Listen up. The Real Live Preacher is my kind of searcher. He’s a minister in South Texas 
who started a blog as a sort of personal refuge from his church–a confessional place where he could voice some of the doubt and confusion in his life, or so he thought. He began, as he says, “on a whim”–(calling to mind Emerson‘s line in Self-Reliance: “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.“) But then the readers of the Preacher’s blog took over. “I lost control of the blog,” the Preacher told me. “I was drug along kicking and screaming” into the formation of “a virtual congregation,” he said. Julie Powell of the Julie-Julia Project (of New York Times fame today!) introduced me to the Preacher’s site. It’s a spiritual oasis on the blog map, a place of struggle and tears, inspired storytelling, belief in disbelief, hope against hope, mystery and authenticity. You’ll be glad you heard his voice.
The Preacher got me thinking again not only of the prophet Emerson but of the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. 
In the 1950s Teilhard anticipated this Internet space, the “planetary thinking network” which he called the “noosphere,” noos being the Greek word for mind. The Real Preacher remembered what I had forgotten: that Teilhard also coined the idea of The Omega Point. WIRED rediscovered Teilhard as the visionary who “set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago.” Which only confirms that, as another prophet said, “there is nothing new under the sun,” except perhaps our little bursts of understanding.
Have a listen to the Preacher.
And check out another example of his storytelling here.
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