Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Bruce Epperly on Prayer Changing Things

    I wrote recently that I prefer “prayer changes you” to “prayer changes things” but I don’t deny that prayer changes things. But how?

    Bruce Epperly contributes a post to Ponderings on a Faith Journey that looks at this along with the idea of human freedom. I know that any form of open theism tends to make some people crazy, but I think many of us talk and behave as though something like this is true, even while affirming God’s eternal plans. In fact, I might suggest that living with such tensions is something God intended us to do! Nonetheless I find this discussion challenging and useful.

    For my own notes on prayer, which come to a somewhat less firm conclusion, see my essays The Hand of God, The Hand of God – Miracles, and The Hand of God – Prayer. They date from ancient times, or rather 2003.

  • On Publishing, Page Layout, and Busy-ness

    Along Bible Paths front cover
    I’m finally getting back to blogging, and even a little of my own writing on other subjects. I thought I’d comment on what has been going on here that kept me away from my blogs for so long. I note that my post Why I Am Blogging Less was published on May 6, so that’s a bit over a month, but my blogging was fairly sparse for a month before that.

    No, there have been no family disasters, nor have I been out climbing mountains. It has all related to business. Two years ago my company, Energion Publications, was a one person operation, and even for that one person (me) it was part time. Since then, we have had quite an explosion of activity. As of June 1, there are two people working full time with the company and two working part time, plus a few tasks, such as cover design, that we contract out. My wife Jody has joined me full time.

    For the first five years of this company’s existence we published an average of four books per year. During the past year we added more than ten. We used to work on one book at a time, now we have books already scheduled for completion in 2011. In fact, we only have enough space left in our 2010 schedule for a couple of books, and the only reason that space is left open is that we’ve been holding it open for special projects.

    Soup Kitchen for the SoulThis is what took me out of the loop for a couple of months. I did the page layout work on three books that have already been released, The Character of Our Discontent, Soup Kitchen for the Soul, and Along Bible Paths: Summer Devotions, and on one additional book’s advance copies, the paperback edition of Preserving Democracy.

    Preserving DemocracyI had to learn some new software. For those interested, we’re now doing page layout with a combination of Scribus, LaTex, and Lyx. For those who may not be aware, Scribus is an open source desktop publishing system. It does many things well on its own, but one important feature is the ability to include elements from LaTex. Lyx is a document processor which, put very briefly, is a sort of cross between WYSIWYG word processing and the text coded layout. It can produce LaTex files, amongst others. I won’t go into detail on why I’m using this combination, but getting used to the setup has been an interesting and worthwhile learning experience.

    I almost forgot to mention that I had the truly odd experience of creating the covers for two of these books working via phone and e-mail with the designer. He had no computer available to do the layout, and I am not great at visual things, to put it mildly. He gave me directions, I’d do the layout, and then e-mail him a jpeg of the result. Those two books are The Character of Our Discontent (image lower right in this post), and Along Bible Paths (image top left in this post).

    I’ve already written about The Character of Our Discontent, but I will post reflections on the other three books and on several more that are coming up soon. I simply haven’t had the time to reflect a great deal, much less to write my reflections on the blog. There is a bottleneck of books on which work is progressing, but for which I don’t have press releases and catalog entries created. So watch for lots of new material coming from Energion Publications.The Character of Our Discontent

    While I’m still busy, I think 16 hour days are largely a thing of the past, and I will also have more time for some of the things I enjoy more, such as blogging and keeping in contact with authors and readers, not to mention my own reading.

    (I’m linking this post to my most recent post on the Participatory Bible Study blog and on The Jevlir Caravansary so readers of those blogs can catch the explanation for my absence. Doubtless they’ve been waiting impatiently for my next words! More likely, not so much!)

  • Lectionary and Mosaic Bible – Pentecost + 3

    I’m ending a hiatus in blogging of just over a month.  I see my last post was dated May 8, 2010, but I was pretty sparse for a month before that.  I’ll get a post up about what I was doing during that time.  No, nothing adventurous; just trying to do necessary work to grow my publishing business.

    This morning I looked again at the lectionary passages for the week, and compared them to the Mosaic Bible.  Three of the lectionary passages do have material connected with them in The Mosaic Bible, though there is no overlap in the texts for this week.  The lectionary gives us 1 Kings 21:1-21a (again deleting what I think is some relevant material starting with 21b),  Psalm 5:1-8, Galatians 2:15-21, and Luke 7:36-8:3.  Of these, only Psalm 5 is not connected, though Galatians only overlaps with verse 20 used for Easter in the Mosaic Bible.

