Pradis

Just so y'all know, if you happen to be a Windows user (unlike me), Zondervan is being very nice and offering $25 worth of free modules for its Pradis Bible software. No purchase seems to be necessary, so you can pick up a couple of resources to use without actually spending a dime.

You can read all about it here.

A Musing on Deconstruction

I was at the bookstore the other day, and I found myself flipping through several books by Jacques Derrida, trying to figure out if I felt up to the task of reading more of that most interesting and difficult of fellows just now. Though I am not entirely comfortable with every place Deconstructionism will go, the basics of it seem to fit the way things really work. I've spoken mostly of Deconstructionism in the sense of the hermeneutical spiral, but let's consider it somehow other than that.

Consider faith. We accept Christ. We try to make Him the center of our lives, and to that end Christians start and continue churches to be used by Him. The churches are meant to be centered around Christ with the aim to spread the Good News. But, our attempt is futile. In as much as we attempt to pursue “His goals” on our terms, we find that our churches are not so much accomplishing the spread of the Good News, but rather maintaining their self-perpetuating existence as organizations and finding ways to amuse our members with ever increasingly spectacular displays.

It isn't malicious intent, but rather the complete inability of humans to be centered. We are constantly slipping away from that which we most aim to do, and, in fact, our attempts in and of themselves are as effective as is the effort of pulling one's fingers out of a Chinese finger trap. It simply does not work.

The key of course, and the place where the Christian parts way with the agnostic Deconstructionist thinker is that something I hinted at above. The problem appears inasmuch as we depend on our terms. God certainly is powerful enough to do what needs to be done, but if He is going to use us, we need to quit thinking we can escape the gravitational force exerted by the phenomena we call Deconstruction and allow God to deconstruct our frameworks for us.

Oops... Nameless was Postless.

In case you tried to follow the links in the last post to go read “Nameless,” you may have been driven crazy by the fact that the links simply came back to the front page. Not that I have a terribly good reason you should want to go read it and if you are a long time reader, you've already seen the posts anyway. But, I've fixed the links, in case anyone did want to read the posts.

Chart Topper: Taking Over Me

Well, I had an event of historic proportions occur today. I had a song cross over the 100 play count threshold in iTunes for the first time. The song with that honor was “Taking Over Me” by Evanescence (from the album Fallen ). For those not familiar with iTune's play counter, it tallies one play for each complete playing of a song in iTunes or on any iPod that is sync'ed through that copy of iTunes. I've been using iTunes primarily since May 2004 when I became a full time Mac user, but most of those plays on this particular song come from September 2004 and beyond.

I really took note of the song, which may be my favorite from Evanescence, in Fall '04. It just seemed to fit for a variety of reasons, and so I listened more closely and became rather attached to it. It actually has some associations with the picturesque day in October of that year I felt compelled to write about last fall in my series “Nameless” (I never did finish the series, but the first parts were here and here).

At any rate, I digress. it's a good song. In general, Evanescence is a bit “harder” rock than I typically like, however, it is this hardness juxtaposed with Amy Hartzler's (nee Lee) voice, the orchestra scores and sometimes a pretty impressive choir that really makes the band interesting. Sometimes the choirs sing in Latin even, such as in “Whisper” from Fallen or “Lacrymosa” from the Open Door, the latter of which draws on the Requiem Mass/_Dies Irae_ by way of Mozart. Even in quieter pieces such as “My Immortal,” there is a contrast of the softness of the piano and the hardness of the guitars that take over at the end of the “Band Version.”

But, “Taking Over Me,” is something different. I cannot objectively define a reason, but I tend to think it is my favorite song from Evanescence. It is haunting and has a unique lead in. An earnestness to it makes it easy to relate to. Perhaps most importantly, there is something especially appealing about the movement from sorrow to hope in it. So, it is not entirely without merit that it was the song to take the 100 play honor.

In Other News: I noticed my post archive is messed up at the moment. It has long had a “known issue” that I've meant to resolve that makes it so that you can only see the last 20 posts in any given category, however SAFARI (my homebrewed CMS/blogware, not the web browser) now has a bug that makes it sort by something other than date, and a lot of old posts are showing up in the categories at the cost of hiding newer posts. I need to fix both issues, but in the mean time, here's your chance to (turn on booming announcer voice) relive favorite classic asisaid moments today! Yes, that's right, you can enjoy posts from as early as 2002 from the convenience of your own home. Call — ahem, I mean click — over in the category box today!

Digital or Paper?

One of my big dilemmas is that I'm a gadget geek and a book buyer. I love the feel of a new book, the smell of a new book, and the joy of laying in bed reading a book. But, I also love highly searchable, cross reference-able digital texts.

I'm debating whether to buy BDAG — the premier Greek-English lexicon — in its impressive print form or to buy it in its less impressive, but perhaps more convenient digital form for Accordance. I've been using Accordance for a few weeks while preparing to review it at OFB and have found it sufficiently impressive that I've been considering the option of buying modules for it.

