My post-Mormon experience has been much easier than most. My transition out of the Mormon faith and into orthodox Christianity, unlike many, saw no family conflict and no lost relationships. By God’s immeasurable grace, I left the Mormon church with no external negative consequences to speak of.
My status as a post-Mormon has been a personal struggle of healing and theological recentering. Though less frequent in the last while, I am still hit with moments where I realize my otherness in a Christian context. There are still to this day times where the guilt and worthlessness of my Mormon youth come to the forefront. God, however, is always merciful and continually heals my wounds. In so many ways he has used my past as a benefit to my Christian ministry. My Mormon background has allowed me to see the church and the faith as an outsider. It has helped me better explain and proclaim the gospel because I can see things someone with only a Christian past to draw from cannot.
Read more...This semester marks the beginning of my third year at Vanderbilt Divinity School. It also marks a return to a required MDiv course after two semesters of Ph.D. level seminars. As I am once again confronted with future social organizers, ministers, and other religious leaders who seem to default to contrarian heterodoxy I have found myself taking a step back to reflect on where I’m at theologically. Has Vanderbilt Divinity changed me and — as this is most likely true — has it changed me for the better?
Read more...The move to TLS-secured websites is great for privacy and a good step forward for the Internet. That being said, as someone who collects and uses retro computing technology, this poses a problem; TLS-secured website will not work in older browsers. Further, heavy use of Javascript, larger image sizes, etc. make loading even none TLS-secured websites problematic. —When you’ve got megahertz and megabytes to work with rather than giga or tera, large payloads take forever!—
Read more...— An updated post for for Parallels 13 & 14 can be found here. —
When I was in middle school there were four games that consumed the vast majority of my time: Simcity 2000, The Sims, Sim Theme Park, and Spiderman Cartoon Maker. I loved these games and would play them with my brothers nearly every day.
Adulthood means limited free time and, in my experience, a desire to in some way escape back to childhood via nostalgia. For me this manifest in my upkeep of old computers and software so I can play the games of childhood. Beyond that, I want to play the games of my childhood on hardware that I could hardly conceive of playing on back then. We’re talking maximum settings all around.
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Experience the smooth ride and easy driving of the third generation Nissan Altima in this unique lightly-owned car. 2005 was a facelift year for the Altima with a new grill and an updated rear, so there’s already a lot to like. This car, however, isn’t just any Altima. This burgundy red Altima includes the SL luxury package and has spent the last decade being driven by a librarian.
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Two years ago I first entered the world of iPad note taking. I was starting my first semester at VDS and had purchased a first generation iPad Air a few months before. My intent was to use my iPad to take notes during lectures and in my many meetings at work. — I was still rocking a giant, heavy HP Elitebook 8760w 17" portable workstation at the office. — I started down the path of pen input, but quickly realized that wasn’t the best way to go. Pen input wasn’t supported well by iOS and wasn’t automatically converted to plain-text like my beloved Newton would. For plain-text note taking, keyboard entry was still the best. I went to Amazon, purchased a bluetooth keyboard, and started carrying my iPad to meetings at work and lectures at school.
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