Left at the Altar will be moving here, soon!  In fact, maybe I’ll move in time to start National Blog Posting Month.   Except that’s now, in the Universal Time Zone.  (Still have a couple hours in the PST.)

This was one of the first few entries on Left at the Altar, back when I started it in April 2004.  I’m having trouble importing the whole archive, so I’m giving up and will put a link to the old site over on the sidebar.  But I thought I’d keep this one post, since it explains the name and intent of this blog.  Originally published on April 12, 2004.  (This intro added 10/31/09!)

What’s with the name? I focus-group tested my blog title on a small group of friends Saturday night. Half liked it immediately, and half weren’t quite sure they got it. It’s a play on words, folks. I fervently hope to add this blog to the growing voice of the Religious Left – those of us who stood by a little cowed for the last many years, wondering how the so-called Religious Right, and wealthy political organs such as the Christian Coalition (no, I’m not giving them a hypertext link; if you are so compelled, google them), came to be considered the voice of The Faithful in the United States, while the popular/media depiction of the “Left” grew increasingly secular. The inimitable Anna Quindlen spoke for a lot of us in a terrific recent column, “At the Left Hand of God.” Anyway, some of the obvious blog titles were already taken (check out, eg, The Religious Left). But this one came to me Saturday morning, and I liked it.

As the subtitle tries to make clear, this won’t be exclusively religious material. More often than not, this blog will be populated by re-directs to great (or irritating) commentary I spot elsewhere, news items, books that I’m reading or hope to, etc. But when I veer into matters of faith, I will be steering Left.

That said, back to the backlog of items I’ve been storing up…