Salt Lake City Tabernacle, photo courtesy of utahhdr.com

Civil Religion is an attempt—a successful one, in my short experience—to foster mutual understanding among members of disparate religious (and nonreligious!) traditions.  The advantages of the blog format are its convenience and its transparency: readers can easily access posts,  participate in the comments, and readily search, recover and distribute the content.  These are good things, mostly.  But because blogs expose participants to a potentially hostile public gaze, there can be a reluctance on the part of bloggers to engage in the kind of mutually self-disclosing dialogue that leads to real understanding. If one fears that reflective self-criticism will be exploited by bad-faith opportunists, one is less likely to engage in open discussion. I know I’ve felt a bit of that in my short tenure as a participant here, though, happily, that fear has been largely unrealized.

That’s why I was interested to read about…