Advertisement If you’re like one of our older friends who said to Charish this week, “So I hear you’re gonna have one of those globs,” a blog works like this:
Blog is short for “web log” and that’s basically what it is — an online space for people to write about whatever they want, whether it’s apple trees, wars or Jesus Christ.
Pictures and links to other Web sites are usually part of blogs. Anyone who has access to the Internet can set one up for free.
Readers usually can post comments and engage in dialogue with the blogger. If you’d like to comment on Charish’s blog, send e-mails to gate@fspa.org and your comments will be posted as long as they’re appropriate.
Charish, 35, communications associate for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, is going to El Salvador with seven other people as part of the Global Awareness Through Experience program.
With the group, she’ll visit hospitals serving the poor, discuss how trade agreements affect the poor with staff at the U.S. Embassy, and speak with a group of women whose family members have been killed or have disappeared.
When she gets back to her hotel, which has one computer, Charish will let you know what she did that day.
“I’ve always thought that if the average American would travel more that we would approach our foreign policy in a different way,” Charish said. “I know everyone can’t go to El Salvador this June so I thought I’ll take everyone with me by being in touch over the Internet.”
Charish will be in El Salvador from June 12 to June 22. You can find her blog at www.gate-travel.org.
Religion blogs have a strong presence on the Internet these days.
Jason Anthony, a religion journalist in New York City, started his blog about a year ago as a roundup of religion news. But he realized the blogs he really liked to read had a point of view.
So Jason, 35, answered five questions to help readers know him better: Why aren’t you an atheist? Where do you come from? What church do you call home? Who are the crackpots? Who asked you?
“Whenever I read a religion story, I always want to know what the person who’s writing it believes,” Jason said. “I realized that I needed to do that as well. I needed to not blog as a journalist. I needed to blog as a person with beliefs.”
Jason said he likes blogs because they’re informal, democratic and have a voice.
Although he explores all sides of the religious spectrum on his blog (he’s found a new blog he’s crazy about called The Evangelical Ecologist at www.evaneco.com), he writes from the perspective of the unchurched.
Jason’s blogsite is http://inyourfaith.blogspot.com.
In our own backyard is another voice in the blogosphere: David Best, a La Crescent, Minn., resident and recent graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.
David, 26, once had a conversation with his sister, who said she didn’t find blogs helpful. If she wants to know something, she’ll go to news sources.
David thinks differently.
“I just think (blogs are) an excellent, complementary element to the world of journalism,” he said. “There’s news as it’s technically defined and then there’s real life as it is often brought to us on a blog.”
David is an Evangelical who thinks that a concern for the impoverished and the environment flow from a conservative reading of Scripture.
His blog at http://swimminginthedeepend.
blogspot.com has explored everything from U2 to the birth of his son to his obligation to those who suffer.
And next week, keep your eye out for a glob, er, blog I’ll be doing this summer.
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
