Monday, January 03, 2005
Jesus, he's dumb
I had no idea this would be an issue, but Captain Ed and Mitch both point out that Mark Giselson has found this site to be remarkably light on Christianity:
As Mitch notes, ours is not a site that discusses religious issues, so it's not surprising to me that we'd have few references to Jesus. More on this in the last paragraph. But Giselson can't even run a Google search right (which should make him a good fit for a job at the StarTribune, but I digress...) He ran this search:
Now that slash is important, as I believe it means it will only search the index page. If you search the site without that slash you get this. Admittedly only four posts that I can find that include the word Jesus in them. But I just posted this Friday; his filter misses it because I didn't use the word Jesus within it. If you try God instead, you get more posts including that one.
If you are going to try to paint us as somehow non-religious, wouldn't you want to use something a little more sophisticated than such a simple filter.
And you'd think Giselson could at least recognize a picture of one of his fellow travellers, wouldn't you?
The larger point, however, isn't this but Giselson's contention that we are somehow deficient in witnessing our faith. I don't expect he would understand the point, but I treat evangelism and education both as retail products, the result of one-on-one ministry. The story in Matthew 13 tells that the farmer seeks good soil for his seeds -- in our church we often sing the hymn "Lord Let My Heart Be Good Soil". NARN is a political and culture talk radio program and unlikely to be good soil. Just as I do not spend my classroom hours discussing sabermetrics, nor do I use this blog as an evangelism tool because it's not the right place for that.
Giving the St. Cloud profs the benefit of the doubt, I clicked just about every one of their blogroll links to make sure I wasn�t missing a Christian connection. ... Could it be that conservative college professors are just as nonreligious as liberal ones? Horrors!
As Mitch notes, ours is not a site that discusses religious issues, so it's not surprising to me that we'd have few references to Jesus. More on this in the last paragraph. But Giselson can't even run a Google search right (which should make him a good fit for a job at the StarTribune, but I digress...) He ran this search:
jesus site:www.scsuscholars.com/
Now that slash is important, as I believe it means it will only search the index page. If you search the site without that slash you get this. Admittedly only four posts that I can find that include the word Jesus in them. But I just posted this Friday; his filter misses it because I didn't use the word Jesus within it. If you try God instead, you get more posts including that one.
If you are going to try to paint us as somehow non-religious, wouldn't you want to use something a little more sophisticated than such a simple filter.
And you'd think Giselson could at least recognize a picture of one of his fellow travellers, wouldn't you?
The larger point, however, isn't this but Giselson's contention that we are somehow deficient in witnessing our faith. I don't expect he would understand the point, but I treat evangelism and education both as retail products, the result of one-on-one ministry. The story in Matthew 13 tells that the farmer seeks good soil for his seeds -- in our church we often sing the hymn "Lord Let My Heart Be Good Soil". NARN is a political and culture talk radio program and unlikely to be good soil. Just as I do not spend my classroom hours discussing sabermetrics, nor do I use this blog as an evangelism tool because it's not the right place for that.
