Hey with a title like that (above), links are circulating to this article at Publishers Weekly (before clicking, go to BugMeNot.com for a login, it’s one of those “free registration required so we can spam the heck out of you” sites where free content is an oxymoron… sorry, </rant>.) or you can drop by Jason Clark’s blog where the whole text is quoted. I liked this soundbyte:
E-mails from readers have also proven to be far more than he can respond to. In the past two years, McLaren has had to change his e-mail address three times. “I get flooded with a lot of heartbreaking mail, from pastors and other Christian leaders who say, ‘I thought I was the only person who thought this way’ or ‘I just got fired.’ It’s very moving.” Negative comments are most often made publicly, he said: “Just search my name on the Christianity Today Web site—it’s all there.”
This isn’t representative of the whole article though… overall it’s another good treatment of the emerging church movement conversation. Mainly it’s from a book publisher’s perspective, i.e., it includes discussion of how books in this category differ from other categories, which is interesting in itself since the “backlist” continues to sell well within the emerging church category of books. Besides that though, it gives another tidy history of the emerging conversation.
I use a WordPress plugin spam filter that normally catches whatever comments are bot-generated, so it usually only lets through comments made by a real person. That said, Terry’s comment looks like spam; it’s not on topic, doesn’t link something on topic, and the general content of his website is, er, not consistent with the views of the people who tend to hang out with people like me.
Still, I figured I’d leave this one up instead of just deleting it as I normally would.