This Blog

July 15, 2008 (2)

This blog is written with the purpose of stimulating conversation in our parish, either on the blog itself or in other settings. I have from time to time wondered whether it is useful but am assured by many of you that you value it even though you do not choose to comment online. I am grateful to everyone who does take the time to comment, the standards of which have been high.

It has been blessedly rare that the blog administrator has had to decline a comment, but that when that has been the case, it has always been submitted anonymously. Years ago I worked for a British Holiday Company in Tenerife and Miami. It was very clear that people would do things a long way from home and when they thought they had a degree of anonymity that were otherwise out of character and might well have been destructive to themselves or their families in another context. We’ve all hear some version of the phrase ‘what happens in Seattle stays in Seattle’. That is the same principle at work and it is unhelpful in the Christian Community.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a number of standards for the seminarians he taught in the Second World War. One of them was that if they ever found themselves in a conversation about someone not present, they were to go to that person as soon as possible and tell them what they said.

While we could just keep on declining to post the nasty, mean or destructive submissions we receive from time to time (and rarely), I have asked that every post be signed with the author’s real and full name. Those that are not will be declined with a request that they be re submitted when signed.