I am an almost sixty-year-old cis-het Euro-American male Low Residency Masters of Divinity student at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. During the fall and spring terms, I take classes online, discussing the texts in the schools learning management system. I head out to California in January and June for brief intensive courses. Because of this, my experiences with theological education are different from many other theology students. For me, this is compounded by some of the interests I bring to my studies.

I’ve worked with computers since the 1960s. I’ve been on the Internet since the early 1980s. I’ve developed an interest in digital pedagogy that has led me down many rabbit holes. I’ve learned about Deleuze and Guattari from online affinity groups. I’ve become interested in connected learning, postcolonialism, speech act theory, third space theory, poststructuralism, and a raft of writers such as Foucault, Lacan, and others. However, my knowledge in all these areas is rudimentary at best.

For my day job, I’m a communications manager at a Federally Qualified Health Center. I started there, close to a decade ago, as their first social media manager, and social media remains very important to me. That said, I’m ambivalent about much church social media. It too often feels like it is more focused on marketing and less focused on formation or transformation than I would like.

Some of this changed with a course I took last fall entitled “Postmodern Christian Education”. As part of the course, we read John Roberto’s “Reimagining Faith Formation for the 21st Century”. In the book, he presented the idea of a “Faith Formation Network” which is sort of like a personal learning network focused on issues of faith. The idea particularly grabbed me and is helping catalyze some of my thinking around faith, education, and digital media.

One group I’ve interacted with is the Connected Learning MOOC. This month, they are starting up a slow read of Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning by Mizuko Ito et al. I don’t really have time to add this to all my other reading, but since it’s a slow read and they invite people to join in as they can, I figured I’ll read and comment when I can. Their opening questions are “What is an affinity network?” and “what characteristics do affinity networks have?”

The book starts by talking about a young woman who ends up part of a Harry Potter related fiber artists group. In the old days, it was unlikely she would have found “a critical mass of knitters who are also Harry Potter Fans.” (Ito, 1)

I’ve read a little bit, here and there, about postcolonialism and third space theory, but I know very few people that are well versed in it and certainly haven’t found a third space theory affinity group. So, when I started wondering about how third space theory might apply to eschatology, I didn’t really have a good place to go, other than wondering the digital library stacks in search of a lead.

So, to the list of things I’m studying this semester, I’m adding an exploration into affinity groups, an explanation into Third Space Eschatology, and ideally hoping to find or develop a third space eschatology affinity group. Thoughts?