Sublime Notes Template Snippet
Several months ago I followed the lead of my friend Jon Boulineau and switched from Evernote/Simplenote/OneNote for my note taking needs, to Sublime Text using the Sublime Note package. Sublime Text uses significantly less system resources than the alternatives and is incredibly stable at all times. Further, when synched via Dropbox, all of my super-small, plain-text note files are instantly available on all of my devices — mobile and otherwise. Read more...
The Lie of Absence
To be a Christian often means living in the undefined spaces of tension between things that together cannot be true and yet are. Take today for an example. In the Christian calendar, today is the seventh Sunday of Easter and the first Sunday after Ascension. Also today, many Christians in the United States will reflect upon the lives lost over the centuries by the United States Armed Forces as a church prelude to Memorial Day on tomorrow. Read more...
Alfred 3 Firefox URL Copy
I’ve been an Alfred user for many years, but until I moved to LifeWay, I’d never had the opportunity to use a Macintosh — and thus Alfred — as part of my daily work. For me, Alfred was always about quick launching applications, doing quick calculations, and checking the spelling and definition of words. Thanks to my daily use at LifeWay and the guidance of the Mac Power Users, I’ve upped my Alfred game significantly over the last several months. Read more...
Humanity & the Church
Introduction Humanity and the Church or, to cast them in more theological terms, theological anthropology and ecclesiology, are highly related doctrines that often get overlooked in the Christian theological community. First providing a brief history to setup a framework for theological discourse, I seek to better understand what humanity is in the eyes of and relationship to God and to define what the Church is and is called to be in the world. Read more...
God's Self Revelation
As the only source of life and being, God is in a constant state of giving to his creation. Because he wills it, humanity, the earth, and the cosmos are. In this very abstract sense, all things “visible and invisible” are a revelation of the God who creates and sustains them. The enterally triune God, however, is not chiefly a god of the abstract. He is a god of the particular. Read more...
The Doctrine of Sin
Apart from his will and his life-giving breath, nothing outside of God can exist. God made all of creation and wills its existence, movement, and life. Into this creation, God placed a special creature, human beings. Humans were made in God’s own image and outside of receiving his breath of life were uniquely equipped to reflect God’s life-giving back towards creation and the Creator himself. Humans, unlike other creatures, could have relationship with God. Read more...
Career Growth Through Upward Empathy
It’s been three and a half years since I closed Sublime Text and entered the world of Outlook and PowerPoint. In a lot of ways management has been what I thought it would be. There are poltics. There are constant temptations to compromise for my benefit over the developers on my teams. There are boring budgeting and strategy meetings. There are e-mails. So. Many. E-mails. Overall, however, management has, for me, been exactly what I set out for it to be at the beginning. Read more...
Linux Fileshare for Classic Macintoshes
A while back I got the idea in my head that I needed a fileshare for my classic Macintoshes. The move to HTTPS in recent years has left ancient browsers out in the cold for hitting classic software repositories like Macintosh Garden which meant I needed to either suffer the pain of heavy browsing in Classilla on my iMac G4 or download files on a modern machine that the Macs could get access to. Read more...
No Regrets: Travel outside the Alltag
Since August I have been volunteering as the chaplain intern at a retirement community and nursing home in the Middle Tennessee area. Over the months, I’ve spoken and prayed with many people as they’ve reflected on and — sometimes — mourned their journey through time. Over and over again — often through tears — I’ve witnessed people who regretted allowing the Alltag1 of life stand in the way of their experiencing God’s creation in its fullness. Read more...
Jesus, Center & Surplus
At the center of what makes Christian theology distinct from the general theological conversations of the religious traditions of the world, is the Christian engagement of Jesus. Other traditions – Judaism and Islam particularly – have something to say about the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth; his life, ministry, and teachings. Only Christianity, however, places cosmic implications on Jesus. Within the Christian tradition, Jesus is not only prophet, rabbi, and rebel, but also Messiah, Christ, or “Anointed One. Read more...
Hope in the Darkness
So much of theological education involves interaction and time with the darker sides of the faith. The troublesome passages of the Bible are given greater focus so we can integrate them into a coherent system with the nicer ones. We learn to deal with death, with rejection, with suffering. We study and focus on all the things the church and world would like to forget exists, so we can be prepared to face them when we enter ministry. Read more...
Cross Functional Teams
Development teams are a lot like a church congregation. A congregation is a community of people with special skills and jobs. You have pastors, preachers, choir directors, ushers, worship leaders, organists, etc. It takes everyone working together doing their special jobs to make a worship service happen. Development teams are also a community of people with special skills and jobs. You’ve got developers that specialize on certain parts of the stack, people who do different types of testing, people who have specialties in breaking down and managing the work of developing software, etc. Read more...
Alcohol and Christianity: A Response
As those familiar with my story already know, I was raised Mormon. For the first twenty-five or so years of my life, I believed a prophet of God had commanded his people to not drink alcohol, coffee, or tea. — This commandment is called the Word of Wisdom in Mormonism. — Further, because of how heavily the Word of Wisdom is taught to children and teenagers in the LDS Church, my worldview placed drinking alcohol or coffee as a sign of rebellion against God and a very bad sin. Read more...
LectServe: An Online Lectionary
Back in late February of this year the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) released an initial version of a lectionary for the upcoming ACNA Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As an Anglican seminarian, I was, naturally, very intrigued by the new lectionary. Though my parish doesn’t — yet? — use the new lectionary, looking at the PDF document released by the Task Force made me immediately clear that anyone wanting to use the new lectionary would need something more. Read more...
Bring us Back and Renew our Lives
Shepherd of Israel, listen, you who lead Joseph like a flock; enthroned on the cherubs, shine on Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh; rouse your strength, come to us and save us! Yahweh Sabaoth, bring us back, let your face smile on us and we shall be safe. Yahweh Sabaoth, how much longer will you smoulder at your people’s prayer? Having fed us on the bread of tears, having made us drink them in such measure, you now let our neighbours quarrel over us and our enemies deride us. Read more...
