[The Rev. Matthew] Moretz told the conference that people who operate in the virtual world of the internet’s social-networking sites are not opting out of reality. They experience real social interaction and real emotional reactions. They experience community, he said.
“We should be embracing this social fact,” Moretz said, arguing that both lay and ordained Episcopalians can preside over these new “gathering[s] of humanity” in ways that can show what it means to be the body of Christ in new places.
“The story is the same but the territory is new,” he told conference participants, alluding later during a workshop to the way that St. Paul used the infrastructure of Roman roads to spread the Gospel.
Moretz suggested that communicators who want to operate as people of faith in what he called the frontier territory of the internet must have an online persona that is authentic and points to “the real you” so that they can bring a sense of being places of stability on the web.
“Our gift to these other worlds is our integrity,” he said.
“Our gift is our integrity.” Please, spare us your gift.
My guess is Moretz was invited to speak exactly because he is a current practitioner of making the Christian faith accessible to bloggers, etc. And so, accordingly, he speaks of the real (not just “virtual” reality) development of a faith community with the hopes of drawing those folks into deeper fellowship in Christ.
In the sense that it is an intentional outreach via web and video blogging, it is different from free-floating blogging. But it is blogging nonetheless.
And this puts Moretz at complete odds with the Presiding Bishop, who sees nothing holy, nor potentially holy, about blogging; just the opposite.
Her opinion is that blogging is spiritually destructive; as a matter of conscience, then, she says she does not read the blogs (although others on her staff do, and of course ENS staffers do).
I suppose the adage that “anything can kill ya if you let it” would be one way to justify Episcopal Communicators absorbing Moretz’ persuasive argument and following suit. But how long can that last if the program boss (the PB) doesn’t buy it.
Moretz isn’t the first, and there will be many more to come. Will there be a problem here for curates like Moretz, or is this a non-starter?
RGEaton
🙂
I think they really need to get TEC up on Second Life, complete with a “create an avatar for your favorite bishop” contest. I nominate Beaker for a certain bishop from a particular northeastern state. Here he is sharing his feelings; could be a preview of Lambeth, I guess. I nominate the Swedish Chef for the presiding bishop. Here is a video portraying how I wish the last HOB meeting could have been (avenging lobsters are from the Southern Cone, of course).
I found Moretz’s comments slightly more realistic than Domke’s, which appeared quite unhelpful in the current ecusa context, but
[blockquote]
He said video blogging can be a way to tell the story of the Episcopal Church’s vision of Christianity that works because of its traditions, not despite them. [/blockquote]
appears to be founded in an Through-the-Looking-Glass vision of the current situation. ecusa appears today to be giddy in its destruction of traditions, rathen than fostering them.
1. “integrity” can also be interpreted as “keeping what is mine”, which would be quite appropriate in describing 815 now. I don’t think Moretz meant it that way, though.
I like Fr. Moretz’s Youtube videos. They can be found [url=http://youtube.com/user/FatherMatthew]here.[/url]
But they ARE opting out of reality. This is fairly clear, isn’t it? They are moving from the world of the near and primary to a world of the distant and secondary. This is not, therefore, a community since the members do not in fact know whom they are speaking to, they are members of a world that has no integrity since there is no means by which this world can be validated, and they are members of a world which by its own admission creates personas quite unrelated to the reality of those who create them. This is an aggregation, not a community – which requires first hand knowledge of its members who share a common ethos.
My cynical guess is that he is saying what he is being paid to say. Larry