Blog posts

This interview with New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan (via NT Gateway) makes for interesting reading. Crossan is not a writer I often find myself in agreement with, but his comments are well worth consideration. I share Mark Goodacre’s amusement that “the major new stress in Crossan on Paul and early Christianity as anti- Roman Empire is that this brings Crossan closer to Wright than ever before, does it not?” I actually started writing some comments on this piece at the end of last year, but they got lost in the works, and I’m not sure I was reading the piece correctly anyway. But with no January Series lecture today, I returned to it and found something that resonated in the wake of Tuesday’s lecture. ...

In a former life, I completed an undergraduate physics degree. I only barely passed that degree, but complete it I did, thanks in large part to my dissertation titled “A Response To Postmodern Critiques of Physics: Towards a Narrative Understanding.” It may have been a pretentious title, but it seemed to sit better with my supervisor better than “The Physicist and the Fairytale” which was my preference. I hadn’t been to a physics lecture, or even read much about physics, since completing that degree. Brian Greene’s January Series lecture, " The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time & the Texture of Reality," broke my fast and I’m very glad I did. ...

Eugene Rivers’ contribution to the January Series, " Our New Post Civil Rights Reality: A Christian Perspective," came highly anticipated but turned out to be an exercise in hiding occasional good points in rhetoric and hyperbole. Rivers is involved in some fabulous projects to revitalise urban areas plagued with gang violence, broken homes, and crippling poverty. In the question and answer time that followed his brief sermon (I’m not sure I can really call it a lecture) he was able to outline some startling statistics of drops in homicide rates in Boston that he argued (with the backing of several studies) were the result of those programmes. His arguments for strong role models, for church groups to advocate on the behalf of those experiencing systemic injustice and to work with law enforcement to assist those who fall foul of law enforcement, and for the need for civil rights mindsets to enter a new paradigm were potent ones. ...

It seems Christian Music Makeover has competition…. Via titusonenine: Father James McCaskill, 31, has agreed to take part in a new fly-on-the-wall documentary about his attempts to boost the congregation of St Mary Magdalene in the former mining community of Lundwood, near Barnsley. Under the working title God Help Us, the cameras are already rolling, and even filmed the priest’s first service. The ailing congregation had already doubled to 17 — although that included his parents, visiting from North Carolina. ...

Paul Farmer introduced the second week of the January Series with a talk entitled " Pathologies of Power: Rethinking Health and Human Rights in the Global Era". Farmer works with Partners In Health seeking “to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care”. His primary work has been in Haiti and many of his examples were drawn from the successful community health programmes his team has initiated there, but also peppered with anecdotes from extensive travelling exploring the multi-faceted issues of healthcare. ...

A few months back I registered for the Technorati Developers’ Contest with a vague idea of a tool to help people track blog conversations about bills currently before various legislative bodies. I never got myself organised enough to build anything, but it seems other people had similar ideas. They actually got as far as refining those ideas and implementing them rather effectively. Check out the winners here (contrary to some expectations, I suspect this will be of interest to at least a few non-techies). ...

With all the changes that 2004 brought I didn’t get to nearly as many new records as I usually would, and I’m still trying to catch up so this list is very much in flux. But then, I’ve never written such a list without a disclaimer of some sort… This list is in a rough order, but not a fixed one. It also does not contain Julie Lee’s Stillhouse Road purely because I listened to it so much in 2003. For a more accurate picture of what I’ve actually been listening to this year, there’s audioscrobbler. ...

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog I discovered this piece at arstechnica reporting that CNN has cancelled Crossfire, the ‘debate’ show that Jon Stewart very publicly dissed a couple of months back. Of particular note are these comments from Jonathan Klein, new President of CNN: Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.” Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion. ...

Salon is one of a number of outlets that has discussed the imminent departure of James Wolfensohn from his position as President of the World Bank. I had often wondered why the Bank always had USian presidents, but the article explains that: The United States is the bank’s largest shareholder. The bank traditionally has had an American president. Its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, traditionally has been headed by a European. ...

Since I took over the Grand Rapids WiFi site I’ve been wanting to let users search by location, finding all their nearest spots. What I lacked was any simple way of converting addresses into longitude/latitude so that I could then do the calculations required. While exploring the Wireless London project recently I followed a few links and discovered geocoder.us, a site that provides just that data. So a quick interface to their web services offering, a little application of pythagoras’ theorem, and it’s all in place on the search page. ...