Patheos
“”Hosting the Conversation on Faith
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| —Patheos' current slogan |
Patheos is a website serving as a multifaith portal, library and blogging platform. It was founded in 2008 as a collection of accessible writings on various religions. The name is a combination of "path" and "theos".
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[edit] Patheos Blogs
The site hosts a number of religious blogs, covering everything from Buddhism to neo-paganism to the vague "spirituality", and a smaller number of atheist blogs. The most heavily represented category is "progressive Christianity", which is probably due to the site owners' leanings and/or the site's multi-religious nature, which requires some degree of tolerance.
[edit] Atheists
The atheist blogs include:
- barrierbreaker (Peter Mosley)
- Camels with Hammers (Dan Fincke; used to be on Freethought Blogs before moving to Patheos)
- Cross Examined (Bob Seidensticker; the title is a pun on his critique of Christianity)
- Daylight Atheism (Adam Lee)
- Friendly Atheist (Hemant Mehta, known for selling his soul on eBay, eating babies and generally trying not to be an asshole to believers)
- Good Without God (Greg Epstein)
- Love, Joy, Feminism (Libby Anne, on the Quiverfull movement and the more general Christian Patriarchy movement; probably the first Freethought Blogs blogger to move to Patheos)
- Token Skeptic (Kylie Sturgess; another ex-member of FtB[1])
- The Uncredible Hallq (Chris Hallquist; another ex-member of FtB)
- Unreasonable Faith (Daniel Florien)
- What Would JT Do? (JT Eberhard, with frequent contributions by guest posters; another ex-member of FtB)
Leah Libresco's Unequally Yoked was also in the atheist section, until June 2012, when she announced that she is converting to... Catholicism, of all possible things. Her blog was consequently moved to the Catholic section.
Patheos' poaching of Freethought Blogs' bloggers was noted and became something of a jocular meme on FtB.[2] The reasons for most, if not all of the moves were financial - Patheos offers better payment than FtB, probably because Patheos doesn't rely only on advertisement revenue.
[edit] Others
Other good blogs are Slacktivist by Fred Clark, a liberal Christian who dissected at length the Left Behind series, and No Longer Quivering, a group blog collecting experiences of survivors of the Quiverfull movement.
Not everything on the network is sunshine and singing "Kumbaya," though. While the network has spent some effort to be inclusive, the individual participants are not necessarily an enlightened bunch tolerance-wise. There's also a great variability in the amounts of other types of secular clue, such as scientific knowledge. If you want to get your blood boiling, but FSTDT is too low-brow for you, just try browsing the "Evangelical" and "Catholic" channels.
So, other notable blogs filed under "Misc" are:
- Bristol Palin blogs on the Family channel. Yes, you read correctly - that Bristol Palin, and yes, she's blogging in the Family channel.
- Standing on My Head, by Dwight Longenecker, a Catholic priest (formerly Anglican, even more formerly Evangelical). In September 2012, he came to the attention of the atheist blogosphere after saying some really dumb things about atheists (a two word sample: "spiritual zombies", though the problems with what he wrote are a bit deeper than that)
- Black, White and Gray, a group blog on the Evangelical channel. Among the contributors is Mark Regnerus, a social scientist notorious for a bad study on the effects of gay couples adopting children.[3]
- Science on Religion is a group blog that purports to provide a scientific look on religion. It would be more honestly named "Religion on Science", as all of its authors seem to be theologians and/or philosophers. Unless the "on" in the current title is used not as "about", but in the same way as in "on drugs".
- The Anchoress is the blog of Elizabeth Scalia, the managing editor of Patheos' Catholic portal. Posts the stuff expected from an orthodox Catholic: abortion is genocide, etc.