Larry Hollon posts about rage online:
Raging on the Internet

while I agree that the connectedness we enjoy is also a challenge, I don’t think it’s the ultimate cause. It’s a convenient tool to help pour salt. But it didn’t create the wounds. The wounds are created by the daily humiliation and struggle of poverty. That they erupt with such explosive violence isn’t a wonder to me. In fact, I’ve always wondered why those who struggle for survival everyday don’t blow off frustration more often.

But that takes energy, and when you’ve barely enough to eat or when you’re grubbing for enough money to get through the day, you don’t have time to make social statements.

As for anger in the developed world, there’s another set of issues to be explored. I think it’s about our feelings of being disconnected, voiceless and unable to control conditions that affect our lives. We’re not in the same basic survival struggle that I’ve written about above. But we’re not in control either. And we’re being frustrated, victimized and diminished on a daily basis by big corporations, big government, big education and big health. It’s little wonder that some think church bureaucrats are part of the same mix.

I rememeber MLK tellling Meet the Press that it was a miracle that more American Negroes had not turned to communism under the conditions in which they found themselves.

Actually, the people who CAN and DO blog have a luxury that those who NEED it most cannot afford, or have no connections to places where they could. We bloggers have a place, even though even that place is no substitute for an in-the-flesh, embodied community to whom we can turn. But even then it is nice to have a way to blow off steam and ask confronting questions without aiming the rage at anyone in particular, or holding back as we would in the physical company of others. Sometimes it simply doesn’t seem polite or appropriate, and yet there are those thoughts and feelings.
The “disconnectedness” of life is one of those attributes of the forces of darkness against which we struggle. It gets quite overwhelming at times. And when one gets used to wandering about looking for a “connectedness” in the churches that goes beyond simple piety and civility, or even beyond the occasional “ministry project” that is carried out, the lack of connectedness often seems to be the “way it is”. Not that “occasional projects” aren’t “better than nothing”, or don’t provide real and needed help, but it doesn’t seem enough. All too rare is the needed community that underpins it. The “active” churches are all too often bereft of the very structures of community that make for the habits that form the people that God would have us become. Without the prior commitments to knowing one another in depth, and living our life together such that we are geared toward the discovery of gifts and discerning mission, we tend toward the adoption of activity that operates more like the politics of the world than the polis of the people of God. It’s very easy to align with Christian Progressives and yet remain in an arrangement of relationships that offers no deeper fellowship than that offered by normal civic societies. While I find myself at home theologically with the Progressive Christians than with the Religious Right (by quite a margin), I find it too difficult to take the disparity of the quality of fellowship of either from the “peculiarity” of the kind of people we are called to be and to commit ourselves to exploring, and forming habits that make this a way of life and an assumed posture.

I have come much closer over the past 5 or 6 years to having any conversation whatsoever about where I am theologically, emotionally, politically, socially in the online communities I have found. This is extremely sad that the level of struggle I have had in finding “connectivity” in the offline world has layed so much importance on the online conversation. I don’t seek to replace online at all. I simply would like to find a face to face group of folks who wish to think anew about “Authentic Church”