The Gospel Coalition 2009 National Conference wrapped up yesterday in Chicago. The list of speakers for the three-day event includes John Piper, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, Phil Ryken, and D.A. Carson.
Didn’t attend? No worries. Messages from the conference have been made available online. You will find audio (and some video) here.
The Article
Meacham: The End of Christian America | Newsweek.com
Have you been thinking about shelling out the money for your very own copy of the new and highly anticipated ESV Study Bible? If you haven’t yet taken the plunge, then perhaps you would be interested in checking out the online version. For the month of March, Crossway is offering free access to the ESV Online Study Bible to “anyone and everyone.”
According to the ESV Study Bible Blog, the online version offers a number of interactive freatures allowing users to:
See it for yourself here.
Problem: There are many small thoughts and ideas that come to my mind on a regular basis that I would love to share on this blog. For example, I run across at least one article, video, or blog post that I would like to share daily. I hesitate to create a new post on foolishcross for each individual thought, link, picture, or quote I desire to share, however. This would lead to a difficult-to-read and cluttered blog. Some might argue that this would be a very accurate representation of who I am. Nevertheless, I would like to keep things relatively clean and organized around here.
Solution: Tumblr. Tumblr is a lightweight micro-blogging platform that allows me to share text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos quickly and easily.
Problem solved.
Visit the foolishcross tumblelog at tumblr.foolishcross.com. Feel free to subscribe, comment, and interact.
Enjoy my clutter!
Kent Shaffer of Church Relevance has released a list of the world’s Top 60 Church Blogs. These blogs cover a number of topics from ministry to theology. At the top of the list you will find:
Check out the entire list here.
Repetition and word frequency are important factors to take into consideration when engaging in Bible Study. For example, Paul’s frequent use of the words “joy” and “rejoice” in his letter to the Philippians should not be overlooked or dismissed by the reader. Something important is being communicated. Let me say again, one should pay close attention to repetition and word frequency when studying the Bible. When studying the Bible, let us all consider repetition and word frequency.
Okay, I’m sure you get my, cleverly-stated, point.
Back in the good ol’ days, Bible Thumpers were reduced to counting each word that occurred in a passage by hand. One “joy,” two “joys,” and so on. Of course, today we have handy computer programs and online tools to do the counting for us. One such tool is Wordle. Simply provide text and you are given a word cloud visualization of that text. The Wordle web site explains that it is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”
Of course, Wordle certainly isn’t useful for Bible study and teaching purposes only. In addition to being able to copy-and-paste in text, you may also provide the URL for any blog, feed or web page that has an Atom or RSS feed. This makes Wordle a useful tool for bloggers as well. Create a word cloud for your own blog or use Wordle to compare and contrast the words and themes that occur in multiple blogs or web sites.
Below are three Wordle word clouds I made for Genesis 1, 2, and 3 (click each for a larger image). You may have also noticed that the word cloud above was made for this blog post.
Do you use Wordle? How else do you make use of this tool? Chime in and comment!
Please consider taking the time to listen to this 1997 lecture given by J.P. Moreland: The Modern Search for the Historical Jesus. In the lecture, Moreland offers a brief introduction to modern attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus. More specifically, Moreland confronts some of the ideas which haven arisen from the Jesus Seminar.
Here is Moreland’s stated outline:
The full-length audio file is available here for streaming or download. It is an hour in length, but well-worth your time.
Please feel free to react to Moreland in the comments.
