Veteran religion scribe Julia Duin of The Washington Times has written one of those stories that simply had to be written, taking readers inside what I once called the Anglican Web Wars.
There was a time when people from the power pews and pulpits went to national meetings and all they could do for news -- other than one or two MSM reports a day -- was read newsletters and memos handed out by the special-interest groups. Now, the annual Summer of Sex rites in the oldline world have gone online and, as noted in The Washington Post by columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., the rise of the digital printing press is even beginning to affect the free-for-all congregationalism that is life in the Southern Baptist Convention.
But back to Duin's handy report from the Episcopal General Convention in the industrial sanctary hall in Columbus, Ohio.
There are, of course, the official websites that seem like they have been around forever. There is the official site of the ECUSA hierarchy and then there is the General Convention page within the unofficial site of the church's ruling progressive elite -- that would be the home page of gay activist and ECUSA power broker Dr. Louie Crew, a site hosted on the servers at Rutgers University in Newark.
Then there is the work, on the traditionalist side of the aisle, by Father Kendall Harmon and his TitusOneNine blog, which, on a slow day, offers several dozen links to documents and news articles about what is going on around the world in the bitterly divided Anglican Communion. Click here for the controversial recent post on the ethics of Anglican blogging, written by the Very Rev. Paul Zahl, dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry. Meanwhile, legions of Anglicans around the world still read the baseball-bat reports of cyber pioneer David Virtue (who often, I am afraid, insists on circulating many of my wire-service reports days before it is legal to do so).
Here is how Duin set the scene, in a piece that really, really needs to have all of its hyperlinks live and kicking.
Dozens of deputies, at least 11 bishops and a multitude of other hangers-on are using the Internet to slug it out over the same issues that the convention is considering through its conclusion. ... Local blogs include Daily Episcopalian (blogofdaniel.com), operated by Diocese of Washington spokesman Jim Naughton, and Baby Blue Online (babybluecafe.blogspot.com), written by Mary Ailes, a vestrywoman at Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax.
The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia is maintaining centeraisle.net, which, although not a blog, posts daily commentaries, one of which jabs the Rev. Martyn Minns, Truro's rector, for calling on the Episcopal Church to "repent."
And on and on it goes -- Preludium, In a Godward Direction, Father Jake Stops the World and the perfectly named An Inch at a Time, General Convention 2006 and, of course, the ever-present Web Elves. There are dozens and dozens of others, which you can find by digging around in the side columns of the sites -- left and right -- listed above.
So, all of you GetReligion readers who are closely following the Summer of Sex, what are your favorite links for the Anglicans, the Presbyterians and everybody else? Please leave them in our comments section.