Category Archives: Genres

90 days through the Bible

This past Thursday I finished listening through the Bible using my 90-day reading plan from last year. I began on Saturday, February 12. The audio Bible I listened to was The Bible Experience, which I highly recommend. I don’t remember exactly why I began listening when I did, maybe because I felt I needed more spiritual input, but as I progressed I found more reasons to be doing it.

Once in college I tried reading the Bible in large chunks, and it was much easier to observe the large scale themes that way. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far before giving up, probably somewhere in the Kings, which is where I usually stop. This time I knew I could finish the whole Bible, because I’d done it before, and I wanted to see how well the themes emerged at this rapid rate.

I also wanted to see if it was a reasonable reading plan. I found that it was, in the sense that I didn’t feel too burdened by it. It helped that I was listening rather than reading. I’m sure I would have gotten behind if I’d had to set aside time to read, but I typically have the listening time I needed, about half an hour per day. I listened at twice the normal speed, since this production was read slowly, at about half the rate of normal speech. I actually could have finished the Bible in fewer than 90 days, because some days I could have listened a lot longer, but I wanted to stick to the schedule to get a true sense of the reading plan.

Another reason for trying out this reading plan is that I wanted to get a better handle on the overall structure and contents of the Bible. I grew up in the church, and so I knew the basics and a lot of the details, but the Bible still had plenty of parts I didn’t know well because I hadn’t spent much time in them.

The only other time I’d gotten through the whole Bible, I was listening to the NIV Audio Bible Dramatized, which I do not recommend. I had arranged the chapters in roughly chronological order, which I also don’t recommend, because it was jarring and confusing to flip between books and time frames without warning or explanation. This time I wanted to listen in plain vanilla canonical order in hopes that it would make more sense, which it did.

When I first created my reading plan, one or two people said they’d rather read the Bible slowly and take time to reflect on it. Normally I would too, and whipping through it definitely had disadvantages to go along with the benefits. The litany of kings got confusing, and I certainly didn’t have time to ponder all the proverbs.

Listening to the Bible rather than reading it also gave mixed results. On one hand, hearing each word spoken gives them all an emphasis they don’t have when your eyes are flying across them on the page, so I noticed things that had escaped my attention before. For example, I had never noticed Jacob’s angel sighting in Genesis 32:1.

On the other hand, if your attention strays during a recording or a public reading and you miss things, it’s harder to go back and pick them up than if your eyes can freely wander the passage. People sometimes say the Bible was written to be heard rather than read, and that may be true in some ways, but surely the more intricate parts of the Bible, such as Paul’s letters, need to be seen and studied in written form.

Some other random things I noticed:

  • The OT is even more violent than I remembered. The sound effects helped there. The Bible Experience doesn’t hold back.
  • I had my epistemology glasses on, paying attention to how knowledge happened in the Bible. I was surprised to hear how often God’s chosen leaders and prophets turned out to be wrong in their disputes with other people (e.g., Lev. 10:16-20). I always assumed they were supposed to have all the answers.
  • Isaiah is very confusing because it jumps from topic to topic and doesn’t give much context, but the other prophets are much less confusing.
  • I don’t know what it’s like for Jewish readers, but to me Isaiah 53 stuck out like a rose bed in a field of grass. My immediate reaction was to ask myself why we needed the NT at all after that. The foreshadowing of Christian theology in that chapter is striking.
  • Before this run through the Bible, I didn’t remember the whole section of Jeremiah devoted to the people who returned from the exile.
  • I didn’t remember just how much measuring Ezekiel’s prophecy of the future temple involved.
  • Among the prophets, I especially liked Daniel because it was directed at Israel’s oppressors for a change rather than Israel itself, on top of being interesting, weird, and largely narrative.
  • I found that I was less familiar with Luke’s accounts than with Matthew and Mark’s versions of the same events. It was refreshing to hear his “new” take on things.
  • The epistles really are a different animal from the rest of the Bible. They’re more personal and open up a lot of new themes.
  • Balaam, Cain, and Sodom seem to have been turned into the early church’s symbols for everything that’s wrong with the world. They show up as warnings in several of the epistles.
  • Hebrews, James, and 1 John form a nice almost-bookend to the Bible. Hebrews: All those sacrifices in the old covenant? Jesus is better. James: All those things Scripture’s been telling you to do? Do them. 1 John: Love–it’s what it’s all about. And of course, it’s hard to imagine a better bookend than Revelation.