In fact, I did invest in a handful of modules. I bought the Scholar's Core to compliment the Library Premier package that I received to review. The Library Premier is a superb package that hits a bit of everything so that one has a nice start to a library (two good modern translations, a voucher good for three more modern translations worth up to $30 each, a boatload of commentaries, Thayer's lexicon and some other nice things), but Scholar's rounded it out with a few essential items: a Nestle-Aland 27th edition (as opposed to the Library's Textus Receptus), the UBS Lexicon, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Louw and Nida Semantic Domain Lexicon. The NA27, BHS and Louw and Nida were the primary items of interest to me. Using the digital Louw and Nida reminds me of why I should probably buy the digital BDAG: it is just so much easier to look things up using Accordance's triple click “Amplify” to my lexicons than it is to flip through a giant lexicon looking for the word I want.

Nevertheless, my inner bookworm wishes I could buy the printed version combined with a license to a digital copy… now that would be nice! Then again, I may hold off on BDAG completely, if I can — what has me really intrigued is the CNTTS Greek Apparatus which should be extremely useful once they get the Pauline epistles included in it. Reading the article about it that is attached to that link makes it sound like just about the perfect apparatus. I hope it stays at $100 in its final form.

And So It Beings. Again.

Tomorrow I have my first class of my second normal semester at CTS. The class tomorrow is “Preparation and Delivery of Sermons” (a.k.a. “Prep and Del”). I'm rather excited about the course, for it will be my first opportunity to be in a class taught by the seminary's president, Dr. Bryan Chapell (we will read his book, Christ Centered Preaching as part of the course). This should be interesting!

The rest of my classes are on Wednesdays and Fridays, so I shall post more on them later.

Reflection and a Moth

My reflection stares back at me in the glass,
A green bug and a moth sit on the pane,
My thoughts run wild and wonder what I've done,
The thoughts and things that I have left unsaid.
O Moth, what thoughts run in your head tonight,
You silent winged creature in dim twilight?
Unlock the stories that remain untold
In the unblinking eyes of the reflected man
Who looks about the darkened window pane.
Do you know where you'll go in the morrow?
What insight can you give of the reflected's fate?
What grieves the eyes that look back in the glass?
As you flutter, impart some wisdom now.
Do you know the balance of time you borrow?

Greek is Finished

Well, last night, I turned in my last paper for my last Greek class. Including the title page, two page bibliography and appendixes for the final translation, text criticism, sentence diagrams and word/translation analysis, it rang in at 26 pages. (The actual main body text was something like 14-15 pages.)

It was the culmination of the most intense class I've ever taken. I worked countless hours on it, spending as much time as I could in previous weeks trying to assemble it (although the group project that included a presentation and 25 page paper, as well as translation of 1 Corinthians took precedent since they were due first), and basically did nothing but work on it over the last week. Despite that, I've never cut a paper so close to the deadline as this one: I finished the final draft at 5:35 and it was due at 6:15 yesterday — and I'm the type of guy that likes to have a paper finished at least 24 hours in advance.

That's when my computer started acting up and the printer messed up.

I caught the first set of errors, but not the second set after I sent the print job to my printer from my laptop. A lot of the Greek on the second print had been replaced with little square blocks. I did catch it on the way to Covenant, went to my godmother's house and e-mailed the paper so at least it would be in on time in some form. She journeyed with me to Covenant and gave me some moral support as a desperately tried to reformat the paper (it turned out the second set of errors was from the lack of various fonts on my laptop that I did not have easy access to install). The paper's sentence diagram was all scrambled up and had to be reformatted for the fonts on my laptop before it could be printed. Finally, I got the hard copy to print and delivered the paper to my professor's mailbox.

What a relief. This has been a Greek “bootcamp,” I do believe.

Later Dinner

So last night I was busy with my two projects for the final week of Greek in Exegesis and I didn't get around to dinner until about 8:00 p.m. As I sat at the table eating dinner and trying to think of something other than Greek, it dawned on me it almost felt like winter, despite being 85 degrees outside. It wasn't the temperature, though, you see, but the darkness. It's getting darker earlier again, and at 8:00 it had the certain look to the outdoors that appears closer to my usual 5:00 or 6:00 dinner time in the winter.

It's funny how a little light can make one feel so different!

Wretched Man that I Am

I always find myself drawn back to the following passage. Paul has razor sharp clarity and insight that is amazing throughout his letters, and leaves little wonder why his letters were unquestionably canonical. Though I am hardly preacher material, I cannot help by lapsing into something like a preaching mode when talking about the Pauline Epistles. Nevertheless, this passage offers such a sense that I know exactly what Paul is talking about that it really stands out; I am thankful for it… what a marvelous reminder of the grace of our Lord.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

-Romans 7:21-25 (NIV)