Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Administrative

  • Blog Downtime

    Yesterday I changed physical servers for this blog. My plan included posting a message before it went down and then posting another when it returned, but somehow that slipped my mind in all the fun of transferring databases and correcting for a slightly different version of PHP in some of my scripts. (WordPress transferred completely without pain, for any of you who might be considering trying it. I had an obscure function in some of my own code that caused a problem.)

    I appreciate your patience-those of you who have come back, that is-and will shower you with new posts for your perseverance!

  • Welcome Chris Eyre

    Chris will be posting a series of entries here dealing with the Consider Christianity series. One of the purposes of my publishing company, Energion Publications is to publish materials that start conversations. As a small publisher, I think it’s useful for me to help start the conversations. Chris has been reading the books, and he disagrees with a number of things in them, so I have invited him to present some of these issues in a series of posts. I haven’t put a limit on it. I’m expecting this conversation to be frank and vigorous. I’ll let Chris introduce himself in more detail as he goes along.

    Let me remind everyone of my comments policy. I remove spam and anything that appears likely to get me in legal trouble or will get my rated ‘X’. If you stay away from those limitations, you are free to express yourself with some vigor.

    I have also set aside some copies of Elgin’s books, both volumes and both study guides, for bloggers who want to get involved in the discussion. I haven’t decided yet on what basis to hand them out, but if you want to comment to this post or e-mail me early with a good reason that you should be one of the folks to get free copies, I’ll certainly give it consideration. The rules that I know of will be that you have a blog on which you comment on religious issues, from any perspective, and that you promise that you will comment on the books on your blog. I know also that I will absolutely not limit the free books to those who are likely to review them favorably. I would like to see bloggers from several perspectives look at these issues. There’s a lot of material in the two volumes, over 400 pages all told, and a number of interesting questions in the study guides.

    I’ll come up with detailed rules and then publicize this further at a later date.

    Have fun!

  • Change to Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator

    This is only a minor change. I wanted some software that would aggregate the way I wanted to, and make it reasonable to include a couple of online forums as well. The result was that I wrote my own software, built on MagpieRSS and really very simple otherwise. At the moment it orders the blogs randomly and goes from most recent back for each blog. I am thinking of adding a simple reverse date order mixing the entries, but that favors blogs that update regularly, and that includes favoring myself, so I’m holding off to see what people like.

    Check this out. Any suggestions are welcome. Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator.

  • Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator

    I’ve just created a blog aggregator specifically for Christian blogs. This is the result of recent questions from people looking for more moderate Christian presence on the internet. While I am happy to work with conservative or liberal groups whenever that is possible, I’d like to have a single place to look for commentary and information from a moderate Christian perspective.

    I still intend to participate in the Methodist blogosphere, and have actually been spending more time looking at the various Methodist/Wesleyan blogs, commenting, and sometimes linking to them. But this aggregator is for moderates of a variety of theological traditions.

    Right now I only have blogs with which I am involved in the aggregator, but I hope this will change substantially over the next few days. To be included, go to the Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator, take a look around, then follow the link to Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator Standards, fill in the form and submit it. I’ll get to adding you to this list quickly.

  • Comment Moderation

    I combined two errors in my moderation queue. On my Threads from Henry’s Web blog I only moderate comments that have certain indicators for spam. I have thus far only seen one valid comment sent to moderation. Unfortunately I wasn’t paying attention when setting up this blog and both turned on stronger moderation and entered an invalid e-mail address, so I wasn’t notified. There were a few valid comments waiting in moderation for a couple of weeks.

    I’ve corrected the problem and approved the waiting comments. I apologize for this delay. I have no intention of censoring comments other than for spam or for legal issues.

  • Some Links for Saturday

    I’ve been doing some writing on many of the links I’ve found during the week, but I do want to list some of what I’ve been writing elsewhere and also a few assorted blog entries I’ve found that interested me.

