is blogging with objective detachment possible?

I intend to write a book one day on Church Splits. They happen often enough, but I also experienced one first-hand. It has been going on 10 years since it occurred, and I’ve been waiting until I can write it with as much objectivity as is humanly possible. I feel I am getting closer to the point where I can write it without unjustly or unnecessarily injuring anyone. That’s my goal. I came across this quote in Karen Armstrong’s book, The Spiral Staircase. My Climb Out of Darkness:

“The scholarly observer must render the mental and practical behavior of a group into terms available in his own mental resources, which should remain personally felt, even while informed with a breadth of reference which will allow other educated persons to make sense of them. But this must not be to substitute his own and his readers’ conventions for the original, but to broaden his own perspective so that it can make a place for the other. Concretely, he must never be satisfied to cease asking ‘but why?’ until he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate, human grasp of what a given position meant, such that every nuance in the data is accounted for and withal, given the total of presuppositions and circumstances, he could feel himself doing the same” (p. 290).

What I take this to mean for me personally is that I must come to the place where I can actually feel myself feeling, thinking, and doing what others felt, thought, and did through the split, and perhaps even sympathize with them. I can’t write about the split until I reach this point of detachment. In fact, this quote is an excellent guideline for all writers or anyone at all who wishes to work towards a more united world.