The Dead Pool (or, Godspeed Tom Gilson)

Back in the early 2000's there was a tight-knit group of early-adopter Christian bloggers. We more or less all knew one another, and to have a popular blog was to have a modest (by today's standards) several hundred unique visitors a day.

Someone (I can't recall who) would run a crawler that counted the number of links to the various Christian blogs, and publish the results in the form of a pecking order. Whenever that got updated, it was a big deal to see if your link count increased or (heaven forbid) decreased, and whether you rose or fell in the link count sweepstakes. It was a Jurassic version of "likes".

For chuckles, here is the earliest blog of mine that was archived on the wayback machine. (Hah! I forgot that I linked to the 1689 LBC long before it was fashionable!)

So... most of those early Christian blogs have long since died, hence the title of this post.

It is, in many ways, a different landscape now, with a lot more mega-blogs linked to celebrities or sites like this one that essentially function as para-church organizations.  I don't view that as a positive development, but perhaps I am just envious.

A few from the early days are still around. But one just announced that is was boarding up the windows and dead-bolting the doors: Tom Gilson's Thinking Christian blog.

Tom deserves a Nobel Prize in patience and gentlemanliness for many reasons, but especially for enduring the atheists who don't know the first rule of comedy (which is: let the easy ones go) and referred to his blog's title as (groan) an oxymoron. Jerry Coyne did this several times, apparently thinking that he was supremely witty. (The fact that Tom was on Coyne's radar is itself a compliment.)

Now Tom's blog is a bit different. His award-winning site survived and thrived in the new landscape. Thinking Christian (aptly named) is/was an eclectic mix of theology, ethics, philosophy, and Tom's first love (if I may say so) apologetics. And, reflecting Tom's persona, I think it is fair to say it boasted the most civil dialog (in the comments) of any religious blog on the web, bar none.

I met Tom on-line when I lived in New Hampshire and he lived in Yorktown, Virginia. Then I moved to Yorktown, and Tom and I would have life-threatening uber-carbfest pancake breakfasts at a local IHoP. It was great. I spoke at Tom's church on the science-faith question. And then Tom packed up and moved to Ohio (like that's even a real place!)

Tom is going to concentrate his ministry efforts in the area of spiritual readiness, on this new platform. I'm certain he will be successful.

Godspeed Tom. Thinking Christian is, in my mind, iconic, and it will be missed.