Brian Kanowsky

Walked about 3.1 miles this morning – overcast, but not too cold despite the dusting of snow last night.

Happened across a flock of juncos flittering about a clearing, and noticed a purple finch watching them from a nearby bush. A couple of titmice flew from branch to branch overhead, and a nuthatch bobbed down the trunk of one of the larger trees.

Saw the fat cardinal in his bush again, and the cluster of bushes behind him was blazing with the bright red feathers and neon orange beaks of other cardinals, cheeping background vocals to his loud song. The cardinals were out in force this morning, singing loudly from tall branches and chirping from the underbrush.

The mud was frozen enough that I could walk out by the beaver dam, which has seemingly doubled in size since I last saw it. Lots of fresh deer tracks in the snow around the banks of the creek, and a skittish bluebird tried to stay one tree ahead of me as I walked forward.

Then I walked down to the park, and saw a couple of enormous chattering crows preening themselves on branches over the creek. A blue jay, seemingly annoyed with the cavorting squirrels, did his best hawk impersonation, screaming and swooping down in their direction. The squirrels scurried for cover, while another blue jay nonchalantly went on digging through the dead leaves on the ground. I heard a red-bellied woodpecker, and when I finally spotted him, I noticed that the tree to his left held a small downy woodpecker, while the tree to his right hosted a couple of nuthatches.

The doctor ordered more walking, and so I play the role of a dutiful patient.

Yesterday afternoon, the wife and I walked about 1.8 miles. Again saw many crows in the sky, joining their small flocks together. Also saw a lone pair of mallards and a number of bluebirds. Watched a red-tailed hawk glide over the trees, and a vulture wobble on a low breeze, searching for a thermal.

This evening, I managed about 2.8 miles despite the cold wind, and the road that alternated between slick ice patches and shoe-sucking mud. A whole neighborhood of cardinals exchanged terse cheeps from their claimed braches, and a large rabbit splashed across the creek when I got too close. Watched a vulture make his last passes over the field before dusk settled, and a lone whitetail deer tracked me with her satellite-dish ears. Watched a couple of mallards splash down in the pond, and when I got closer I saw that there were at least a dozen pair of the ducks swimming together, trying to stay warm.

Managed only about 1.4 miles this afternoon, as it started snowing midway through my walk.

A cold, gray, and snowy afternoon makes for a very quiet walk, but I did see a couple of song sparrows and a solitary cardinal, who chipped in alarm as I approached. Watched a couple of geese flying low, and several smaller groups of crows flying back and forth as they merged into a large murder.

Foggy (and chilly) morning for a walk, but managed 1.75 miles.

In addition to the usual suspects – titmice, sparrows, crows, and doves – I saw a red-tailed hawk, several bluebirds, a downy woodpecker, a yellow-bellied sapsucker, and what I’m guessing was a towhee, although I don’t often see them in winter. Also saw the fattest cardinal I’d ever seen. In the pond, a pair of mallards and a skittish, large muskrat with a mouthful of leaves.

While browsing through my friends’ updates on Twitter, I was struck by the lack of a hashtag to aggregate all the smart and provocative content that Christian liberals were creating. After checking with a few influential Twitterers to make sure there wasn’t already a tag, I proposed the #pX hashtag.

(If you’re new to Twitter and need help figuring out what those hashtags are all about, check out this Mashable post.)

Why #pX?

I wanted to emulate other successful tags – they’re short, semantically memorable, and still meaningful. In this case, I wanted to play off the overlap with political progressives, who primarily use the #p2 hashtag. It stands for “Progressives 2.0”, and has an active userbase due to greater promotion and a shorter length. Other rival tags like #topprog and #rebelleft are still used by smaller communities on Twitter, but they lack the broad appeal of #p2.

So I set out to include the two basic aspects of this community – politically progressive and Christian. I started thinking about different representations and symbols that Christian groups have created for themselves over time, and came across the Wikipedia page for the Chi-Ro symbol – a P overlaid with an X, representing the first letters of “Christ” in Greek. This was one of the earliest christograms – that is, a combination of letters representing the name of Jesus Christ.

Chi-Ro symbol

The #XP tag was already in irregular use, mostly to refer to the aging Windows operating system. I was surprised when my searching revealed that #pX was available, so I quickly added the tag to popular hashtag repositories like What The Hashtag, Hashtag.org, and tagdef, among others.

Not only had I come across a hashtag that was symbolically meaningful, but it worked on a basic semantic level, too – using the traditional Greek letter Chi (X) to represent Christ (as in Xmas or any number of other common short names), pX is just a nice abbreviation for progressive Christian.

While capitalization technically isn’t recognized by Twitter or associated services, I used the traditional capitalization of the Lord’s name to show respect, and to reflect the relative importance of Christ to our political leanings.

Liberal Christians or Christian Liberals?

Like several of the other primary users of the #pX hashtag, I consider myself to be a Christian liberal rather than a liberal Christian. The difference, to me, is that my Christianity forms the basis for my political liberalism, informing and guiding it in a certain way. I don’t necessarily subscribe to liberal theology – something that doesn’t chart very easily on a typical left-right political scale anyway. And I wanted this hashtag to help create an open community of Christians who care deeply about peace, social justice, and a whole host of related issues.

#pX is about what we, as Christians living within a political system, can do with that political system to create a more just environment for all of God’s children. While theological issues will inevitably be discussed, the focus of the #pX community is on the political side of things – who has the power, how it is being used, and how it should be used.

You can join the conversation by adding #pX to your tweets. To follow the conversation, check the Twitter search page for #pX, or create in search in your favorite Twitter client.