There is something amazing happening in the Blogosphere - a meme is born!

Jon Carroll's column parody of the Jihad concept has taken on a life of its own. Chris Walton's analysis of it is definitely worth the read as he tracks the emergent interest as the article flew around the Internet on wings of email. We even have a Wikipedia entry now on it. Watching the birth of something online is really interesting and got me back to the blog to bring this site back to life. Ministry can be all consuming so it takes something like this to pull me back into blogging.

Obviously there is some hunger out there for a response to the self-righteous messages coming from the world of fundamentalism. The desire to return to monocultural past is an unfulfillable fantasy based on reactivity to change.

But more important to my mind is the capture of the democratic spirit within Unitarian Universalism found in Carroll's column. The votes and the acknowledgement and embrace of dissent are hallmarks of Unitarian Universalism. And the creative use of language by taking militaristic terms and peace terms together for people's names is dead on for our creative activism.

So if anyone out there is in the Capital Region of New York and wants to start a "cell" of Unitarian Jihad in our congregation (www.fuusalbany.org) just let "Shock And Awe of Outrageous Compassion" know!
- posted by Sam @ 10:09 AM