, which I've heard is good.

DJ-
You might also be interested in my article over at Emergent What? on cussing.

Being so highly googleable is getting scary. I've always enjoyed the transparency of blogging using my real name, though, and I think it's kept me more accountable.

My understanding is that WP.com is not intended to be a business solution, so it doesn't really bother me that it should be down for half an hour when people want to use it.

Annoying? Yes. Terrible? No. No one's business depends on WP.com being up 99.9% of the time. Nor does a business depend on having their blog up all of the time.

Also, I assume/hope this maintenance was scheduled, so users knew to expect a 30-min outage. When I used other hosting services, I appreciated their notifications scheduled downtime. If your service isn't free, I'd expect scheduled maintenance to be done late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, when it would have the least impact on traffic.

On another note, I think demanding redundant, fault-tolerant, 100%-uptime, RAIDed, load-balanced servers for one's weblog is akin to demanding that your coffee be served in a double-walled platinum carafe: It might be nice, but it's really not worth the price. We're talking blogs here, not e-commerce.

Each user needs to determine how much uptime is really worth for them. With the vast majority of hosts, the vast majority of bloggers will never experience unscheduled downtime. The difference in downtime between a $5 a month normal host and a $99 a month uber-redundant host will be imperceptible.

1. That stinks. Here's a painfully easy fix:
a. Right-click (in Firefox) on the Amazon search box on your website (immediately to the left of this post's comments).
b. Select "Add a keyword for this search", and fill in the keyword and name you want to use
c. Done!

2. Kottke does this at http://www.kottke.org/afield and it's very slick, but I have no idea how he does it. Pure genius.

Andy emailed me, and I realize now that I was a bit uncharitable toward him in my earlier comment. I want to say publicly that I don't have anything against him or Hugh, just that I was not initially impressed with their blogs when I encountered them. Most of this is probably worldview difference, since I'm coming at blogging from a postmodern & EC rather than evangelical angle.

Obviously, they have attracted huge followings, probably much larger than my blog's, and I wish them the best.

I didn't go or even look into it because I didn't hear much buzz about it. If I had, I probably would have thought it sounded too introductory. I've been blogging since early 2003, not nearly as long as you, but still long enough that none of the "how to blog for Christian purposes" isn't interesting to me. I also lack the time and money to go to conventions of any kind, and the Emergent Convention would have been higher on my list.

I also didn't like the blogs of a lot of the people named as major presenters. If I'm going to spend time and money to hear from people being held up as examples, they'd better be more credible than GodBlogCon 1's big names.

Andy Jackson, for example, seemed to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of blogging when he:

a) Sent me a bulk, unsolicited, out-of-the blue email asking me to link to his blog shortly after he launched it. Exact text of his email: "I enjoy your site. Please link". That's it, along with the subject line "FYI - New Resource Site & Blog - www.SmartChristian.com" (email 11/13/04)

b) Sub-titled SmartChristian.com "Your Christian Provider of Essential & Relevant Information". I don't think that's the purpose of a blog, but rather of a big media outlet. I got the impression that if I read Andy's blog, he would tell me what to think so I didn't have to go to the trouble of thinking for myself.

Hugh Hewitt, another big name at GodBlogCon, has ridiculous ads in the sidebar of his blog. George W. Bush's Omega-3 supplement? Three powerful exercises for combat conditioning? I'm supposed to trust this guy's advice?

Now, if Rudy C. had been a presenter, along with Andrew Jones, that would have been something else entirely.

Thank you for covering GodBlogCon for the EC crowd. I wish I could have been at your breakout session.

DJ-
I just set up an aggregator like Planet (which is no longer available directly) using WordPress and two plugins. Click my name to see example. The plugins are
http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/?p=87
and
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/RunPHP

Let me know if you want to do something similar.

I'm using Rojo now, after using Bloglines for a few years. Rojo is slightly Ajaxed, and has an excellent tag system for organizing feeds.

It also lets you tag individual posts as you read, without changing the page you're on - the tag box occurs in each post, and sends via Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript & XML).

I tried Google Reader a few days ago, and found it very slow. But it has potential if Google will throw some more server resources into it.

This is freaking hilarious. I love it - complete with graphics for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Priceless.

This is freaking hilarious. I love it - complete with graphics for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Priceless.

This is freaking hilarious. I love it - complete with graphics for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Priceless.