{"id":2228,"date":"2009-09-23T08:46:24","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T12:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/?p=2228"},"modified":"2009-09-23T08:46:24","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T12:46:24","slug":"ted-mercer-blogspot-com-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/2009\/09\/23\/ted-mercer-blogspot-com-about\/","title":{"rendered":"ted.mercer.blogspot.com — About"},"content":{"rendered":"

They didn’t have blogs back in the day. They had speeches<\/a>. They had theses<\/a>. They had pamphlets<\/a>. They had tracts<\/a>. They had samizdat<\/a>. To get to<\/em><\/strong> a lot of those documents you either have to choose a famous one — like I just did in that listing — or know how to operate a microfiche machine or just hang out in library archives. If you’re lucky, they are permanent — somewhere.<\/p>\n

Blogs are more fleeting. There are more spelling errors, more goofy lolcat pictures, more viral videos. But they are more . . . present<\/em> than any of the others. And more dangerous<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You probably don’t know who Ted Mercer<\/a> is. The first time I heard about him was ~1993 when I was listening to my first graduate audition in the Division of Speech. A young man from Bryan College<\/a> was applying for a graduate assistantship. And one of the senior, hoary-headed members of our faculty said to us all (something like), “Are we sure we should let him in? He is, after all, from Bryan<\/em><\/strong>.” Her words were pregnant with a mysterious and sinister meaning.<\/p>\n

Now I was the youngest faculty member in this group. And . . . I’m a little bit clueless as I’ve said before<\/a>. So, in typical fashion, I just asked earnestly, “What do you mean? What’s wrong with Bryan?” Another less-junior-than-I colleague nodded and agreed, “Yeah, I’d like to know too! I have no idea.” And the senior member just sighed and shook her head, disappointed with these children these days about how they know nothing of the past. . . . I think. I don’t know why she was sighing. But I never heard the details that day.<\/p>\n

So I’m going to tell you the story. With the actual documents themselves. A friend just passed them along to me last night, and I stayed up too late reading them.<\/p>\n

If Ted were alive today and had been fired from Bob Jones University, he’d have his own blog where he’d publish such things. But in 1953, all he had was a mimeograph machine and an address book. So let’s take a look. . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They didn’t have blogs back in the day. They had speeches. They had theses. 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