A good post by Michael Spencer at "Boar's Head Tavern" on eschatology. Now you know what to say when the subject comes up.
The Boar's Head Tavern, by the way, is one of the more interesting group blogs in the blogosphere. Group blogging is rather hard to do, and every group blog tends to be different. They tend, however, to fall into two groups, which I will call 'discrete' and 'conversational'. Most group blogs are discrete. In a discrete group blog, most of the posts are relatively self-standing; they are mini-essays of some sort. In a conversational group blog, on the other hand, the blog functions as a sort of chat room; posts are largely not self-standing, since they are usually responses to other posts or initiating posts. Comments functions give discrete group blogs some of the benefits of conversational group blogging, but only to an extent; conversational blogs can, of course, at any time throw in a self-standing post, although if these are too common they dampen the conversation. As it turns out, conversational group blogs are very hard to do; they're harder to keep up and you have to have a group capable of being civil over a wide range of subjects. The Boar's Head is one of the most successful of the conversational group blogs; the only other really successful conversational group blog that comes to mind is NRO's The Corner, although I'm sure there are probably one or two more from different parts of the spectrum. Conversational group blogs are a bit like soap operas - if you leave them a bit and come back to them, it doesn't take long before you're reading right alone with the flow of the conversation. They also tend not to be very deep, although there are always gems (the Boar's Head is partly successful, I think, because it has so many), like Spencer's post above, or the hilarious (to me, anyway) conversation of which this post at The Corner is a part.
