In Print...

It is official, something I wrote has been published...in print...in an actual book. How did this happen you ask? Well it helps that it's not my book and that I had no idea that the book was being released until about a month ago.

A couple of years ago I was doing a google search on one of my professors, a gentleman named Mabiala Kenzo. He is a brilliant theologian who specializes in narrative theology, post-colonialism, and the works of Paul Ricoeur. One of the sites that I found was A New Kind of Conversation. The site was essentially a kind of blog where a group of theologians, philosophers, counselors and writers (including well-known author Brian McLaren) were interacting with questions about the relationship between post-modernism and the Christian faith (particularly evangelical Christianity). The really cool bit about this was that every post had an open comments section where anybody could interact with what these authors had posted. Like all blogs the unregulated posting sometimes wandered pretty far off-topic, but there was also a lot of insightful and interesting interaction as well.

So the long and the short of it is that I contributed a number of comments to the discussion and about a month ago I got an email from the book's publisher asking for my home address so that they could send me a free copy of the finished book. It arrived today and it looks like all of my comments were included (woohoo!). I did get siced by the editors in one post, but it was just for using "dunno" instead of "don't know."

You can check out the full conversation on the web site or buy the book in your local book store or on amazon. Why buy the book when I can read it online for free, you ask? The joy of the book is that the original posts and subsequent comments have been edited and organized into a much more coherent whole. The book also includes some very helpful sidebars and definitions to some of the more technical language that's being used.

So there you are, a little bit of shameless self-promotion. Setting that aside it really is a good book and some of the essays and comments are very worth the $20 or whatever it costs in stores. I leave you with the bibliographic info.

Penner, Myron Bradley and Hunter Barnes ed. A New Kind of Conversation: Blogging Toward a Postmodern Faith. Paternoster: Colorado Springs, 2007.