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...
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...
My iOS Home Screen Review
Towards the end of episode 95 of Analog(ue) Casey and Myke give each other’s iOS home screens a review. In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to go through the icons on my home screen giving an explanation for each one. Home Screen iOS Stock Clock Honestly, I’m not entirely certain why this is still here. Prior to getting my beloved Pebble Time my phone was my alarm clock so this app was critical to my daily life. Read more...
Against Idols, Jesus is Lord
"I am the Lord your God, […] you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them […]" Exodus 20:2-5a ESV The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States' federal government has already caused many millions of words to be written in blogs, Tweets, postings, newspapers, texts, and all the various other means of communication of our modern world. Read more...
Nostalgic Heresies
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. Read more...
Vanderbilt Divinity has Changed Me
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...
Web Proxy for Retro Computing
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...
Audio in Windows 98SE on Parallels 12
— An updated post for for Parallels 13 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. Read more...
