Bible & Tech
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted with any regularity. Life has been extra busy, or at least busy with out-of-the-ordinary stuff. It’s hard to believe that the summer (speaking in terms of school rather than the season) is more than half over!
This is a bit of an unusual post, but I thought it would be a good transition back into my normal blogging routine, which amounts to roughly one post per week.
Here’s what’s been going on:
The folks at OpenBible.info have done a real service to the Christian community by tagging every identifiable location in the Bible for Google Earth. You can download the KMZ file and explore any place in the Bible. They even give you all of the passages where each location occurs—hyperlinked to the ESV. I love being able to see the places about which I’m reading, and being able to zoom in and interact with them in a 3D environment beats a 2D map or image as far as I’m concerned, though being able to preview and link to these locations in Google Maps is still pretty cool. Here’s an example of all the locations in Galatians. And here’s a neat post that traces the locations in the Bible through six historical periods. I’m hoping Logos will implement my suggestion and use this data to link to these locations from within their software.
For more info visit:
HT: ESV Blog
Update: This blog post gives simple instructions for using the data in Google Earth.
I’ve been blogging with Google’s Blogger for several months and have enjoyed it. It’s a great tool, and the new Blogger has added several helpful new features. But having used WordPress for the last couple months at work, I was compelled to make the switch. Since WordPress is open source and has hundreds if not thousands of free plugins, it is a much more customizable tool and has many advantages to Blogger.
Theological Ruminations is now officially closed. Please remove it from your blogroll and subscribe to my new feed. If you care to hear what I have to say, this is the place to come!
I just came across this really cool website that allows you to read and compare many of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Someone has obviously spent a lot of time building this (understatement!). Check out the guide for more information on how to use it, and then try it out yourself.
Looks like I’m going to be blogging now at work, in addition to my current responsibilities. The purpose of the blog is to keep pastors informed with the latest Christian news, events, resources, etc. If you’re looking for another blog to add to your blog roll, check it out. Expect to see a handful of posts each day (at least Monday through Thursday).
I know there are several solid forum sites out there, but I wanted to make you aware of the site our company just launched: PastorForums. Check us out, and help us get started. In case you’re not familiar with our other sites, we also have PastorResources, PastorBookshelf, PastorBlog, and PastorOpenings (coming soon).
Check out these sobering confessions from pastors. Some will make you sad. Others will encourage you. Some may convict you. All of them will sober you to the reality of sin and point you to your need for grace.
Every theologian has the need to make PDFs, but not every theologian has the money for Adobe’s Acrobat Professional, now in version 8. By far the best free PDF maker out there is PrimoPDF. No strings attached. No annoying labels added to your documents. Full functionality. Lots of great features. Version 3 was just released. If you don’t have it, I’d strongly encourage you to get it. You’ll be glad you did.
However, once MS Office 2007 is released, it’ll finally have the ability to save documents as PDFs. Until then, PrimoPDF is the way to go.
Update: I’ve been disappointed with the Office PDF feature. It does have the advantage of maintaining all link functionality and preserving your document map for easier navigation, but the quality of the type is poor and the size of the file is unusually large. If you need links and/or document maps for navigation, the Office PDF feature is probably what you want. If you don’t, I’d recommend continuing to use PrimoPDF as it will give you a smaller and sharper looking document.