Reclaiming the Mind Ministries has just announced the launching of their online Theological Library, which contains hundreds of ETS papers from the last five years. The papers are (1) free, (2) fully searchable with selectable text for copying and pasting (most of them),1 and (3) available for viewing online2 or downloading and viewing as PDFs. There’s a wealth of helpful material there that I’m sure you’ll want to take advantage of!
website
Google Reader Gets Search
For all you Google Reader users out there, you’ll be glad to know that you can finally search your feeds—both read and unread items! This is especially handy if you don’t tag an item and can’t remember where you read it. I use Google’s Web History to look up stuff like this, but it doesn’t work with feeds unless you actually visited the site. I will put this feature to good use.
Windows Live SkyDrive
For those of you who don’t have a website with access to FTP and have an occasional need to share with others large files too big for email, you may want to consider Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s free and easy to use and gives you 500MB of space, handling up to 50MB individual files. Gmail allows up to 20MB attachments, but anything beyond that can be difficult to share over the web.
SkyDrive gives you three types of storage: personal, shared, and public. You can create as many different folders as you want.
Bible Geography Meets Google Earth
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.
Tip for Safer Surfing
I’m getting downright tired of the junk on the web. I’ve been frequenting hundreds of blogs and news sites each week at work to find helpful material for our new PastorBlog. I’ve been disgusted with all the stuff you see on major news sites—obscene immodesty and sometimes even complete nudity (apparently the standard of what’s acceptable is lower in the UK). Amazingly, even some Christian news sites and blogs have this kind of σκύβαλον. That really burns me up, but I digress.
Well, I’ve found another good use for the Web Developer extension for Firefox. I hit five key strokes, and all the images on the page disappear: alt-t-w-i-n. Alt takes you to the toolbar menu. T takes you to the tools category. W takes you to the web developer tools. I takes you to images. N makes all images invisible. It even conveniently spells a word so it’s easy to remember and type! (Alt-t-w-i-m and alt-t-w-i-r both work as well, and the latter might be most useful in that it replaces the image with its description, but twin is the easiest to remember and type. Take your pick.) You can undo it with the same keystrokes, and it will be applied only to the current page. The one downside is that it doesn’t disable flash. Anyone know a way to do that?
New Testament Transcripts Website
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.
PastorResources Blog
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).
PastorBookshelf Weekly Email
Some of you are subscribed to the PastorBookshelf weekly email, but for those of you who are not, I thought you might be interested in seeing this week’s email. If you think you’d find it helpful, I encourage you to sign up. I’ll probably start posting them here each week. So if your inbox is already swamped, just subscribe to my feed and look for the web version of the email here.
