Pause to Reflect.

I'm learning a lot about blogging, here at In Your Faith.

I've become a voracious reader of other religion blogs - some great, some not-so-great. The big appeal for me is the fact that a blogs is almost certainly up front about its bias.

Sometimes it's obvious from just a quick read, like the lean left with The Revealer or the lean right with Get Religion. But more often, religion bloggers will somewhere or other just tell you straight out about their religious beliefs and backgrounds, which we rarely get to read about in paper pages. And I trust that. I like to know what the writer believes, so I can read in the right spirit.

So, I've decided to devote the next few entries here to doing that - coming clean about my take, what I believe, what intrigues me, and why I write about religion. I'll link these entries to my home page for future readers.

That said, the task has been hard - hence the week or so that has gone by since my last post. My religious affiliation has never been as easy as "I'm a conservative Christian" or "born-again urban Buddhist." I find myself sitting once again across from the vexing question: what do I call myself? For a man who spends a disproportionate amount of time in pews and cushions, the census takers would have to lump me with the "unchurched" - the 33% of Americans who don't have a place of worship to call home.

When I think of the constants in my worldview, they are all persistent questions. And that makes sense. There's a practice among certain Quakers for writing their community guidelines. In the book of their beliefs and practices, they'll offer the flock "queries" in place of laying down rules (God keep the Quakers from rules). In essence, queries are a set of questions that believers can return to, time and again, to challenge, to ponder, to beat against and to refresh themselves.

Starting Monday of next week, I'll try to ask one good question a day, and tie it into how I read the news. I hope you'll be patient with me. In the end, I think it will make for a better blog.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.