Mission

Why create a site and call it "A Community for Reformed Thought and Discussion"? Aren't there enough forums like the Puritan Board or enough great resource sites like Monergism.com or tons of great blogs? Yes, but this site is not intended to supplant any of them but to supplement them.

There really aren't any Reformed Drupal sites on the Internet (that's the software environment that powers this site). The nature of these types of sites is they all tend to end up being communities of interest where ideas are shared and the best ideas bubble to the top.

It's hard to describe the benefit of a site like this and is easier to see an example of something like it. One example of a large site is DailyKos.com. The politics are nutty but it's wildly popular with many thousands of liberals. Even John Kerry has a diary there. People post their thoughts in the form of diaries, news, and articles. The community comments on the articles or diaries and "vote" on how good they are. Based on the timeliness and popularity of an article (as qualified by the rating of the article), some articles bubble to the top. Some are merely content to just be at Dailykos to post their mad, liberal rantings in a personal space devoted to hating Republicans. Others make headlines with their mad rantings. My point in using DailyKos as an example is not to commend it but to demonstrate what it's like. The Drupal program is useful for more than liberals at DailyKos.

I had originally intended to be a Blog consolidator with Solideogloria.com and still am giving away free subdomains to people who want to have Reformed blogs but I found the Wordpress blog to be too limiting. I had contacted contacted a really Godly minister a few months ago and said "Pastor, you're really smart, you should have a blog" or some words to that effect. He mentioned (like some others I've talked to) that they don't really have time for a blog. I can appreciate that. I've never really been the blogging type either. If I put my thoughts in a personal blog I'd want them to be profound enough so people didn't think I just had a blog up as some sort of narcissistic exercise. I still provide a blog hosting service for people who blog and write some really prfound and well-written articles. I'd want to do no less if I had a blog.

So, after talking with a friend in the web programming industry, he pointed out DailyKos.com. I hated the politics but I like the site concept. While some may not want to blog for the reasons above, some might not have a problem sharing an occassional article. Even those that don't want to write and article might want to diary some Reformed thoughts on a particular topic. I thought the fact the function that folks could post articles in their own accounts topically would enhance Puritanboard in fact. How? Because it is hard to find some really good stuff that folks post here sometimes. That is not a criticism of the Puritanboard but a reflection of the limitation of forums. I know some people bookmark threads but even with that you have a lot of stuff to sift through to find your own or others thoughts on an issue here. What if some of those great thoughts were also diaried? Maybe they're not blogs, maybe they're not articles, but some of the insights are worth a diary entry that can be found topically.

I remember just recently trying to find something a Church History buff wrote on the Puritanboard a number of months back and it took me about 30 minutes of trying different search terms to find it. I love the Puritanboard because of the quality of the community and the thoughts it produces but I have trouble finding information that was posted. I would like to be able to find particular information that somebody might have shared at one point, in the middle of a long thread. This site is a solution to that problem. Reformed thinkers in blogs or forums can place their articles or diary entries here so they can refer back to them later or folks can find their thoughts more easily. Not every thought is a scholarly article but some thoughts are worthy of being more easily found.

In conclusion, I'm not trying to replace a Monergism or any blogs or forums but to fill in the gaps between them. Monergism (or a site like it) is a library of more scholarly and excellent articles. We need sites like that. Blogs are for people who have aptitude and desire for those kind of things but they are very personal and more journalistic. Forums are places where you can discuss and interact, make point and counterpoint. Solideogloria.com allows articles or news or diaries to be posted for those who want to be read or those who merely want to diary their thoughts.

Your Humble Servant,

Rich Leino