UCCtruths

Starting Monday, Dan Schultz (aka PastorDan) of Street Prophets and I will have a 'blog debate' on "The Role of Religion in Politics". Each day next week, we'll be posting our exchange on our respective blogs. Hopefully it will be informative and entertaining.

For a little background on PastorDan from Street Prophets:

I am a third-generation minister in the United Church of Christ, and have served congregations in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I grew up in my dad's church across the street from Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin. I later graduated from the UW with majors in English, History, and the History of Culture. After a few years in Minneapolis, I moved to Atlanta, where I received an M.Div. from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.

PastorDan was also featured in the New York Times last August:

For three years, Mr. Schultz has supplied the voice of religion for Daily Kos, an epicenter of left-liberal activity with an otherwise fiercely secular bent. In 2004, Mr. Schultz began fielding prayer requests every Sunday night as part of a Daily Kos feature called "Brothers and Sisters." A year later, Daily Kos's founder, Markos Moulitsas, let Mr. Schultz spin off a formally connected online community, Street Prophets.

In 4.3 million page views since then, Mr. Schultz's readers have found comparatively little balm in Gilead. True to the take-no-prisoners style of blogosphere discourse, Street Prophets traffics more in calumny and condemnation, though with an extremely learned theological intelligence behind it.

While he and I don't agree on much, his voice is an important one for our denomination. I read his blog regularly and feel challenged by many of his posts even when I disagree with them.