Blog Expectation, Book Expectation

I am reading Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel (lent to me by Sponge-Headed Scienceman, who didn't particularly warm to it), which I will write about with qualified approval in the near future.  I became irritated at one point, as I felt he was being imprecise about someone he disagreed with, not giving the full explanation, which I am fairly certain he knows.  People shouldn't do that in a book, I muttered to myself.  It's just not quite right.

Then I remembered my own post "City Christians," from the day before, which has the same amount of fault in a much smaller space.  I thought about the topic a bit and then just started writing.  When I thought of "cities," and their inhabitants, particularly their Christian inhabitants, I was really thinking of older, northeastern American cities, stretching as far south as DC, as far west as Chicago.  Maybe, at furthest, Atlanta and Minneapolis/St.Paul.  Vaguely, perhaps, though not with any specific examples as I pondered, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

If commenters from Spokane, Anchorage, Denver, or Santa Fe had spoken up and said "I don't think that's true about my city at all," or others had challenged whether I was including smaller cities like Akron or Waterbury, or someone had said "Do you mean the black and Hispanic and immigrant people too - do you mean the blue collar white people - or are you just talking about white hipsters and gentrifiers" I would have to say, on all counts "I haven't the faintest idea.  I didn't think through that far."

Bloggers and online writers in general like to see themselves as the new wave, equivalent to the Old Guard of wordsmiths, but this difference in expectation is cutting ourselves an awful lot of slack.