7/19/2004 12:18:00 AM

the next generation of theologians will start as bloggers. they will be schooled in global-reach pontification, in flame wars and public reconciliation. they will know how it feels to be wrong in a very open way and will be well versed in admitting to it. this admission will bring with it both a more scrupulous fact checking and a more fast and loose approach to publishing. comments, conversations, deep links and trackbacks will be the circuitous route that many thoughts will gestate along.

these new theologians will not be content with restating the given truths of a bygone era nor, certainly, the cosmologies, philosophies or economies of power that these language worlds of the past came to dominance within. an explosion of nuanced thinking around the myriad details of existence will be felt as the voices of a million empowered perspectives articulate a new network of worlds no less foreign to us now than our's would be to those who labored in Calvin's Geneva, Muhammad's Medina or Augustine's Hippo. a great preponderance of these voices will be coming not from the seminaries or vocationally religious with their shrinking coffers and ever-disgruntled constituencies, but rather from the interconnected lives and words of the normal women and men of Santiago, Montreal, Mozambique and Bangalore: the demythologizing, fundamentalisms, liberations and deconstruction of the twentieth century the past to a functional global pragmatism of difference; of justice and mercy transforming the small spaces that hold the secrets of the worlds yet to come.