Twitter and the prophetic voice

As I scroll through the statistics of the world's most "followed" Twitter users, I notice a trend. Those with the most dramatic differentials between how many "follow" them and how many they are "following" seems to track with how "prophetic" the person is perceived to be.

By my reckoning, here's the current list.

The Pope @Pontifex

The Dalai Lama @DalaiLama

Stephen Colbert @StephenAtHome

Marshall Mathers @Eminem

Kanye West @kanyewest

So do we now have a global statistics database to track the prophetic voice?

This left me wondering about an outlier: Dwayne Johnson @TheRock. But when you read through his tweets, a large percentage are actually motivational mantras. So far, the theory is holding up.

Michael Peppard is associate professor of theology at Fordham University and on the staff of its Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. He is the author of The World's Oldest Church and The Son of God in the Roman World, and on Twitter @MichaelPeppard. He is a contributing editor to Commonweal.