Recently in Meta-Blogging Category

The 105th Philosophers' Carnival is up at kennypearce.net.

 

 

The 318th Christian Carnival is up at RodneyOlsen.com.

 

 

The 316th Christian Carnival is up at Crossroads: Where Faith and Inquiry Meet.

 

 

The 314th Christian Carnival is up at You Can't Mean That!

 

 

The 313th Christian Carnival will be hosted this coming Wednesday at Who Am I? The Christian Carnival is a weekly collection of some of the best posts of the Christian blogosphere. It's open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought. This is a great way to make your writing more well known and perhaps pick up some regular readers. For examples of past carnivals, see the Christian Carnival archive.

The ninety-eleventh Philosophers' Carnival is up at MandM.

First Things has started a new blog called Evangel with all evangelical contributors. I wasn't all that surprised to get Joe Carter's invitation to take part, because he's tried several times to get me to join a team of evangelical bloggers, but most of the time no one was interested (including me). So I was indeed surprised at what this blog has become in such a short time. Joe has tried several times to get together a team of evangelical bloggers like this, and I guess the First Things name has served as part of the motivation this time around. (It certainly was for me. That part of his invitation did surprise me.)

I'm pretty impressed at the team Joe has managed to assemble, and I'm glad to be a part of it. I don't know all the names in the list, but I've follwed the blogs of several for quite a while, and I've been aware of others on and off but enough to keep tabs on what they're doing. A number of them very much have my respect. We'll see if I can keep up with them, because over 50 posts appeared there since this weekend while I was deliberately staying away due to the kids being home (and it was a four-day weekend through today in our school system).

While I'm writing about what I call meta-blogging issues, I thought I'd mention that I've reworked one of my RSS feeds. If you read my blog via RSS, you might be reading the feed that no longer picks up any posts with the meta-blogging tag. All my carnival announcements have that tag, and anything about the blog itself or some other blog connection like this will be excluded from that feed, because that's the feed that imports into Facebook, and I don't want all my Facebook friends (who number over 600, to give you an idea of how many people would be inundated with Christian Carnival announcements that they won't remotely understand) to have to see all that. Of course, if you read that feed you won't see this announcement either, since this post is tagged with the meta-blogging category. But maybe someone who reads that feed will end up on the blog site for some reason and will notice this post.

The 98th Philosophers' Carnival is up at kennypearce.net.

Welcome to the 94th Philosophers' Carnival. Sorry for its lateness. It's been harder to devote time to this over the last few days than I expected.

We've got a number of submissions on a variety of philosophical topics. If you submitted a post, and it isn't here, don't assume that I rejected it deliberately. Please let me know, and I'll check to see if I may have missed a submission or if it never got to me. But please be aware that hosts are given some discretion to accept and reject posts, and I had to make a call as to whether each submission was sufficiently philosophical (and at least one was outside the time period for this carnival). I did reject some submissions that didn't seem to me to be good fits for this carnival.

I'm going to organize the posts according to sub-topics within philosophy, and I'm going to provide a description of each post in Academic Philosopherese along with an English translation (or, more accurately, paraphrase).

Welcome to the 284th Christian Carnival. The Christian Carnival is a weekly collection of some of the best posts of the Christian blogosphere. It's open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. One of the goals of this carnival is to offer our readers to a broad range of Christian thought. For more on Christian Carnival participation, see here.

I'm not including every post that was submitted. To qualify for inclusion in the Christian Carnival, submissions must have been posted to your blog within the past week. Hosts often allow a little wiggle-room for submissions that are close enough (I allowed several exceptions), but this week's submissions included posts as old as January and February. It also has to be Christian-related. Again, there's a lot of wiggle-room as to what counts as Christian for the purposes of the Christian Carnival, but a list of blogs having to do with Zen or a list of iPhone apps isn't Christian by any reasonable standard. This is also a blog carnival, which means submissions need to be blog posts. If it's not from a blog, this isn't the forum for it, especially if it's from a spam link-farm or some other advertising outlet. We also allow just one post per author per blog. One author submitted give posts this week (only two were written this past week, so it wasn't as hard to choose which to include: I just went with the one that was submitted first). Hosts don't often reiterate these criteria, so I thought it was worth drawing some attention to them.

