Month: December 2005

Technispeak

You probably can’t tell, but this site is now officially running on WordPress 2.0.  Yay!  Now that that’s done I’ve got some fun improvements I’m planning to make.  I’m going to Ajaxify the layout a bit, so we can go straight from the little snippets on the front page to full articles without reloading a whole page (ditto for comments), and then I’m going to make some adjustments to the drop-down menus so they don’t take up some 80 KB on every page.  Hopefully nobody’ll notice.  That’s why I have to announce it.

And then I have plans to begin work on my very own first plugin (I’m so excited!).  I’m going to see if there’s a way I can create exportable blogrolls that can be shared with other weblogs.  That is, I want to be able to turn my wordpress link manager into my own version of blogrolling.com, without the silly fees for important features.  We’ll see what happens, eh?

That is all from me…

Preaching

I’ve always had a hard time with “preaching.” I’ve always associated it with the role of the evangelist. And then, I’ve always associated the role of the evangelis with a certain kind of preacher – the wild-eyed, impassioned, unthinking kind.

He proclaims what he has received from his forbears without any kind of seasoned alalysis, and blasts those who disagree with him *because* they disagree with him, again without any inquiry as to *why* they might think differently, or consideration about whether some small part of his opponent’s line of thought might be right. This is not to say my preacher isn’t smart. He’s smart all right. But he’s so confident in what he knows that he directs his intelligence to invective, with lancelike force skewering his opponent by means of a superior way with words.

He sounds like a rat, but that’s my envy talking. Continue reading “Preaching”

Honoring the Sabbath

One of the requirements for my Christian education class this semester was that we memorize the 10 commandments. It might sound a little silly, but try this little test: can *you* recite all 10 of them? Ask a couple of friends if *they* know all 10 of them. I’ve already said that content is the essential part of catechesis, and I’m pretty sure my professor agrees with me. And what did you think that essential content was supposed to look like? Few things are more basic than the 10 commandments, and hardly anybody knows them.

But here’s the odd thing: reading through the commandments, I find that here are a set of rules so basic that almost everybody can agree to them: don’t lie; don’t steal; don’t murder; honor your parents. Some of them, obviously, you have to be a montheist to get behind: no other gods before me; no graven images to worship. But there’s only one that I ,and most people I know, break regularly and with vigour. Number 4: Do no work on the Sabbath. Continue reading “Honoring the Sabbath”

Aargh! I Don’t Have Time for Either One of You!

Good posts to read and respond to are coming out of the woodwork suddenly, and I don’t have any time for either. But let me direct you at least toward two of them.

[Tim Challies](http://www.challies.com/archives/001489.php) has a lovely article on Evangelism and whether it is the chief end of man. I’ve been struggling with this concept for some time now, because I keep running into people who say that evangelism is flat out the most important thing we should be doing. Or, as one pastor I know put it, “Preaching is the highest form of worship.” What is up with this idea?

[Brad Hightower](http://21stcenturyreformation.blogspot.com/2005/12/reformed-and-charismatic-and-central.html) has an article on convergence between Charismatics and the Reformed tradition. It should be good. I wouldn’t know. I’ve got to study for a Greek quiz…