By way of St. Louis Dispatch, the Christian Post reports ...
https://www.christianpost.com/news/pastor-darrin-patricks-death-ruled-a-suicide.html
Religion News has an update that Darrin Patrick's death has officially been ruled a suicide.
https://religionnews.com/2020/07/02/death-of-megachurch-pastor-darrin-patrick-officially-ruled-a-suicide/
By way of Bob Smietana and Alejandra Molina, report that Darrin Patrick's death officially ruled a suicide
https://julieroys.com/death-of-megachurch-pastor-darrin-patrick-officially-ruled-a-suicide/
...
Megachurch pastor Darrin Patrick’s cause of death has officially been ruled a suicide, according to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.
Patrick died May 7 in Pacific, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. The cause of death was a gunshot wound and the medical examiner ruled it a suicide, Franklin County Sheriff Steve Pelton told Religion News Service.
For those who remember the 2016 "where are they now?" review of the scandals that emerged about people who at one point endorsed Real Marriage, you can head over here:
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/07/real-marriage-in-2016-looking-back-on.html
Rachel Green Miller has a post reflecting on the recent Geneva Commons fracas (let the reader who bothers to keep track of anything OPC or PCA understand)
https://rachelgreenmiller.com/2020/07/03/getting-to-the-root/
For those who may have never heard of Rachel Green Miller before, she spent some time documenting what in Mark Driscoll's works were sometimes noted as "citation errors" or more bluntly plagiarism in A Justice Primer, which was retracted in its first edition and has been reissued in a second edition.
https://rachelgreenmiller.com/2016/01/21/a-justice-primer-the-investigation/
https://rachelgreenmiller.com/tag/a-justice-primer/
Alan Jacobs still loathes Twitter but got back on it because he was told he needed to promote a book he's worked on.
https://blog.ayjay.org/the-circle-game/
...
My friends make fun of me for my long-standing ambivalence about Twitter, but since the 2016 election season I haven’t been ambivalent. I have despised it wholly. I believe that Twitter and Facebook have done unprecedented and unhealable damage to our social fabric — I believe that they are evil, and that no morally sane person should be comfortable using either of them. I do not say that every morally sane person should refuse to be on them — for some people the decision to be on social media is wholly justifiable and maybe even admirable — but if you’re happy on social media then you need to reset your moral compass.
So I wrote to my peeps at Penguin Random House and asked if I would be betraying them if I deactivated my Twitter account again. My wonderful editor Ginny Smith wrote back reminding me that Twitter is a “useful tool” — “but it’s not worth your sanity.” Exactly. Thank you. I’m outta there.I never plan to actually use Twitter. About the most use it was for me was that at one point former high profile members and leaders of Mars Hill Church had used Twitter prodigiously enough to give away their identities in relationship to the disciplinary scandal that enveloped Andrew Lamb. For anyone who might, here in 2020, even want to read about that peculiar disciplinary situation, there's a tagged series of posts.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20confluence%20of%20situations
Over at the blog On an Overgrown Path, Pliable remarks on how Twitter has, among other core problems, a propensity to hew to whatever the narrative of the moment is, which is to say that a Richard Bratby in particular can pander to the latest trend in a way that doesn't so much add to critical engagement as reduce things to "buy this" or "don't buy this", although, I felt obliged to comment by pointing out Jacques Ellul's acid observation that the critic, whether in arts or literature, has always been the publicity agent for the arts.
The way people can go back and forth on Twitter has reminded me of a Terry Teachout blog post called "The Shame Sharks":
http://www.artsjournal.com/
... I never cease to be struck by the fact that so many people still fail to grasp that the social media are public. These technological innocents seem to think that you can use them to communicate exclusively with a small circle of friends—which is normally true. Yet the potential for attracting an infinitely wider audience is always there. [emphasis added]
Should unhappy shamees know better than to post the silly selfies and tasteless tweets that get them into trouble? Perhaps, but it’s too easy to answer yes. Twitter, after all, wasn’t created until 2006, and it took a fair amount of additional time for it to become a fully empowered agent of the secular arm of politico-personal correctness. We are still adjusting to that horrific development.
...
No doubt a time will come when we’ve all learned to watch our electronic mouths. Until then, I can only offer the same advice that I gave many years ago to a then-obscure performer about whom I wrote a profile that helped to put her on the road to fame. When I interviewed her for the piece—on tape, mind you—she said a number of things that would have caused her embarrassment had I quoted her. I liked her and admired her artistry, so at the end of the interview, I said, “Can I give you a piece of advice? Journalists are not your friends. Most of them would have printed what you said without a second thought. I won’t, but I want you to remember something for as long as you live: no matter how nice a reporter may seem, you must always treat each interview as an adversary proceeding.”
That’s how the social media work, too. Use them prudently and they can be a source of enormous pleasure and profit, but never forget that the sharks of cyberspace lie in wait to bite your hand off. They don’t care about you. In fact, you don’t even exist to them, save as an abstract symbol of their preferred causes. What they want, ever and always, is power, and they’ll happily eat you in order to get more of it. If you’re not prepared to bite back—hard—then stay out of the deep end.
Should unhappy shamees know better than to post the silly selfies and tasteless tweets that get them into trouble? Perhaps, but it’s too easy to answer yes. Twitter, after all, wasn’t created until 2006, and it took a fair amount of additional time for it to become a fully empowered agent of the secular arm of politico-personal correctness. We are still adjusting to that horrific development....No doubt a time will come when we’ve all learned to watch our electronic mouths. Until then, I can only offer the same advice that I gave many years ago to a then-obscure performer about whom I wrote a profile that helped to put her on the road to fame. When I interviewed her for the piece—on tape, mind you—she said a number of things that would have caused her embarrassment had I quoted her. I liked her and admired her artistry, so at the end of the interview, I said, “Can I give you a piece of advice? Journalists are not your friends. Most of them would have printed what you said without a second thought. I won’t, but I want you to remember something for as long as you live: no matter how nice a reporter may seem, you must always treat each interview as an adversary proceeding.
That’s how the social media work, too. Use them prudently and they can be a source of enormous pleasure and profit, but never forget that the sharks of cyberspace lie in wait to bite your hand off. They don’t care about you. In fact, you don’t even exist to them, save as an abstract symbol of their preferred causes. What they want, ever and always, is power, and they’ll happily eat you in order to get more of it. If you’re not prepared to bite back—hard—then stay out of the deep end.
That the "power" that can be gained on social media is of the most ephemeral and meaningless variety with respect to economic life and political policy was something Fredrik deBoer sounded off on recently but Teachout is not wrong to have written that there is a kind of "power" in social media use. Seeing as that post has self-destructed at deBoer's blog all I can do is link to the post where I quoted the whole thing over here.
Teachout wrote of how you have to be willing to bite back, and bite back hard, if you're going to even use social media. For those who are not disposed to do that, there might be another possibility, be clear up front a la Michael Spenser in the old days at Internet Monk, of reserving the right to delete comments or never publish them to begin with if they seem impertinent or defamatory and let people know up front that's how it's going to work. I am grateful that readership at this blog has dwindled to maybe a twentieth the size it was circa 2014 because the likelihood of having drive-by comments from people who say "all you do is rip on Pastor Mark" has all but vanished. I might get comments from people who are too lazy to read enough posts to pick up that I'm not a Biden or a Trump fan (that part takes less reading to discover) but I don't get many comments to the effect of how one day I will have to answer to God for all the bad stuff I've ever posted here about the former Mars Hill. When even Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas have come around to acknowledging that Mars Hill, however it started, became a gruesomely abusive ministry culture I would say that that public statement is a huge encouragement.
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