I’ve restored a bunch of posts on the topic of voting, including my review of Electing Not to Vote. I suppose at some point I ought to write up a retrospective on this issue. After reading through everything I wrote on this topic in 2008, I noticed that my views have changed a bit.
Grammar and the machine (links)
February 1st, 2010From around the internet:
- Morphology catalog of NT Greek
- If you can read German and are interested in the grammar of Greek papyri fragments, read Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit
- Greg Boyd published an essay on the scriptural underpinnings for his Christian anarchy
- Jacques Ellul on technology (video with subtitles)
The last two are thanks to Jesus Radicals. There is of course some irony in blogging about an online video containing a critique of technology.
On the canon
January 28th, 2010In the adult education class I have been teaching we took a look at the canon last night. I feared that compared with previous topics I would be short on material, but I actually ended up going a bit long (and cutting off questions/discussion). I’ll have to get better at making time. Still, we had some good discussions about the scriptures, the Apocrypha, and some of the gospels which are covered from time to time in the media. The class was particularly amused and flabbergasted by the last sentence in the Gospel of Thomas.
He who has a precision scope, let him see
January 19th, 2010A prominent supplier of rifle sights to the US Military inscribes its products with scripture references (e.g. 2COR4:6 and JN8:12). These sights are affixed to weapons which are used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
2009 Page Count
January 17th, 2010I log all of my book reading in a composition book. 2009 was my first complete year of this practice. I read 9,044 pages in 25 books. This excludes any books I abandoned (that number was unusually high in 2009) and any online reading (which I hazard to guess accounts for more than half of my total reading). I hope to improve upon that total for 2010. There is no shortage of stuff for me to read.
OT class recap
January 14th, 2010The class went fairly well last night. Unfortunately I tried to pack too much content into 1 hour 15 minutes, so we did not get as much question and discussion time as I had hoped. That was not terribly surprising given the scope of the material. Still, my churchmates were (apparently) engaged and inquisitive, and I think I was able to share with them a few things they had not learned before. Also, I have a good subgroup of folks who are knowledgeable in their own right, so I get to learn from them (not to mention borrow some really interesting books).
Next week it is on to the New Testament.
Old Testament Discussion
January 13th, 2010Discussion question for tonight’s class:
Why should we as Christians read the Old Testament?
Old Testament survey
January 12th, 2010I recently began teaching an adult education class at my church. The title is “Historical Backgrounds of the Bible – How did we get the scriptures?” The class is only 6 weeks long, with 5 remaining, so time is going to be really tight. Here is my plan for the classes:
- Old Testament overview
- New Testament overview
- Canon
- Transmission of scripture
- Translation of scripture
As you can see, covering the entire Old Testament in one night is going to make for a very broad survey. I’ll try to stick to the basics and facilitate conversation as best as I can.
Overall I am really excited for this course. This is my first experience of any kind in the role of teaching Bible to adults. Hopefully I will learn a lot and my class-goers will learn something too.
Sci-fi queue
January 11th, 2010Thanks to some gift cards to book sellers and the low prices of paperbacks, I have a good sized stack of science fiction novels to read:
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- The Number of the Beast by Heinlein
- The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card
- Tehanu by Ursula K. LeGuin
- I Will Fear No Evil by Heinlein
- Ender’s Game by Card
Those should keep me occupied for a good while. I also have a few other novels as well as some nonfiction to keep me busy.
Browser wars heat up
January 11th, 2010I just benchmarked Firefox against Chromium on the SunSpider Javascript tests on my eeePC 900 running Ubuntu Netbook Remix:
- Firefox: 6034.2ms +/- 1.6%
- Chromium: 2537.8ms +/- 2.3%
Looks like I have a new browser. This actually follows my recent conversion from Safari to Chrome on Mac. Firefox has good extensions and nostalgia, but they better turn up the heat on development.
Vocabulary Analysis
November 23rd, 2009While reading Ehrman’s Jesus, Interrupted I got the idea to look in to vocabulary studies. You know, the ones where linguists catalog all the words used by a particular author and use the data to compare various works by (or purportedly by) that author. Does anyone know of a publication which lays out the basic methodology for doing this? I might try to write a script to help with the first step. I’m also interested in applying these methodologies outside of the biblical texts to see what they might yield. For example, how much does the vocabulary base of authors change across genre, time, etc.? I’ve never read anything which attempts such a study.
My Hobby: Doctrinal Statements
November 23rd, 2009I browse church doctrinal statements and see which is listed first: scripture or God.
Pencil and Pen
November 14th, 2009As an analog to the erasable pen I propose we invent the unerasable pencil.