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Logs in the River of Discourse

A feminist tried to fail me out of divinity school.

The last two weeks of divinity school turned out much differently than I expected. For my last semester I was required to take a course to fulfill a credit in the topic of gender and sexuality. There was only one course that fulfilled that requirement that would fit into my schedule with another required course, ethics. I spent my last semester as one of two men in a course exploring the intersections of theology and psychology for women. Out of character for VDS, the classroom was chaotic and stifled any opinion outside of the professor’s own progressive feminism. The course was a struggle for me to attend each week as the Church, great women of faith, and traditional Christian anthropology was drug through the mud. And yet, I persevered and dutifully attended each week and participated in discussions as I was able.

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Posted: , Words: ~4500, Reading Time: 21 min

Easter Peace be With You

Readings for Easter II, Year C

Sermon Audio

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

There are many sermons that could be preached from today’s readings. St. John’s account of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples and his interactions with Thomas gives us pause to reflect on the many times and ways our faith in Christ has fallen short.

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Posted: , Words: ~1800, Reading Time: 9 min

Stone: Downfall of the Wicked (Luke 20:9-19)

Luke 20:9-19Sermon Audio

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

Days after cleansing the temple, the “chief priests and the scribes with the elders” approach Jesus to question him. In the last several days, especially, Jesus has made a direct and very public critique of how the temple is run. Throughout his ministry, he’s had even more things to say about the religious establishment in Jerusalem. We can only imagine what he’s been teaching in the temple for the last several days that have the people hanging “upon his words.” Those with clear institutional authority – the authority of God’s Holy Temple – want to know under what authority Jesus acts. Jesus answers with a parable.

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Posted: , Words: ~1700, Reading Time: 8 min

God's Time: Lewis Bell's Funeral

Unexpected death is difficult to process. This time last week, Lewis was responding to a picture of my daughter’s birthday with an animated gif of Cinderella. Now, I stand here. I know I am not alone in this room. We share in the suddenness of it all.

In the grand scheme of the world nothing has changed. And yet, in our little corner of things much has changed. For Charlotte, Vickie, Bettie and those closest to Lewis, everything has changed.

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Posted: , Words: ~1000, Reading Time: 5 min

The Magic Variable 'count'

So, I happened to be looking back through some old files and I found an early programming assignment from my first computer science course back in college. In the middle of the code I found this wonderful line:

while (cownt<years) {
    cout<<cownt+1; //"cownt" = "count", but when I entered it spelt correctly it gave me errors.//

As it turns out early on in the code I declared int cownt=0;. I either couldn’t find this typo in debugging my mere 61 lines of code or — what I think was actually going on — I thought count was a reserved magical variable that made loops work — not something I had to declare. Sometimes it’s nice to look back and see how far you’ve come.

Posted: , Words: ~200, Reading Time: 1 min

XML::Compile with an Extension Namespace

Starting this May, mortgage folk are going to be required to send Freddie and Fannie data including additional data points in ULDD phase 3 extension. At face value, adding these additional data points shouldn’t be a big deal at all. However, the legacy code I’m maintaining used XML::Compile to generate code. For various and sondry reasons — which I will not go into here — XML::Compile in the code I’m maintaining was in a place where it was extremely difficult to add XML elements that weren’t included in the original base Mismo 3.0 namespace.

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Posted: , Words: ~400, Reading Time: 2 min