Rupert Murdoch
sells topless Page 3 girls to England, and he sells "fair and balanced"
television commentary to America. But until last week, his most
eccentric product was Beliefnet.com.
On June 25, Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation sold the pioneering religion Web site to the owners of Affinity4, a company run by evangelical Christians and, according to its Web site, is dedicated to "the sanctity of the family." It is another owner and another incarnation for Beliefnet, an online magazine that has survived since 1999 by nurturing every aspect of our conflicted spirituality. It has united angels and yoga, monotheism and meditation. Beliefnet has become America.
When Steven Waldman, an alumnus of Washington Monthly and Newsweek magazines, founded Beliefnet in 1999, it was dedicated to journalism and theological conversation; it was a good resource to learn the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or Baptist and Methodist. The Harvard theologian Harvey G. Cox Jr., the evangelical seminary president Richard Mouw and the journalist James Fallows were all early columnists; the books editor was Lauren Winner, now a professor at Duke. (I wrote several reviews for her.)
Like Feed and Suck and other Web 1.0 magazines -- like children with a
lot of energy but unstable personalities -- Beliefnet was fun and odd,
quirky and unpredictable. Also like those children, it did not have a
good sense of how to prudently use Mummy's credit card. Having spent
more than $25 million in venture capital, Beliefnet filed for bankruptcy in 2002.
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Source: Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times
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