I found the prophets depressing, because Israel and Judah were so stubborn and because I felt the prophets’ threats of doom overwhelmed any hope they offered. I worried that God might not have really been just and that he had no qualms about sweeping away the righteous with the wicked. Thank goodness for Malachi 3:16-18, where God specifically addresses this question. Still, I struggled. This is one place where reading more slowly might have served me better, because I could have lingered on the prophecies of restoration.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the Gospels. I breathed a bigger one when I got to the epistles. They encouraged me. The prophets were writing to stiff-necked people who were headed for judgment. But with the Gospels at last I was back to a message written for people who actually wanted to follow God. Jesus had plenty of harsh things to say, but the balance between that and the messages of restoration was greater. And the epistles were even more encouraging, because more than any other books, they dealt with how to handle suffering, and they injected it with hope and dignity.

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Posted in Bible, Essays, Reading, Spirituality | Leave a comment

The philosophic turn

I have four main projects on the front burner at the moment: studying the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, creating a flowchart of the Theophostic process, helping with my church’s demographic research, and assembling a rough systematic spirituality of the NT. On the side I’m reading about quantum mechanics and various apologetical topics. I’m developing an itch to get moving on my rule-based algorithmic tonal music composition program, but I’m being good and limiting my projects to those four. If it develops into a rash, however, I may have to do something about it.

I’m studying the OCP to introduce myself to the discipline of philosophy, because I’m aiming to enter the field, but I only know bits and pieces from a few corners of it. To accomplish this, I’m planning to read the whole thing, take notes in the form of an outline, and transform the outline into a set of flashcards for use in jMemorize, using a script that I will write. It’s a large project (2,176 entries; 1002 pages, if you include the appendices), the kind I usually give up on or drop, out of distraction by other projects, but I feel pretty dedicated to this one because it is serving a larger, somewhat specific goal.

I’m actually kind of proud of my progress lately. I’ve become much more focused. The past week has been spent scanning and proofreading the list of entry titles and writing a script to put the person entries in chronological order. Today I began putting the entry titles into an outline to give my reading a somewhat sensible order. I consider myself to be past the boring part. Proofreading is tedious, but organizing concepts is fun! Once I finish the reading outline, I’ll post it and shift my attention to one of the other projects, which I’ll write about another time.

On the side I’m reading Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, a book I’ve owned for about 15 years but have never read much of. It shares that in common with most of my other books. But a few weeks ago my web wandering led me into a number of QM-related articles, so I finally decided to dig into it. The reason I chose this book over others is that it covers eight different interpretations of quantum theory, rather than simply assuming one of them as given. That’s the whole purpose of the book, in fact: to explain and evaluate physicists’ competing understandings of the quantum world. Very interesting. Whatever’s going on down there, it’s weird. Which, of course, is exactly why I like it. πŸ™‚

Once I’m done, I may post a summary of the book, if I don’t find another satisfactory explanation of QM online. I need a quick way to introduce people to it, though summarizing such complicated ideas is a recipe for misunderstanding. I don’t feel that I adequately understand quantum theory myself.

Lately I have also wandered back into apologetics, which I’ve been away from for a long time. It used to be one of my major obsessions. This time it was my penchant for reading about strange things that drew me back. It went from mysteries like the Voynich manuscript and the Shroud of Turin to the accounts of near-death experiences in Beyond Death by Moreland and Habermas. I was led to this book a while back by a video of Habermas describing some of these experiences. After picking up that book, I was reminded that I wanted to learn more about Reformed epistemology, so I put that on my mental “to read soon” list. Then I ran across the modern Ebionite movement via several Amazon reviews and became intrigued, in an appalled sort of way. And this weekend I began watching Aaron Shafovaloff’s videos on Mormonism. I suspect this interest in apologetics will snowball. Which is fine. Since one of my philosophical interests is philosophy of religion, it’s right on time.

