Ordinarily, a first blog post comprises either an apology for one’s ignorance of blogs or a clever introduction to content and style. Wonderful blogs have begun in both ways.

For example, President Mouw’s blog (Mouw’s Musings) began in this way: “Those who know me well thought they would never see the day, but indeed it has come: I am launching my own blog. [...] It offers an opportunity for me to share with you, my friends and fellow bloggers, the things that are on my heart in ‘real time,’ so to speak.” With these sentence, he set the tone for what is one of the most urbane and magisterial examples of blogging that I know. He somehow manages to present himself, via an avant-garde medium, as a sage entirely above and apart from the squabbling, the “dirt,” of the blogosphere. I believe this had very much to do with the style of his first post.

Prof. John Stackhouse is another instance of such a beginning. He wrote: “It has taken considerable convincing for me to start a weblog. We’re all busy, so a blog needs to do something worthwhile. What would this one do?” And then he said what this one would do.—But not before he had established himself as Professor John Stackhouse, above and beyond being a blogger.

Both of these blogs, of course, are favorites of mine (as you can see from my blogroll), but I can’t help feeling that they’re like the mansions on the other side of town rather than the dude in the condo across the street. Consequently, the “neighborhood,” the e-social space they occupy, has a certain formality, ponderousness, dignity. There are posts you will never find on their blogs: provocative questions, slices of quotation, tentative thoughts. This is especially evident in their comments sections which tend toward a classroom atmosphere. In the world of Christian bloggers, at least, I think these two represent one side of a spectrum.

On the other side of the spectrum are blogger’s bloggers, like Ben Myers and Halden Doerge. Examining their origins is instructive.

Halden’s blog (Inhabitatio Dei) began with the following paragraph:

Having resisted being drafted into the blog universe for some time, I have finally given in. Basically I have a couple of reasons. First, I’ve been writing book reviews on Amazon.com for a few years and I’ve received numerous emails from people asking me to start a blog. Secondly, I enjoy internet discussions of theological and philosophical topics but I find the discussion forums on the net to be woefully inadequate and full of posters who are interested in the most inane and uninteresting sorts of questions. To that end, a blog may well be a good alternative venue.

Although he, too, suggests a bit of resistance to the blogosphere, nonetheless he comes across as an insider. He is already part of a conversational community–he was asked to begin his blog. Moreover, his purpose in blogging is also conversational–he is actively seeking discussion.

Ben Myers (Faith and Theology) also presents himself as an insider–in fact, as the consummate insider, a PR-savvy blogger who managed to become a classic from day one. His first post began like this:

Some excellent blogs for New Testament studies have inspired me to start this new blog for theological studies. My current interests include Christology, dogmatics, hermeneutic theory and modern theology, as well as relating theological reflection to New Testament studies. So in this blog I’ll be offering updates on scholarship, suggestions for reading, biographical sketches of theologians, and my own comments on ‘faith and theology’.

But what set him apart was not this rather ordinary (albeit well-written, succinct, and interest-inspiring) opening, but the treat he appended to it. The rest of the post conducts a riotously funny mock “theological history” of blogging that managed to be both good satire and also a clear revelation of Myers’s take on the history of theology.

The reason these two bloggers stand at the opposite end of the spectrum from Stackhouse and Mouw is that they occupied, from day one, an entirely different neighborhood. Although both Halden and Ben are erudite, nonetheless the tone of their blogs was and has continued to be that of the dude in the condo across the street. The question you are asking yourself, of course, as you remember that this, too, is a first post, is this: what neighborhood will The Veil Away occupy?

Well, if origins are the foundation for one’s condo/mansion, then I have already caused my house to fall. The Veil Away has briefly appeared, over the last two years, in numerous forms with numerous intentions and numerous tones. Possibly a reflection of its determinedly schizophrenic author (he prefers to call his condition “being a generalist”). But at the very last moment, when the idea that is The Veil Away was about to die, an organizational trick came to my mind that seems to have solved the whole muddle. I really needed to distinguish between the personal and public purposes that my blogs were serving. I tended to include both the ruminations of my ongoing conversation with the books I was reading and also outward-facing posts that attempted to engage and interest readers other than myself on the same blog. Consequently, without direction, each blog gradually died like a car that stalls and starts all the way down a hill and finally dies on the way up the next hill.

But then, as I mentioned, an idea occurred to me: two blogs. One for personal, reading-related ruminations, written without care for reader’s perceptions, primarily as a database for my own research; another for public writings, about things I desired both to tell other Christians and to hear from them about. This blog serves the second of these two purposes.

My philosophy of blogging, therefore, as far as this blog in particular is concerned, falls squarely in the conversational neighborhood. I propose to conduct this blog as the condo and myself as the dude. Welcome to my neighborhood–and please feel free to confront, converse, and question anything you read here!