Las Casas: Hope in Sin's Darkness
For the modern theologian, Bartolomé de las Casas presents quite a number of difficulties. Las Casas' turn from a participant and supporter of the Spanish encomienda system of Indian enslaved labor to an ardent opponent and the theology behind it is to be greatly admired. Las Casas' theological anthropology provides a foundation for a theology whose trajectory points to the imago Dei within each human being and the equality of value of all within the Kingdom of God and all who the Kingdom looks upon. Read more...
It Wasn't the Nails
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. Nailed to a cross, bleeding, hurting, mocked, physically suffering for hours, Jesus breaks his silence. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” On the cross, dying for the treason of being a Messiah when he was truly so much more. Jesus, in his greatest moment of terror continues to identify with humanity; with us; with you; with me; yes, even with them. Read more...
My WSL Perl Development Environment
Recently I bought a little Windows tablet on sale for $60 as a device to play around with Windows 10 on and for — hopefully — testing a future UWP or PWA Windows version of LectServe. I’ll give a review of the NuVision tablet at some point in the future, but after I spent two! days getting Windows updated to the newest release, I quickly enabled the Windows subsystem for Linux and installed Debian. Read more...
Martin Luther: Christological Implications to Eucharist
Martin Luther’s Small Catechism – though short and concise – presents a clear window into Luther’s understanding of Christ’s nature and how that nature works itself out in the ordo salutis. Historically, Luther’s writings on the Sacrament of the Bread and Wine followed the path of the Reformation debates on the Mass as a sacrifice and how – or even if – Jesus was present in the Eucharistic elements. Theologically, however, Luther’s views on Sacraments, specifically the Eucharist, can best be understood through his Christology. Read more...
Mary, Mother of God, Most Blessed Human
The second iteration of the Women’s March garnered much attention this weekend. From outward appearances in the news and social media, version 2.0 of the Women’s March was even less unified than the inaugural event of 2017. Saturday’s gatherings across the nation involved feminists, Black Lives Matters, labor movements, immigration activists, Democrats, and a host of other concerns. Though headlines were careful to present female-only images of the events, candid photos on my social media feed show many men co-opting the movement as well. Read more...
How my View of Salvation has Changed
After a semester studying soteriology, how has my view of salvation changed? It has not. I have, however, increased my ability to articulate my view. Salvation is an unwarranted gift of grace from God offered to all of humanity. All the children of Adam and Eve are born into sin and death. Humanity has distanced itself from God and has brought corruption into God’s good creation. God, in his infinite mercy, looked down and saw that there was no one to rescue humanity from her fall, so he decided to save her himself (Isaiah 63:5). Read more...
Full-Text Search using Hugo & Lunr
Adding full-text search to a statically generated Hugo site is a fairly easy process. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m already using Gulp to compile and minify my site. Using that Gulp file as my starting point, adding full-text search is a simple three-part process. To enable search, I decided to use the Lunr.js library. Lunr is simple to use and has just the right amount of features for adding some simple search capabilities to your site. Read more...
Parables, Desire, and Salvation: A Counter-Reformation Reading of Mark 4:10-12
In the Synoptic Gospels, each Evangelist narrates an event where Jesus explains to the Disciples and the other people standing around him the reason for his use of parables (Matt 13:10-17, Mark 4:10-12, and Luke 8:9-10). Jesus says that he teaches those who follow him the μυστήριον τῆς βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ1 — the “mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:11). To those outside of his circle, however, he does not reveal God’s mystery. Read more...
Baptism: Sacramental Ark of Holiness and Salvation
The Articles of Religion of the Church of England state in article XXV that sacraments are “not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession” but that they are “sure witnesses,” “effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us.” Further, sacraments work “invisibly” in humanity and “not only quicken but also strengthen and confirm” humanity’s faith in Jesus. It is within these bounds that Lancelot Andrewes preaches his sermon on the Holy Spirit on Pentecost — Whit-Sunday — in 1625. Read more...
Anglican Baptism: Regenerative and Salvific Through Sacrament and Faith
Anglicanism is a diverse and varied tradition. Before the Reformation, Anglicanism refers to whatever Christians were doing1 in the British Isles. Post-reformation, Anglicanism applies to the ecclesial bodies identifying with the pre-denominational Christianity of Britain and continuing to live in that communion.2 Anglicanism, on the one hand, identifies as an ancient expression of the Christian faith existing before the Great Schism. Thus, Anglicanism is — with the Roman and Eastern churches — a Catholic and apostolic body. Read more...
Translation: Conciliatio Locorum Scripturae, Chapter 21
A modern English translation of Andreas Althamer’s 1527 Dialloge hoc est, conciliatio locorum scripturae, qui prima facie inter se pugnare videntur extended and translated into early Modern German in 1528 in Nürnberg (Nuremberg) and published as Diallage, das ist vereynigung der streytigen sprüch der schrifft, welche im esten anplick, scheynen wider einander zesein. Latin Source German Source Diallage: Das ist Vereynigung der Streytigen Sprüch der Schrifft, Kapital XXI Ich wil verhörten das herz Pharaonis / Exo. Read more...
Build, Minify, and Upload Hugo to S3
Though I’m not a huge fan of JavaScript, I include a small bit of it in this site to track page views and to generate the tag cloud on my search page. Since my project had already been polluted with JavaScript, I decided a while back to go all in and use WebPack and Gulp to bundle my JavaScript code, build my Hugo site, minify everything, and then upload the whole thing to S3. Read more...
Mark 6:30-52 and the Unanswered Question; Who is this?
On October 8, I was invited to preach at McKendree Village where I did my field education last year. It was a blessing to be back with so many friends and to see the healing God had brought to many of the people I had visited in the rehabilitation center. Since I’m taking A.J. Levine’s course on Mark this semester, I decided to preach on the miracles of the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water in Mark 6:30-52. Read more...
Automate Slack Status with IFTTT
Recently I came across the need to automatically update my status in Slack. I have class Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings which requires me to leave work a little early. As I’m often rushed, I don’t always remember to set my status. This has, at times, left my team waiting on a response to a message I won’t see for a few hours. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Luckily, using Slack’s legacy tokens and following the guidance of Made by Munsters I was able to use IFTTT to quickly automate the updating of my Slack status. Read more...
Hugo Site on S3 and CloudFront
For a very long time I’ve hosted this site at Nearly Free Speech. I’ve been happy at Nearly Free Speech, but with the launch of LectServe and other IoT and Serverless projects of mine on the AWS stack, it made logistical and financial sense to consolidate on Amazon. Moving my Hugo site to Amazon was a fairly simple affair. First I setup a simple S3 bucket to drop my Hugo generated files to. Read more...
