PeaceBang

Who’s PeaceBang?

Like many ministers, I blog anonymously so that there’s no mistaking my own personal views with the views of my congregation. That said, my identity is no secret, so let’s say that the “anonymity” of this blog is more a symbolic courtesy than a reality.

I do not write about specific things that happen in my church out of respect for my parishioners’ privacy, and also because that’s just not the aim of this blog. If I speak of church life, I want it to be through a rose-colored lens. Haven’t we all heard enough negative things about congregations to last us all a lifetime? I love and believe in the Church.
I want to propagate such feelings in others.

If you’ve guessed that I have many serious lover’s quarrels with the Unitarian Universalist tradition and “denomination,” I would respond that that’s just about right.

I started blogging in the last days of 2004 at the suggestion of my friend Rebecca Scott. We were out to dinner and she was hugely pregnant with her first child, Ruth, who was then known as “Sparkle Baby” and featured on the “Sparkle Baby” blog. I didn’t know much about blogs but I went home that night and started one.

The name PeaceBang was also born the same night, when I was standing in line at a crowded and noisy ice cream parlor after dinner and trying to tell the clerk that my friend Steve would pay for my ice cream cone. “He’s paying,” I said, and Steve misheard it as “PeaceBang.” After several frustrating moments where I kept saying “He’s paying” and he would genially respond, “PeaceBang!” (as though we were clinking glasses in a toast), we both collapsed in laughter. Later that evening when I had to name myself as a blogger, I immediately chose “PeaceBang.”

I have a passionate need to express myself through writing. The blogging community has been a wonderful antidote to the loneliness and isolation than can beset the single suburban pastor, and I have been amazed at how our dynamic conversation has nurtured my thought process and theological reflection.

And yet there are grave limitations to blogging. We must not imagine that because we share words over the internet that we truly know one another. We are a community of sorts and therefore accountable to one another — I have learned that over the years — and we do our best to communicate despite the limitations of the medium.

At its best, I think, blogging can make real friends of virtual friends, and I have felt myself profoundly fortunate to make actual friends all over the country through this phenomenon.

I consider it an honor that so many of you are regular visitors to PeaceBang, and I thank you.

P.S. The photo in the banner is my real church. The haircolor, however, is another story.