We are extremely excited to enter this new phase of Faith-Promoting Rumor’s (FPR) history, joining up with Patheos.com. We thought we could take this occasion to discuss a bit of the history and personalities of FPR as we enter into this relationship.
First, we are a blog of mostly, or at least somewhat pseudonymous personalities. Each of us has various reasons for wanting to keep our personal, professional, and ecclesiastical lives separate from our blogging lives. Some is a matter of privacy, and some of principle. After so many years, it is basically just a part of who we are, and we don’t worry about it so much.
Second, we discuss lots of different topics, but our blogging subtitle, “Mormon thought, culture, and texts” is pretty representative of the themes we like to tackle. We are not a news site, and we don’t offer a lot of commentary on “current events,” but we do offer insightful, inquisitive, and exploratory treatments of issues important to Mormon theology, experience, and interpretation.
Many of the bloggers here are amateur or professional scholars, representing various disciplines. We don’t always agree with each other about our approaches to certain topics or to our understanding of Mormonism. We strive to provide a space for civil, intelligent conversation that works toward mutual understanding. By and large, we accomplish this pretty well.
These days, we are a semi-large group blog with various authors of varying levels of blogging activity. Actually, FPR started as a John C’s solo-blog in May of 2005. Later that year, he began adding other contributors, including Chris H. and Mogget, both of whom still blog here. Another blog called Urban Mormonism merged with FPR in February 2007. Since then we’ve added many others who share common interests or experiences.
We are thrilled to enter this new phase of blogging under the Patheos umbrella. Given our commitment to scholarship and reflection on religion, this is an excellent fit and we look forward to a productive relationship, and access to a new audience! The change in address should not change the content or focus of what our readers have come to expect from FPR, but it might inspire some of us to post more often!
We welcome our new and old readers to FPR @ Patheos!
Does this mean that Patheos will have a VCR Repair Portal?
Congrats to Patheos and the FPR! I’m excited to see where the blog goes from here.
I assume this doesn’t affect RSS feeds?
Here’s hoping the prophecy comes true!
It’s great to see you continue your excellent work here.
What is the advantage to joining with Patheos?
Hey MH,
I think that joining Patheos allows us to maintain our current interlocutors within the LDS Bloggernacle, while also potentially reaching a broader readership that is interested in thinking about the same kinds of topics we think about with another audience. There already exists a robust conversation about topics we care about here at Patheos, like religion, the study of religion, sacred texts, how norms come to be established, the cultural context of religious belief, interreligious dialogue, and thoughtful essays about particular religious traditions. We’d like to be a bit more in conversation with that group as well as our bloggernacle conversation partners, and feel like the Patheos brand might facilitate some of that.
Did they approach you, or did you approach them?
MH, they approached us.