Blogging and discernment

It seems that there' been a bit of a flurry of posting about this topic lately. First, I'm on a mailing list at Boundless.org, and this was by and large the topic of their latest mailing which announced several new postings on their site. Tim Challies mentioned this last night, and then this morning announced a book project entitled The Discipline of Discernment (are they accepting preorders?). One comment in response to this post led me to a two part post with a list of principles to follow. I'd encourage you to take a look through the above sites and think about which of these principles you might be wise to pay closer attention to.

I've likely violated a majority of the above principles at some point or other in the last 5 years of posting, but I think that my primary weakness at this point is lumping together people that I critique. Sometimes I tend to treat those who are not extremists on a particular issue as if they were. I suppose that this is largely the error of guilt by association.

Comments

There is one addendum that I wanted to add regarding it being poor discernment to criticize people based on guilt by association. I would say that this does not apply if the person that I'm addressing is supposed to be exercising oversight over the guilty person's behaviour.