Last weekend Joe Carter, the founder of Evangelical Outpost and now the web editor of First Things, put together a group blog called Evangel.
Justin Taylor almost immediately declared it the best group blog in evangelicalism. And in its first week of existence it has logged 94 posts, 497 comments, over 30,000 visits, and a lot of linkage and buzz.
First Things is a venerable journal for thoughtful people of faith –I use the vague phrase “people of faith” intentionally, because while the journal has always been heavily Catholic, it is not only interdenominational, but inter-religious. The First Things website is increasingly a happening place, and with the coming of the Evangel blog, it’s officially where the party’s at (as the kids say). Imagine National Review‘s group blog The Corner, but churchy.
The main reason I bring it up here, though, is that two Scriptorium authors are on the team at evangel: John Mark Reynolds and Fred Sanders are both joining that conversation.
Scriptorium Daily, of course, will continue as before. It’s the main web presence for faculty from Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute to project their voices beyond the humanities building in La Mirada, to stay in touch with alumni, parents, friends, prospective students, like-minded souls, kindred spirits, and FOGBEATERS (Friends Of Great Books Education And The Evangelical Renaissance. No, there’s no club, I just made that up). In fact, we’re looking for the time and resources to get some besetting tech issues fixed up here at Scriptorium. We’d like to be able to catch up with Reynolds’ iPhone lifestyle, and to let Sanders start posting kids’ drawings again. So we’re not deserting this blog for that one, and we’ll keep doing our best to do Torrey-out-loud things here at Scriptorium.
But like I said, there’s a party, if by party you mean sustained argument and a lot of people talking at once, over at Evangel.