    This simply reaffirms the way in which I think the Mosaic Bible is most useful for those who already use a reading plan oriented to the church year–it provides a rich range of readings that relate to the various church seasons that will be helpful in lesson and sermon preparation.  For those who do not use a reading program tied to the church calendar, I think the Mosaic Bible provides a more friendly starting point than simply diving into the lectionary.  Often the lectionary texts prove a challenging combination–individually helpful, but seeming quite scattered as a group.

    The focus for this lectionary reading seems to be evil men.  One interesting twist is just how you read the story in Luke.  Naboth’s vineyard gives you a pretty clear set of bad guys and good guys, with Ahab in the role of very bad guy.  One interesting approach might be to contrast the response of Jesus to the woman who is a sinner as opposed to the judgment meted out to Ahab.  That could lead to really interesting discussions of varying types of sin as well.  No matter how often we claim that sin is sin, I think we really do have “clean” sins and “dirty” sins. Most commonly “dirty” sins are the ones you commit, and “clean” sins are the ones I commit.  (See the host in the story in Luke.)

    I find the possible range of topics presented by each collection of lectionary texts quite fascinating, and this week was no exception.

  • Alden Thompson – Jesus Solves All the Problems in Your Bible

    I located this video today, and while I’m not blogging much these days, I wanted to share it.  Alden was one of my teachers at Walla Walla College when I was in the Biblical Languages program there.  I now publish his book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?, now in it’s fourth edition.

    There will be some references to specifically Seventh-day Adventist events and issues, but the majority of the material here relates to controversies that will be familiar to all of us.

    And no, I didn’t post this just because he mentions me and says a couple of nice things about me.

  • Why I Am Blogging Less

    I haven’t been very active on this blog or anywhere else over the last few weeks. That’s because work for my business has gotten pretty heavy. I even had to work with a cover designer via phone and e-mail while I entered his designs into the computer. Not being a very graphically oriented person made that was interesting, to say the least.

    I still don’t know how much I’ll be able to do on this blog for the next three or four weeks, so expect posting to be sparse, and much shorter than usual when I do get to them.

    “Of making many books there is no end …” Ecclesiastes 12:12b

  • Somebody Needed a Dictionary

    … to look up “suffrage.”

  • Where the Jobs Are Now

    This book is outside of my area of expertise, but is expertly reviewed at Christian Personal Finance. I know many people are looking for this type of information.

  • Biblioblog Top 50 Posted

    … and I got bumped to #16, which is not surprising given how little blogging I’ve been doing lately.  Come to think of it, the really surprising thing was how long I stayed in the top 10!  Thanks to Jeremy for his hard work and for “more cowbells.”

  • Immigration and a Police State

    Does that sound too alarmist? I confess I’m always trying to find ways to write headlines that attract attention and I’m not very good at it. But I’m not sure that’s too alarmist for what’s going on in Arizona right now.

    I spent some time in Texas when I was in the Air Force, and I experienced searches when traveling near the border and traveling on a bus. No, I wasn’t searched or required to produce ID (I was not in uniform), but all the people who “looked illegal” were required to do so. We tend not to complain about such things when they do not impact us personally, but there is a great danger there.

    Making laws that are very difficult to enforce is going to produce enforcement methods that are difficult to justify. Once those enforcement methods are in place, we may have trouble getting them removed when the law applies to someone else–someone like us.

    I want to call your attention to a good blog post on this by Pastor Bob Cornwall on Ponderings on a Faith Journey. There are several things that Bob recognizes that people often ignore. First, he does realize that illegal immigration creates problems, especially for people on the border states. Enforcement such as requiring employers to get proper documentation is a valid method of enforcement. Second, he recognizes what some people on the other side fail to notice, that once you have a few million people in place, the “send them back home” solution isn’t as simple as it may look. Third, he recognizes that states are responding to a failure to deal with the problem at the federal level. It certainly is a federal problem, but it’s not one of the easier ones on which to build consensus.

    We have a number of issues that tend to lead toward over-policing, including immigration and drug policy. As time goes on, I believe we’ll find that the costs of attempts to solve these problems will become greater than the problems themselves. Unless, of course, we get creative and try looking for real, balanced solutions.

  • Fouling the Water and Trampling the Food

    That’s my post today on the Worldprayr blog. It’s based on parts of Ezekiel 34.