The New Said At Southern

A couple of years ago, a metablog was created to carry all the feeds of Southern Seminary bloggers.  About six months ago, that metablog began experiencing difficulties and was no longer carrying a consider number of the blogs.  This metablog had served to be a great resource for people to stop by and check out what the students and faculty were blogging about, and for me it was an almost daily stop.

On March 15 of this year, my friend Tony Kummer (who is also responsible for this BTW), put together a bunch of the student feeds on a Blogger template which I happened to find very helpful.  I, along with others, encouraged him to develop a new metablog to replace the older, now defunct, metablog so that we could have a home base to read what other seminary students are saying.  As this formative process was underway, we began discussing about eventually making the switch to WordPress.  Our goal was to make the move over the summertime; however, that switch came earlier as on May 8, Said at Southern was now being hosted on WordPress.  Over the past 2-3 weeks, we have been planning and working on developing a website that is simple, clean, easy to navigate, and fully functional.  That is not easy to do when you are trying to carry 85+ feeds on one website!

Nevertheless, today (June 1) is our official launch day, and I want to direct you to the new Said at Southern and ask you to take a look.  What we have done is created new, separate pages for the feeds: for students, faculty, and alumni respectively.  Also included on the website are podcasts from chapel messages, Dr. Mohler’s radio show, and both Drs. Mohler and Moore’s Sunday School classes.  Another nice feature is the “Well Said” which are what we consider the best blogposts of the day.  We would love to get some feedback as our hopes are not simply to cater to the SBTS crowd, but also to the broader evangelical audience (and practically anyone who would be interested).  One of the things I appreciate the most is that Tony has carefully written an “Expectations” page which explains some of the standards we hope to maintain at SAS. 

So you might be wondering, “Who is the ‘we’ that you keep talking about?”  Currently we have three editors – Tony, myself, and Owen Strachan, an excellent writer and commentator.  Our goal is to run the front page, including editorials, blog series, and update everyone on what we consider to be important and newsworthy here at Southern Seminary.  Outside the editorial team, we have a great list of contributors, many of whom are scheduled to write in our first series – reviewing The Ringing Bell, Derek Webb’s latest release.  Today, Brent Thomas kicks things off with a nice post entitled, “How to Think Biblically About Christian Music.”  Stay “tuned” (sorry that’s really cheesy) for the rest of the series.  It should be good.

Later this summer, we hope to blog through our school’s confession, the Abstract of Principles, and continue to write about all things said at Southern.  Well, almost. 

So it’s Friday.  Slow day at work, not a lot to do.  Check out Said at Southern, and if you don’t mind, let others know about what we are trying to do.  Said at Southern isn’t primarily for seminarians; rather, it is to provide a portal to some great resources and edifying conversation, whether it is engaging the culture from a Christian worldview, discussing current theological issues, evaluating ecclesiological trends, reviewing books and music, or just everyday life as a seminarian.  You can also subscribe to our feed which will carry all our latest posts.

If you have any suggestions or comments, please let us know.  We are still developing this blogsite to be the best hub of news, commentary, links, and media resources of Southern Seminary available on the Internet.  Thanks.