That’s it for today’s semi-annual blog update! Tune in next time for more riveting accounts of my latest projects! Continue reading

Posted in Life | 2 Comments

Surprise! I’m posting. Also, Lovecraft.

Why hello! I bet you thought I was dead. Well, I’m not.

Various things have happened since I last posted, but today I’m going to talk about my latest literary adventures.

I’ve been watching Alias lately, and that has gotten me interested in fantasy related to conspiracies and secret histories of the world, and that has led me, among other things, to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It’s something I’ve been wanting to get a handle on for a while. So last week I went to the library, made a quick reading list, and got started.

I tried reading some Lovecraft a while back—”Under the Pyramids” and maybe one or two others—but it didn’t really grab me. I heard “horror” and was hoping for maybe Stephen King, but horror seems to have meant something different back then, something closer to Edgar Allen Poe. I could see he had a certain appeal, but I was disappointed.

Well, I must have read the wrong stories, because what I’m reading now is great! I can see why so many people have written stories set in his universe. He’s detailed enough to give you a lot to work with and vague enough to leave a lot to the imagination, and his language and settings are evocative enough to keep you motivated.

My goal was to read all the main Cthulhu stories written by Lovecraft himself, in chronological order of writing. Phillip Schreffler wrote a short book called The H. P. Lovecraft Companion that has a chart of Lovecraft’s major gods (see here) and a glossary of a lot of his characters, with references. So I looked up the gods from the chart in the glossary, collected the references, and put them in chronological order according to this Wikipedia article. Here’s the list:

  • Dagon (1917)
  • Nyarlathotep (1920)
  • The Rats in the Walls (1923)
  • The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
  • The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926)
  • The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
  • The Dunwich Horror (1928)
  • The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
  • At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
  • The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931)
  • Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1932)
  • The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
  • The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
  • The Shadow Out of Time (1934)
  • The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

I’m already noticing some problems with this list and making edits, so it will probably change a lot by the time I’m done, but if this subject interests you and you want a simple place to start, try that. You can read these online at dagonbytes.com. If you want some maps, try here. Here are a couple of other, longer reading lists. And here’s some sinister music for you to listen to while reading.

Right now I’m in the middle of “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” which is just what it sounds like—a quest in a dream world for a city called Kadath. I was surprised and pleased by this, because I wasn’t expecting such a traditional type of plot, and not all of it is creepy. In fact, a lot of it is kind of nice. The Myst and Riven soundtracks work well for this one. Continue reading

Posted in Bibliography, HP Lovecraft | 1 Comment

A full week

This week has been rather busy!

Last weekend we finally switched to our new server at work. We got Exchange running and copied all our files over to the new machine, and I stayed up very late Sunday night finishing it. Since then I’ve been fixing things that got broken in the move.

On another front, one of our project managers has left, so now I am mostly managing one of his projects because I was pretty involved in it anyway, preparing the manuscripts for typesetting. So that is challenging, but it’s also kind of fun, coordinating all those pieces, keeping people informed. πŸ™‚ But don’t tell my bosses that; they’ll give me more. o.o;;

The guy they’re bringing in to replace him is interesting. He’s a marketing consultant and also a pastor, and he has many ideas for helping us brand our company and take ourselves in new directions. I was a little nervous at first because I didn’t know how it would all affect my job, and more specifically my pet projects, but I’ve relaxed since then. I’m glad he’s here.

At home I’ve been defining my next project (yes, another one)—going to various libraries, checking out books, reading bits of them, writing. I thought I had the topic down and was going to blog about it, but then my ideas for it expanded. But now they’ve narrowed again, so I will write about it soon. Continue reading

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And now for a normal entry

Well, yesterday was rather interesting. I overslept again and didn’t go to the gym like I had planned. But I did finally go get a blood test, which I’d been putting off. The nurse definitely had a procedure down for doing this kind of thing, with words and phrases to give instructions and little warnings (like, “This will be tight,” for the rubber band around my arm and, “Stick,” when she stuck the needle in). She obviously prioritized efficiency over personableness, though she wasn’t unfriendly. In a way I admired her method. It did get the job done, and I was happy to have done a blood test there the year before so I would know how to cooperate and make the whole operation go smoothly. The blood test took less time than I expected, so I was a little earlier to work than usual.

