Focus: Religion

Mar 23

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.

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Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

seo - Google SearchTo trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site higher than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­ity” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to visit your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our churches and meet­ing­houses and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meet­ing­house /
Hos­pi­tal­ity keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quaker meet­ing­houses have pretty good “nat­ural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meet­ings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sional “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­ily war­rant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­ity we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tual seek­ers can both grow per­son­ally and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tional, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the client’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cesses occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more fully engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­ity could be eas­ily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­eral back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­ily accom­plish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sider this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­ity” of our spir­i­tual communities.

Jul 10

Religion in the mainstream press

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They default to the same bor­ing tropes, says Amy Levin at TheRe­vealer:

Reli­gious wars, reli­gious dress, reli­gious money – these are the real and yet superbly com­plex ele­ments of our cul­tural exis­tence. Scout any crack or cranny of pop­u­lar cul­ture and you find reli­gion cre­at­ing a glo­ri­ous maze of top­ics for writ­ers to dis­cover and sift and sing to the masses.

But lately, I find that a repul­sive plague of rep­e­ti­tion and banal­ity has swept over the dis­en­chanted cyber­sphere. Each day I begin my reli­gion news search with hope­ful eager­ness, sift­ing closely through main­stream and fringe out­lets, hun­gry for signs of a new trend, move­ment, argu­ment, study–anything other than what I con­sumed the day before. But I search in vain, and my dol­drums have led me to take action.

(H/T to David Watt on Facebook)

Aug 02

Spiritual Biodiversity and Religious Inevitability

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Emi­grants from the Irish potato famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pretty worked up about con­vinc­ing each other of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ural world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­sity. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapted to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the other side of the world has no nat­ural preda­tors doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­sity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is needed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual har­vest but leave us espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­thora infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one another. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to level all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­tity. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­ity, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of other peo­ple, then they will even­tu­ally spread themselves–not by push­ing other bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the other bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­ity that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.