I was expecting to have more time to put this together, but I took a lot longer to finish my grading for my summer courses than I'd expected, and my family got back yesterday from a long trip to New York City to see family, and the boys started summer school this morning, which involves a lot more than just putting them on the bus when special education services are at issue and they've got professionals working with them who don't know them at all. So I'm a bit late in putting this together, and I'm pretty much giving you the links, titles, and blog titles for submissions unless the submission included a description. But we've still got a list of the self-evaluated best posts of the week from the Christian blogs whose authors went out of their way to submit something. Enough business . . . on to the Carnival! Posts are in the order I received them.

Kenny Pearce hosts the 88th Philosophers' Carnival.

Welcome to the 259th Christian Carnival. For those not familiar with the Christian Carnival, it's a weekly collection of Christian bloggers' submissions of their best Christian-related posts from the previous week.

As usual, let me know if I missed anything or got any links wrong. At the end I've added a few other posts that weren't submitted that I would consider among the best posts of Christian bloggers in the past week. On to the Carnival!

The 75th Philosophers' Carnival is up at Wide Scope.

In the latest Christian Carnival, I found a post at Got Bible? about the term 'Reverend' for people we also call pastors or ministers. I remembered posting about the same issue a few years ago, but as I was reading this post a new idea occurred to me. At least I thought it was a new idea. Here's the idea. Wouldn't it be interesting to start calling every Christian 'Reverend' the way everyone is a brother or sister in a lot of congregations? After all, Paul calls everyone saints as a reminder that we're all made holy in Christ. Doesn't 'Reverend' pretty much mean the same thing?

The problem with the term is that it makes some people seem more holy just because they hold a certain position in the church, and that's completely opposed to biblical teaching. But if you called everyone by that term, it would removed the problem. I thought about doing this after church on Sunday, but I didn't get around to it with anyone.

So I went to go find my previous post, and here it is. Check out the last paragraph especially. Am I really that out of it that I can't remember the punchline of a post that I can nevertheless remember writing? I mean, I can remember the content of the punchline enough to come up with it again, but I can't remember that it's not new and that it was part of the original post that I was thinking about all along, and I somehow end up thinking it's a new idea that I've never thought of before.

I've often heard passages of music that sound similar enough to another one and wondered if the writer might have taken it from that without noticing. There's a beautiful Spock's Beard song that has a line that sounds an awful lot like John Williams' Jurassic Park theme, which came out the year before. I've long thought some pieces by Trevor Rabin of Yes had some similarities to the Princess Bride theme by Mark Knopfler. There's a repeated short bridge section in Carry on Wayward Son that sounds similar to a Journey song that was never released (but I think might be on their boxed set). That song had been played on a tour the previous year when Kansas had opened for them. The guys in Journey have several times publicly accused Kerry Livgren of deliberate plagiarism. If I can steal an idea from myself without even knowing it, surely these musicians (and all of them are good writers) can unknowingly come up with a melody that's similar to one they've heard before but don't happen to remember hearing.

The 70th Philosophers' Carnival is up at The Brooks Blog.

It's unfortunate that I haven't linked to this carnival very much for quite a long time, but it's not because I've lost interest or anything like that. The quality of posts had been dropping, but hosts are now being more selective, with generally good results.

The main reason is that I don't link to carnivals I'm not in. It defeats the purpose of linking to the ones I'm in, which I do out of thanks to the host who made the effort to include my post. If I linked to every edition of any carnival I sometimes appear in, it wouldn't mean anything special when I link to editions I happen to be in.

But lately I've either forgotten to submit something to the Philosophers' Carnival or not had anything I thought of sufficient philosophical quality to submit. This time we have happy convergence with the two issues (having a post and remembering to submit it).