On February 22, 2005, this blog went live. Three years and 1,132 posts later, where the heck are we?

The blog continues to be reasonably healthy. Last month, this site saw just under 4,000 unique visitors; during calendar year 2007, the site received approximately 38,000 unique visitors. By the standards of the Big Blogs, these are tiny numbers — the Big Blogs get tens of thousands of unique visitors each day. But for a personal blog on liberal religion, over a hundred unique visitors a day is fine and dandy.

Of greater interest is the current healthy state of the liberal religious blogosphere. UUpdates, a site that aggregates Unitarian Universalist blogs, now tracks some 323 blogs. Many of these blogs are well worth reading — in fact, there are so many good ones that I can’t keep up with all the blogs I like. I’m also finding more and more liberal Christian, humanist, liberal Jewish, and Pagan blogs out there that are worth reading.

What I continue to miss about the liberal religious blogosphere is the lack of face-to-face contact. Here in Boston, Unitarian Universalist bloggers have managed to gather for an annual picnic; and Unitarian Universalist bloggers typically meet a couple of times at General Assembly. As we see more and more Unitarian Universalist bloggers, my hope is that we start building regional networks — ideally, we’d include not just bloggers, but those who read the blogs as well; and not just Unitarian Universalists, but other religious liberals, too. And ideally, we will become more place-based, instead of being place-less.