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Voting for the 2006 Canadian Blog Awards began today. My blog was nominated last year and won (see shiny gold leaf on the left) and if you want to vote for me this year you can go here and scroll about two-thirds of the way down the page. I'm listed as Aaron's Head. I have to admit to the sin of pride...I do derive a certain satisfaction from applause. (I was an actor in my past life, so there it is.) But the best part about last year's awards wasn't the shiny leaf; it was finding a couple of really great blogs to read, including Kevin G. Powell, who's now over in my blogroll. That's one of the healthy aspects of religious blogging, the potential to read and learn from someone else's perspective. I can log on and read what an Episcopal chaplain is dealing with, what a Lutheran pastor preached last Sunday, how an openly gay recent convert sees the church and what my fellow Trinity classmates are struggling with. And beyond specifically religious or Christian blogs, I read the musings of parents and lawyers and students and musicians and teachers and cartoonists and doctors and...you get the picture. People from all over the world, all different economic levels and a wide range of faiths or lack thereof. Reading blogs allows me to see from another perspective, albeit through a window of the blogger's own devising. The other is less other when you read his or her side of things...with an open mind. That open mind is the key. The negative potential is in the closed mind, in the tendency of the internet to encourage the angry rehashing of one's own increasingly intransigent position. The "right vs. left" polemic has so tainted online discourse that message boards and comment sections usually become either flame wars or group bitch-fests. And I'm saying this from experience, as someone who has himself let slip the dogs of war on occasion. It's not pretty, and it's not Christian...or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or any other faith worth following. So I do wonder about voting for a "best" religious blog. (Of course, I still have that shiny gold leaf over there...I am human, you know.) Is the spirit of competition appropriate for our line of interest? Perhaps, instead of voting, you should just go and click on some of the other blogs. Take a peek at the world from someone else's perspective - not to judge, but to discover. |