At two we had a birthday party for one of our coworkers, as we usually do, and the theme was chocolate, which is pretty much the theme every day in our office, but especially today. I decided I would gorge myself, so I had both a chocolate icing covered brownie and chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup. I could have done with just the brownie, which was extremely good, and I felt a bit overloaded and had to eat kind of slowly toward the end to avoid feeling sick. Unfortunately I had gotten myself a frosty from Wendy’s earlier and had just been drinking a root beer, so after the party I felt the need to drink lots of water to dilute all the sugar.

I didn’t feel much like working that day, probably because I’ve been getting too little sleep lately, and finally at around 3:30 I decided to take a nap in my car, which I’ve been doing more than I’m comfortable with this week, but it’s hard to work when you’re falling asleep at your desk. So I slept for a while and then just sat there for a few minutes, enjoying the warm but somewhat breezy day and the intense green of the grass and bushes in front of me.

After work I went to the bank and then to get a haircut, where I listened to the hair stylist tell another customer about being hit on on her way to work that day by a guy in his car. He said, “How are you?” while they were stopped at a traffic light and asked for her phone number. The light changed and she turned the corner, but he actually followed her and flashed her lights so she would pull over, which she did, cautiously, and he got out and asked for her number. She decided to give it to him, and when she got to work he had texted her. Her first question was, “Are you married?” because she had intuited that he was, and she was right. Well, that wouldn’t work for her because as she put it, she doesn’t share. She seemed to be very pragmatic about it. Her only objection to having an affair was apparently that she didn’t want to deal with a jealous wife. I hoped there was some moral commitment to the sanctity of marriage that she wasn’t stating for social reasons, but I can only guess. In any case, it was an interesting story and certainly not something that happened to her every day!

After my haircut my next goal was to buy some new dress shoes because my current ones are coming apart. I knew exactly which ones I was going to buy—Berry by Nunn Bush, the exact kind I have now—and exactly where I would buy them, Famous Footwear, because it’s the same store I bought them in last time, and I happened to know that they still carried them. Usually I have to find shoes that are almost like the shoes I have at the time because I buy cheap brands that I guess change models every year or maybe go out of business. But last time I was annoyed at having my shoes fall apart so quickly, so I bought something a little more permanent but still not expensive.

They had the shoe I wanted but not the size, so the girl at the register ordered it for me to be home delivered (well, work delivered in my case), with no shipping charge, which was nice. The card reader wouldn’t read my debit card, and she said that the reader had been having trouble ever since the earthquake last week. Mysteeerious. I like it when odd little things like that happen.

When I got home, I cooked some noodles, and while my water was heating up, I did some dishes. One of them was a large plate that had sat on the stove next to the pot of water for too long, and when I picked it up, I burned my right thumb and index finger pretty badly. They look fine, but for hours afterward, I had to keep them cool or they would start burning after less than a minute. At first I ran water over them or kept them in a glass of water, but then I froze a large bag of water and kept another bag in the freezer to switch them when the first bag melted. That worked out well. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, my fingers had recovered.

The last time I had to do that was when I was again cooking and had gotten some jalapeño juice on my thumb, and I suppose it crept into some cracks in my skin. It burned. I don’t recommend using jalapeño juice as, for instance, a hand lotion. Continue reading

Posted in Birthdays, Blood tests, Burns, Chocolate, Cooking, Earthquakes, Haircuts, Naps, Shoes, Slice of life | 2 Comments

A thought on leaky abstractions and theology

I wonder if the “simple” truths of Scripture are really just abstractions and they sometimes leak (see this), which is why we need people who study and sometimes explain the complexities of theology, for the times when people’s lives don’t fit neatly into the abstractions. Continue reading

Posted in Programming, Theology, Thought, Transferrable concepts | 1 Comment

New list–Recommended Preachers Online

Until I come up with a good way to post my site updates automatically on the front page, I’ll write a brief entry to let the blog subscribers know what’s new. I’ve just posted the start of a new, ongoing list (and accompanying Google map!) of preachers online that I think are worth listening to. Take a look! Continue reading

