Street Corner Society

Yesterday I stumbled upon a “Web 2.0″ site, eBible.com, that’s set up to create a network of bible study.

There seems to be a lot of potential built into it. For example, anyone who signs up as a user can tag particular passages with topic-words that may interest others. I’ve added some topics like “inward” and “universal,” starting with a few citations from Penn’s Primitive Christianity Revived. And referring to our recent thread, “Friend, thou shouldst not have been thinking,” I’ve posted (as “public bookmarks” under my username Kofu) links to the handful of bible citations that came out of that discussion. (Later: it looks like you may have to be signed in to see more than the ten most recent ones.)

The site also allows members of any particular “Church,” Ministry,” or “School” to join as a community, so they can study the bible together. I guess they started with some sort of church directory. A handful of Quaker meetings are listed as latent communities. (In the “Join a community” step there’s a “Live Search” function that, when you type in Friends Meeting or Religious Society, will pull up some of them.) Or you can add your own.

The site managers have to approve proposed “communities.” I’m not sure what their take on Friends will be. Will they welcome our participation? It seems tilted toward the evangelicals, in the broader (and better) sense of the word. And I see Quaker involvement there as having an outreach aspect, for instance in pointing out and annotating passages that are particularly meaningful to Friends. As new communities, I’ve proposed my own monthly meeting, my yearly meeting, and then as a “Ministry” I’ve proposed the entire Religious Society of Friends. Each community has to have a street address, so for the RSoF I put c/o FWCC-North America. The site is geared to addresses in the U.S.

So there are some limitations, but also there’s a lot of potential that hasn’t been fully realized by the people who are there now. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under love & unity, technology & design, web finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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