Getting Started

For those of you who don't know me, let me give you a little background (just a little).  I am a seminary graduate who holds an Master of Divinity from Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, USA.  I was denied ordination from the ELCA due to their rules against ordaining openly gay candidates.  Since then, I have been working in the IT industry.  Perhaps because of the recent decision of the ELCA to open the ordination process to people who are in committed same-gender relationships, I have been having an increasingly strong interest in working through some theological thoughts in a public forum.  This blog may be the beginning of this process.

I don't have any grand illusions that throngs of people will read this site.  Perhaps nobody will.  In the end, it doesn't matter.  This is a place for me to work through my thoughts, structure some ideas, and try to integrate the technological and theological parts of my brain.  I ask that anyone reading this blog consider that this is all WIP (work in process).  Any resemblance to a coherent systematic theology is purely accidental!

An additional reason for using a blog to work this process is to impose some sense of accountability on myself.  Even though this blog is not likely to endanger Blogger's infrastructure by overloading its servers, I do think that by hitting the "publish" button, I am making a commitment to be honest to this process.  I don't know yet how frequently I will update this blog, but hope that by setting up this blog artifice, I will finally start organizing my thoughts.

In my next entry, I will explain why I have named this blog "Refactoring Theology".  For those who are familiar with IT, the term refactoring will be familiar.  So far is my brief search in Google has revealed, I don't think anyone has applied the term to theology - perhaps for good reason!  But whether the term is familiar or not, I will explain in short order.

So enough of the prologue and on to the work at hand.