Guest Post

Some of the best coverage of the firing of National Public Radio news analyst Juan Williams has been NPR's own. But the broader conversation has quickly become a chorus of ridiculousness.

If you ask socially dominant students at any major university in the U.S., they will know a story about a young woman who has been rated for her various "abilities" by members of a sporting team on campus. The ratings usually function semiprivately and circulate among the men. Meanwhile, a different little scandal is brewing here at Duke, over another set of numbers that also usually circulate semiprivately among men.

Pastoral ministry is a public calling, and in our social-media age this calling extends to online identities and relationships. Since becoming a pastor, I've adopted some different Facebook practices.

Many of the recent articles about clergy burnout suggested that it's a symptom of cognitive dissonance: pastors think their job ought to be a particular kind of work and are frustrated when it ends up involving something else. None of the media coverage, however, offered a compelling description of the call to ministry itself.

Last week, students at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania gave up instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter—not by choice but by Provost Eric Darr’s order.