Introduction to the online theological world

Someone emailed and asked me about the online theological world because she is researching it for her DMin. 

Here is the online theological landscape in my opinion:

1. There are a few collaboration projects. The New Testament Gateway is run by Duke professor Mark Goodacre.  You can also check out Theopedia.  See also TheResurgence for Conservative Reformed Folk and Emergent Village for the emerging church and Anglimergent for emerging church folks who are Anglican.  Here is a Yahoo group for Jurgen Moltmann that Tony Jones alerted me to.  Many organizations that exists in the real world have a way to interact online today.   Christianity Today and Beliefnet especially God's Politics with Sojourners have powerful online presence. 

2. Most of the real discussion is happening on blogs.  Some blogs have multiple authors like Reformation 21 for conservative reformed folk and the Generous Orthodoxy Thinktank which has a lot of evangelical professors.  They sometimes collaborate.  See the recent post about an online Karl Barth theology conference.

3.  Here are a few important individual blogs by professors:

• Richard Mouw - president of Fuller Theological Seminary has a blog
• Scot McKnight - New Testament professor at North Park has a huge blog audience and he writes 4 posts a day or something like that
• Ben Witherington - New Testament professor at Asbury writes a lot
• John Stackhouse - theology professor at Regent College
• Mark Goodacre - professor of New Testament at Duke
• Here is my list of the most important church leadership blogs by leading thinkers and writers: 80 very good Church Leadership Blogs.    
  

4.  Sometimes bloggers get together in real life.  For example, people like Mark Goodacre get together with other bloggers at meetings like the SBL and AAR -major theology conferences. 

5. Some seminaries are now offering free online courses. 

Covenant Theological Seminary's "Covenant Worldwide" - free seminary courses.

Gordon-Conwell's Dimensions of the Faith free online theological education program. Listen to full Church History, Systematic Theology, and Biblical Studies courses.

Many other seminaries are putting MP3's on iTunes so people can listen to audio.  See Chris Tilling's post Theology and NT lectures on iTunes and Nijay Gupta's Excellent Christian Academic Material (Free) on ITUNES-U.

Fuller Theological Seminary puts all of their Syllabi / Course Descriptions online. 

6.  Most seminaries have all of the faculty email addresses on the web on the faculty pages which leads to some interaction with the online world.  Some schools that make available the email addresses of their professors include Duke Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Gordon-Conwell, Luther Theological Seminary, Wheaton College, Tyndale, Bethel, Denver, Aberdeen, and Durham.  On the other hand, Regent College, Asbury Seminary, Westminster Seminary, and Covenant Seminary do not make faculty email addresses available.  I think seminaries should make them available online.    

7.  I have a Facebook account but I have not seen much theological discussion going on there except for some groups to join. See the Out of Ur group for the Christianity Today Leadership Journal Out of Ur blog and another group for Tony Jones's book The New Christians. 

Comments

[Jody Fernando]

Great list! Thanks, Andy. I'm curious - how do you determine when a website has a 'strong online presence'? Are there means of finding out hits and popularities of websites and such?

[Natanael Disla]

Good list for beginners searching for theological discussion on the Web.

For Spanish-speaking folks and Latinamerican-based theological discussion, I strongly recommend the following:

-Lupa Protestante (http://www.lupaprotestante.com/)

-Gabriela Ibarra (http://monjaguerrillera.com.ar/)

-Teología Sin Nombre (http://teologiasinnombre.blogspot.com/)

These are the best sites theologically speaking flowing through Latinamerica Protestant Theology

[David Morris]

Great stuff!!! Thanks for helping us all keep current. I am familiar with some of these but I can't wait to start clicking and bookmarking away!

[Andy Rowell]

Jody,

Measuring blog traffic:

1. http://technorati.com/ compares your blogs to others
2. how high your website appears on different google searches. Get help at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
3. http://www.sitemeter.com/ counts your hits but you may have a counter already on your blog platform
4. http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home how many people subscribe to your blog.

That is the basics that I know.

andy

[Adrianna Wright]

Thanks again Andy!

[Anthony Gregory Glasgow]

Would like to enroll in the tuition free courses.