Changing a blog

Welcome to the new home, and the new design, of my blog.

When I launched this blog, in 2007, I called it ‘Shored Fragments’. The name comes from a line at the end of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. I chose it because I loved the poem – I still do – because I loved the name – I still do – and because it captured what I thought I was doing in launching a blog.

My original ‘About’ page spelt this out. For years I have been in the habit of typing up brief (500-2000 words) summaries of a thought that has struck me. These got saved on my various computers with filenames like ‘Fragment on Universalism.’ The blog was going to be a place to put them up in public, to invite others to help me to sift and refine them. It would be a collation of fragments that might later grow to something less incomplete.

Nearly five years, and well over two hundred posts, on, I still post ‘fragments’ from time to time, but most of the posts on this blog do not fit that original description. Some still do, but they are definitely now the minority. Others are instead signposts – pointing to this or that post or event or publication that I find interesting. More are what I recently described in an email to someone as ‘sniper shots’, but perhaps would now think of as keyhole surgery: reading around a debate that interests me, I see an argument that is vulnerable to a brief, focused, criticism, and I write a post to critique it. These are complete pieces of writing, if short.

I also reflect that, over time, I have been intentionally limited in what I post on this blog. I have deliberately restricted what I post here to theology; because of my interests, and because of the nature of the blogging medium, there has been a strong focus on Evangelicalism, and a more occasional but persistent focus on cultural criticism. (The comment about the ‘blogging medium’ is a reflection that blog posts have to accomplish their aim in less than (say) 2000 words; almost none of the thought that led to my Trinity book appeared on this blog because I had nothing of substance to say that was sayable in that space…)

I am not going to change the name of the blog; perhaps I am being vainglorious, but it now seems too established to do that. It is time, I think, to change the description of the blog to reflect what it has become, and so with the new location and new design, I have a new account of what I am about on this site.

In brief, the blog is an exploration of theology and culture from an Evangelical perspective. Part of this, of course, is a focus on what each of these words mean, with the contests over ‘evangelical’ being – at present – somewhat more prominent in my mind than the others.

2 Comments

  1. Jason Goroncy
    Sep 30, 2012

    Hi Steve. I’m not sure what adverts you were getting (my blog seems, thankfully, to so far have been spared such auto-ads), but I’ll continue to read your ‘fragments’ , ‘signposts’ and ‘sniper shots’ wherever they are posted. Best, Jason.

    • steve
      Sep 30, 2012

      Thanks, Jason. Apparently, if you were a registered WP.com user, you didn’t see them; otherwise there was always an ad at the bottom of each post…

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