Posted in Audio sermons, Christianity, Site updates | 3 Comments

Recommended Preachers Online: The List

Links

The List

Church Pastor(s) City State Notes
Emmanuel Baptist Church David Carpenter Athens AL
Shades Mountain Bible Church Ron Gannett Birmingham AL
St. Peter’s Anglican Church John D. Richardson Birmingham AL I really placemarked this because Lyle Dorsett sometimes preaches.
Twickenham Church of Christ Brad Cox Huntsville AL
Trinity Free Presbyterian Church Myron Mooney Trinity AL
Trinity Church Ian Cron Greenwich CT
St. Peter’s Anglican Church Eric Dudley Tallahassee FL
Christ the King Church Ken Carr Batavia IL
All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church (Audio) Patrick Henry Reardon Chicago IL
Chicago Church of Christ – Chicago Ministry Center Jeff Balsom, Todd Fink, Randy Harris, Jim Lefler Chicago IL
Covenant Presbyterian Church of Chicago Aaron Baker Chicago IL
Edgewater Baptist Church Jim Shedd Chicago IL
First Baptist Church of Chicago (Audio) Jesse M. Brown Chicago IL
The Moody Church Erwin Lutzer Chicago IL
Church of the Resurrection Stewart E. Ruch, III Glen Ellyn IL
Grace Church of the Valley Clark Richardson, Mike Hill, Jerry Kennell North Aurora IL
Kishwaukee Bible Church Frank Yonke, Steve Leston, Ron Spiotta Sycamore IL
Church of the Savior Bill Richardson West Chicago IL
Blanchard Alliance Church – Wheaton John Casey Wheaton IL
Bethlehem Baptist Church John Piper Minneapolis MN
Woodland Hills Church Greg Boyd St. Paul MN Okay, yes, he’s an Open View theologian. But other than that he’s really good!
Parkside Church Alistair Begg Chagrin Falls OH
Salem Alliance Church John Stumbo Salem OR
Park Cities Presbyterian Church Joseph “Skip” Ryan (formerly) Dallas TX
Stonebriar Community Church (Audio) Chuck Swindoll Frisco TX
Christ Church Plano David H. Roseberry Plano TX
Bethany Community Church Richard Dahlstrom Seattle WA
Jesus Fellowship of Believers Tim Dodson Menomonie WI
Immanuel Church Rich Vincent West Bend WI

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Recommended Preachers Online

Links

Motivations

As I reflected on my lack of spiritual vitality earlier this year (2007), I concluded that it would help to have more Christian input into my mind. Once a week at church and an occasional devotion wouldn’t cut it. To keep my mind on spiritual things, I needed to hear the Christian message more often. One easy way for me to do that is to listen to online Christian audio, so I set out to collect some.

Procedure

As things usually go with me, the project quickly expanded beyond all reasonable proportion, and instead of gathering two or three sources I could rely on for insight and inspiration, I decided to find as many as I could, searching in a comprehensive and semi-systematic fashion. And by comprehensive, I mean searching every city (above a certain size) in every state in the US. And then expanding to other English-speaking countries after that. That’s what I’m shooting for anyway. In reality I’ll search until I get tired of it. At some point I may expand the project to include speakers that aren’t attached to a church.

My overall procedure is to take the states in the order of their importance to me and search for churches by city, starting with the largest. I didn’t start out this way—I tried alphabetically first, so the map began with some random churches in Alabama—but officially the first state in the list is Illinois, and the first city is Chicago. And then along the way I’ve thought of churches in other states I knew I wanted to include, and I’ve listened to sermons at my friends’ churches from around the country, so I’ve interrupted my orderly progression to add some of those.

Normally I would keep a list like this in my bookmarks, but since the data was geographical, I thought it would be fun to make a Google map out of it, which I have linked to above. My bookmarks are holding the raw results of my search, and to make my decisions, I’m taking more detailed notes in a Zoho Creator database.