    First, while perusing Wrong Words, I noticed the entry Child Abuse or Child Discipline, which in turn links to Child Abuse on the Religious Right – The Pearls. This is something that Christians especially should be aware of, because there are some dangerous things going on without sufficient protection or concern for the consequences. The type of child-raising advocated by the Pearls that these posts respond to is not something we Christians should tolerate. It’s being done in our name, and condoned as the proper “Christian” thing to do.

    Then with help from Wesley Daily, I found the following post by Neil Bishop, Putting Jesus’ Disciples Back into the World. There’s some good material there on leadership and also on keeping the church’s focus where it belongs and not getting distracted.

    Over on The Panda’s Thumb we got to see a demonstration of the rare detective abilities of certain members of the intelligent design movement, as they were fooled by a well-known internet scam. You can follow the links to the perpetrators from there. This was probably the third or fourth time I’d seen that particular scam. It has eternal life. It will keep popping up because some people really want to believe it. I wonder if the Explanatory Filter works as well detecting design as their ordinary discernment worked in detecting a well-known scam?

    Ed Brayton, over on Dispatches from the Culture Wars notes how angry congress became when the office of one of their own was raided. Suddenly the constitution became really, really important. But where were these same congressmen when it was other people getting wiretapped or raided? You can follow the story starting with his entry If You Have Nothing to Hide, Why Worry?. Where have I heard that before?

    Now for my own blogging elsewhere:

    I’ve posted several entries on the Participatory Bible Study Blog, two more on Hebrews, Hebrews 6:4-6: Can Those who Fall Return?, and Jesus as Human and Divine Priest. In addition to several minor posts, I wrote about Genesis 3 and the fall in Genesis 3: The Story of the Fall.

    On the Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter, I wrote a little bit more about continuing education in Continuing Education: Directed Learning of New Things. I also talked about applying 1 Corinthians 13 to worship in Applying 1 Corinthians 13.

    I hope you have a fine Memorial Day weekend. I’m planning to enjoy myself. Be nice to a veteran somewhere–even me. 🙂

  • Priesthood, Sacrifice, and Christian Theology

    I want to call the attention of the readers of this blog to some posts I’m starting in the Participatory Bible Study blog. I’m looking at the nature of priesthood and sacrifice in connection with views of the atonement. This portion of my blogging through the book of Hebrews will take me a number of entries, and I will only point to them once here. For those interested in such issues as the substitutionary atonement, particularly penal substitutionary atonement, and how this compares with other views may find that series interesting.

    The sub-series begins with What is a Priest?.

    Admin note: I’m going to be out of town over the weekend teaching a weekend discipleship seminar. If any comments get stuck in moderation, they’ll probably be stuck until I return.

  • New Categories

    I dislike multiplying categories, but in trying to sort through the amount of material I have on this site, and in looking ahead at what I have planned, I think it will be too hard to find any of the older posts without some more detailed categories. I will try to go through all the old posts (more than 130 at this point), and add in the new categories to make them easier to find. I wrote many of these posts with the intention that they remain available for reference, particularly my series on inspiration, Biblical criticism, and creation and evolution.

    New categories include intelligent design to distinguish general discussion of creation vs. evolution from posts specifically dealing with this particular variant, New Testament and Hebrew Scriptures to divide up Bible study posts, and Biblical inerrancy to indicate those posts that specifically deal with something related to Biblical inerrancy.

    I now return you to regular programming . . .

  • Welcome!

    Welcome to Threads from Henry’s Web.

    I am starting this blog to replace the series of essays that I have been posting on my web site. The blog format brings me kicking and sceaming into the 21st centry. All kicking and screaming aside, it will allow me to create new essays more easily, and also to make more entries that point the way to some of my other activities on the web and various news stories of interest.

    See the links section to the right of your screen for the index to the old “Threads” entries.

    Blog entries will work together with my other posting and will include the opinion essays, lectionary comments, and other new material on Bible study and moderate Christianity.

    Comments are always welcome!