Alan Jacobs

I want him out. I was happy to see him impeached and I would dance for joy if he were to be removed from office. But I think the task of Christianity Today is to inform and educate its readers about the theological and moral commitments that should govern Christian thinking about politics, not to endorse or decry specific acts of governance about which Christians, and the American electorate more generally, are deeply divided. A magazine like CT should be focused on helping people to “take every thought captive for Christ,” not telling them which side to take on this or any other partisan issue. Now there’s one less venue where Christians with political disagreements can come together in a common cause. That doesn’t feel like a win to me.

Taking a side, even the right side, isn’t always the best thing to do. There ought to be some magazines, and some institutions, and some people, focused instead on laying the groundwork for better days to come, and that requires inviting into the tent some people in your community whom you think are deeply misguided.

Albert Camus once wrote that the attitude of the French intelligentsia towards the pieds noirs — the ethnic French in Algeria — was “You go ahead and die, that’s what we deserve.” That is now what French law is saying to France’s Jews — but even more bluntly.

When I bought this domain name I joked that the “.org” in this case stands for “organism,” because of course I’m not an organization. But that may not matter to the private equity firm that wants to buy the whole .org domain.

I have to confess: I didn’t know that this was possible. I thought the various domains were administered by the consortium that runs the whole Web — I didn’t know that entire top-order domains were for sale on the open market. I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog and elsewhere counseling the wisdom of owning your own turf, but this is a strong reminder to me that of course I don’t own my turf — I only have use of the domain name for as long as I am willing and able to pay whatever a private equity firm (should the sale go through) decides I ought to cough up. If they tell me that I can keep ayjay.org for $5000 a year, then this won’t be my turf any more.

It’s sobering. Similarly — and this I did know — if my hosting company, or any other hosting company I might use, decided that as a Christian I am an intolerable bigot who cannot be allowed to sully their good name, then I might still have temporary title to the domain name but would be unable to make any of my writings public.

I have written against the walled gardens of social media and in favor of tending the digital commons, but maybe “commons” was a bad metaphor. Maybe the open web is more like a public park that the city government might at any time sell to developers who plan to turn it into a high-rise. Absence of walls is not presence of public ownership.

I own my computer and the files on its hard drive. That may be all, in the digital world, I own.

trigger warning

… is the name of my new band