Benefits

In addition to collecting more listening material than I could ever possibly take in and stimulating my thoughts and feelings on spiritual matters, this project has come with some unexpected side benefits. One is that I feel more connected with different parts of the country. If Birmingham, Alabama, comes up in a conversation, I can think, Ah, I know something about Birmingham. I’ve listened to some good preachers there. If a natural disaster sweeps through, I can wonder how my churches there are doing. If on a Sunday I’m traveling in an area that has churches on my list, I can visit one of them and gain a more personal connection. If I have a friend who needs a church, I can refer them to my list, if I’ve covered their area; or I can take the project on a detour through their city to see what I can find. For my friends who go to churches on my list, it gives me a little more of a connection with them and more topics for conversation.

And finally, this project lets me exercise one of my joys in life, which is to find hidden treasure and share it with people who might not have found it otherwise. Some of the preachers in the list are well known, but there are pastors out there who are unknown but still good, and they deserve a wider audience. So by posting my discoveries online, I can hopefully give them a bit more exposure and put a few more people in touch with their unique perspectives and good preaching, and the happiness and well-being in the world can be increased. πŸ™‚

Criteria

This list is extremely subjective. While there are a few things I look for, I don’t apply a rigorous and objective rubric to each church. The question that determines whether a church makes the list is, Would I listen to this preacher regularly? If the answer is probably or yes, they go on the map. (If it’s maybe, I come back to it later and listen to a sermon or two more to decide.) So this is not a list of all the good churches in the world or even all the good preachers, just the ones I have personally found to be especially worth listening to so far. Obviously someone else would have a different list. Also, since most of these decisions are based on a single sermon, I will take a church off the list if I change my mind about it on later listenings.

I do keep my ears open for a few basic characteristics. I prefer speakers who have a more natural speaking style, as opposed to a highly affected one. I gravitate toward thoughtful pastors who are speaking to audiences who already have the basics of Christianity under their belt and who are looking to live it more effectively. I like hearing preachers who express the Christian message in new ways, rather than delivering the same old content with the same old language. And I appreciate a balance between exegesis and application. If it’s unbalanced, I’d rather it be on the application side. I am also a conservative Protestant, so you will see a clear bias toward this category in my list, which also I think comes from the fact that they seem to care more about preaching and getting their message out into the public.

Since there are potentially thousands of preachers who fit these criteria, I also keep a few limiting questions in mind: Is this speaker unique enough to stick in my mind? Is he or she easily ignorable (by being overly academic, rambling, or boring in some other way)? Does the speaker express a lot of opinions I disagree with without adding anything to my understanding? Is this speaker annoyingly liberal or conservative? I am more tolerant of conservatism, but I will turn them off if they’re too simple minded for me. And although I am fairly ecumenical, I skip over churches that don’t fit into what I would consider orthodox Christianity, so no Mormon, Christian Science, or Unitarian churches. Seventh-Day Adventists are a little too iffy; they’re out too.

Most of these criteria can be overridden by others in particular cases. Sometimes I can overlook an affected speaking style if the preacher is especially reflective. Or I can forgive a simple message if I feel inspired by the speaker’s sincerity. And I also look for certain specific preaching styles that I wouldn’t normally listen to because occasionally I do feel like listening to them. Sometimes I’m in an “old time religion” mood, for example, which is normally when I turn on Family Radio, even though Harold Camping is kind of a heretic. And of course my friends’ churches get special consideration. πŸ˜‰ Though they are not automatically included. -.- Even if they’re the preacher.

The List

The list linked to below corresponds to the placemarks on the map. It should be updated often while I’m on this project, except when I take breaks to concentrate on other things, and the changes will be reflected on the Recent Changes page and in the corresponding “all updates” feed. The churches on this page are arranged by state, then by city, then by church name. The Google map list is arranged in the order in which I added them.

The List

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Posted in Audio sermons, Christianity, In progress, Lists | Leave a comment

And it’s up!

Welcome to my new Drupal site! I still have plenty to tweak, but hopefully this arrangement will make it easier (psychologically) for me to post. The theme is itheme. Sometime I’ll make my own. Continue reading

Posted in Site updates | 1 Comment