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Your book is a collection of weblog entries with some additional essays. Is there any other difference between it and your blog?

I wrote nine essays just for the book. I worked on those essays at a level that exceeds anything that is possible with regular blogging. I'm quite happy with the new essays. You know, blogging is like speed chess. Rules are the same, but you are posting stuff a couple of times a week. At some point you just have to stop working on it. I enjoyed writing the nine essays because I didn't stop until they were done; not until every word was where I wanted it.

Blogging at Salon is kind of a hip, cool thing. Do you feel hip? Do you have a blog persona?

Real Live Preacher is a character. I'm pretty hip in the internet world. It's geek hip. In real life, I am not so hip. At least my daughters say I'm not.

I think that I wanted to say some things and wasn't brave enough to say them myself. So I invented a character and set him down in a place where anyone can say anything. Then I turned him loose. In some ways, Real Live Preacher is the truest I've been to myself. In other ways, he is the person I wish I were brave enough to be in real life. In other ways, he is what I hope to be when I grow up.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Read RealLivePreacher at Salon.com. A must-read is his epic struggle with a raccoon.

Hear Real Live Preacher talk about the blogosphere on Christopher Lydon's blog at Harvard Law School blogs.

Selected quotes from Real Live Preacher are available from the Quotationspage.com.

RealLivePreacher.com is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from the publisher.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48