In case you missed it, Church Relevance released their list of the top 60 Christian blogs. Mere-O did not make the list (alas), but friends Justin Taylor, Joe Carter, and the guys over at Think Christian did (of course!).
Pyromaniacs made the list too, which prompted this from contributor Frank Turk:
Then last year, Crossway published a book "by John Mark Reynolds, Roger Overton, Hugh Hewitt, and Matthew Lee Anderson" called The New Media Frontier which I got from them for the sake of review, and I have politely passed over this book -- because it is transparently an attempt by Hewitt et al. to repackage his earlier work. And I like Crossway -- but this book is both boring and uninformative, especially in light of Hewitt's past performance on this topic.
And I bring it up because, in spite of Hewitt's promotion of the blogger he sort of headlines who are the co-authors of this book (Joe Carter excepted, btw -- Joe is an interesting blogger and an extraordinarily gracious guy), these characters and their view of blogging underperforms.
Alas, we can't win them all. Don't say we don't link to our critics, though.
While Frank's point that the people who edited the book (I am not one of them--simply a lowly contributor who somehow ended up on Amazon's list of co-authors when you search for it) are not on the list of the top 60 blogs, two authors in the book did make the list (David Wayne and Mark Roberts). Additionally, the "how to" chapters were written by Joe, while many of the rest of the chapters either set the intellectual context for Christian engagement of new media or help Christians learn how to blog well within their respective niches (pastors, youth leaders, apologetics, academics, etc). Not really the sort of topics that would land someone on the list of top 60 blogs, or that being on the list of top 60 blogs automatically qualifies one to write about.
But lurking within my response is the old argument regarding the relevance of statistics. Inevitably, smaller guys like me spurn statistics as useless to justify our own mediocre (online) existence our correspondingly miniature (though quite thoughtful!) audiences, which allows us to cultivate a superficial purity of soul since we have managed to keep ourselves free from the pursuit of "a following."
Whatever. I'm just disappointed I didn't make the list. Maybe next year.
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
