Earlier this year there was a conference called GodBlogCon. I count myself a godblogger, so naturally, I was intrigued...until I poked around their website and discovered that it was focused solely on Christian bloggers. (It also sounds like the political slant of the conference was pretty conservative.) "Oh well," thought I. "Too bad there isn't something like that for people like me."

I'm not sure I would have given the matter much more thought had I not gotten a note a few weeks ago from Thurman Hart, who blogs over at XPatriated Texan. He's a liberal Christian blogger who, you guessed it, originally hails from my birthstate, and he had a question for me: would I be interested in working on a bloggercon for progressive bloggers of faith?

Would I ever!

We've been exchanging emails ever since, and we've gotten a few of our friends and colleagues involved in the early conversation -- Gordon Atkinson of Real Live Preacher, Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center, Bruce Prescott of Mainstream Baptist,  Andrew Schamess of Semitism.net. Now we want to involve you, too.

Progressive Faith Blog Con is still in the planning stages, but here's what we know so far: we'd like to hold it in 2006, somewhere in New York or New England. We want to design something that will appeal to liberal bloggers from a variety of faiths and traditions. We're envisioning a weekend of events: optional ecumenical worship, a keynote speaker or two, and panel discussions led by progressive godbloggers, for progressive godbloggers, about subjects we can brainstorm together as the planning coalesces.

What we don't yet have is a place or a date. We've been talking about the weekend of March 3-5, but we're reluctant to set our hearts on any particular weekend until we have a place to congregate. But while we work on those logistics, we'd love to broaden the conversation; we want to know whether this sounds like fun to other folks, and if so, what those other folks want the conference to be.

If you want to learn more, tell us how to find you and we'll be in touch soon. Tell us what would make you want to be there. If this is exciting to you, please help us spread the word; feel free to repost this information far and wide. And hey, if you happen to know of a venue that might want to host something like this -- especially one that might be inclined to let us in for free, given the nobility of our enterprise -- do let us know.

Blogging has many joys, among them the opportunity to form connections across great distances and differences. If you're a liberal blogger of faith, help us create a chance to turn our virtual community into one that exists in the physical world too. I can't wait to see what we can build together.

Technorati tags: religion, politics, ProgFaithBlogCon.