Sean Boisen: Reading

Blogos RSS Feed has Moved: Please Update Your Reader URL

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:49:44 GMT

I've moved to a new blogging platform (goodbye Radio Userland, hello WordPress).

But if you read through an RSS aggregator (this is really important, so pay attention):

This is the last post to the current RSS feed (http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/rss.xml)
You must change your feed URL to keep reading Blogos: the new feed is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/feed/.
If you've only been subscribed to a specific channel (e.g. http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/categories/semanticbible/rss.xml), those have moved as well: the new one for SemanticBible-only posts is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/category/semanticbible/feed/ (note 'categories' -> 'category'), and others are constructed in similar fashion

If you read directly from the website, everything will work as before at my preferred URL, http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/. The new site includes several syndication buttons that make it easy to add Blogos to your Bloglines, MyYahoo!, or other readers.

If you have any problems with this, please send me (sean) an email at semanticbible daht com. I don't want to lose any readers in the transition (there aren't that many to start with!).

The Humility of Jesus

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:20:55 GMT

"... it is important that we know who Christ is, especialy the chief characteristic that is the root and essence of His character as our Redeemer. There can be but one answer: it is His humility. What is the Incarnation but his heavenly humility, His emptying himself and becoming man? What is His life on earth bu humility; His taking the form of a servant? And what is His atonement but humility? 'He humbled himself and became obedient to death.' And what is His ascension and His glory but humility exalted to the throne and crowned with glory? 'He humbled himself ... therefore God exalted Him to the highest place.' In heaven, where He was one with the Father; in His birth, His life, and His death on earth; in His return to the right hand of the Father -- it is all humility. Christ is the expression of the humility of God embodied in human nature ..." (reflections on Phil.2.5-11from Humility, by Andrew Murray)

Oh, for the humility of Jesus in myself and around me!

On Becoming an Amazon Associate

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 22:44:51 GMT

I decided to sign up as an Amazon Associate, and to incorporate referrals into links on Blogos. I had to stop and think a bit about whether this meant a slide down the slippery slope to commercialism, but since i don't intend to clutter my pages with search boxes, banners, etc., it seemed pretty harmless (y'all are welcome to let me know if you think otherwise). I'll put a search box on the Reading category page, but otherwise links will just be links, with no extra intrusions of the A-word. Ok?

Frankly, i don't think i have enough readership to make a big difference. But if you want to help finance my habit, feel free to click through: i think i make 4% on referred purchases. I can almost guarantee that any referral income (which comes in the form of Amazon gift certificates) will be used for more books on Bible study and discipleship, and will be vastly exceeded by what i spend anyway on my own :-)

Reading: Ordering Your Private World

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 14:01:15 GMT

This is the season when we reflect on the year gone by and think about what we'd like to be different in the year to come. New Year's resolutions have come to mean things we don't take seriously, or don't maintain over time, but there's great value in reviewing and re-purposing, if we follow through.

MacDonald's book offer readable encouragement to take the inner life seriously, something i find myself more and more focused on over time. Simply stated, the difference between merely existing and actually accomplishing something or being someone seems to come from a decision, whether conscious or not, to manage yourself. As Christians, this is a practical expression of Paul's statement that "the love of Christ controls us" (2Cor.5.14)

Here are MacDonald's Laws of Unmanaged Time from chapter seven:

Unmanaged time flows toward my weaknesses: without a clear notion of where i'm strong and what my abilities are and aren't, i'll tend to invest my time outside the areas of my best and most important contributions
Unmanaged time comes under the influence of dominant people in my world: my schedule, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If i don't take up my God-given responsibility to manage it, others around me will do so for their own agendas, well-intentioned or not.
Unmanaged time surrenders to the demands of all emergencies: only a clear sense of priorities can help me decide what really needs to be done, as opposed to what is merely the tyranny of the urgent.
Unmanaged time gets invested in things that gain public acclamation: while this may be more of a tendency for public figures like MacDonald, things like email and blogging provide many of us the allure of potential public presence. My sitemeter has a graph that shows how many times my blog page was hit: it's easy to make this a barometer of the significance of what i post.

My resolution: keep working at identifying what God has actually called me to do, and find ways to keep my time focused on it.

Reading: the Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:12:49 GMT

I went searching for this book because of a reference to it from Brennan Manning's Ragamuffin Gospel, and was delighted to find in our local library a later edition, expanded by the inclusion of several hundred works of art. This fascinating book by Jaroslaw Pelikan describes 18 varied perceptions of Jesus through many ages and cultures: the King of Kings, the Monk Who Rules the World, the Son of Man, the Poet of the Spirit, the Liberator, and others. The classic artwork alone is enough to recommend the book, but the exposition is comprehensive and insightful, and provides a wealth of material for reflection on Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" (Matt.16.15)

The Fifth Sentence Game, and Knuth's 3:16 Bible Texts

Sun, 25 Apr 2004 14:44:04 GMT

By way of ongoing, Scripting News, Burning Bird, and others, my contribution to the Fifth Sentence game, from the Contemporary English Version New Testament:

After Jesus had told the people to sit down, he took the seven loaves of bread and fish and gave thanks.

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. Tim Bray's addendum: point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads (see above for mine).

No, i didn't cheat and grab a Bible just to look spiritual: this really was one of several books at arm's length from where i'm typing this (sitting in bed with my laptop). It's Matthew 15.35-36. I suppose i exercised discretion in which one of them i picked (among Seeds of Terror, Renovation of the Heart, the Laws of Software Process, First Things First, and others that i'm not making nearly enough progress against).

This game reminds me of a fascinating book, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated. The book is remarkable in several ways: it was written by Donald Knuth, far better known for his contributions to computer science than Biblical studies, but defnitely a man of faith. He was crucial in the development of TeX and MetaFont, high-quality programs for typesetting which, though less popular in today's WYSIWYG environment, are practically fanatical in their devotion to the beauty of printed language.

The organization is also quite different. Knuth goes through each book of the Bible and examines the third chapter, sixteenth verse: Genesis 3:16, Exodus 3:16, etc. For each text, there is some commentary on the meaning of the text additionally, calligraphers prepared beautiful representations of the text itself. He has some interesting commentary on the mathematical properties of this kind of non-random selection algorithm, so there's something for geek, artist, and Bible student alike. Highly recommended.

Reading: Renovation of the Heart

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 04:16:33 GMT

I visited a church this morning, and the pastor shared one quote from this book by best-selling author Dallas Willard that was enough to get me to go home, take it off the shelf, and start reading:

"Ultimately, our circumstances are never as important as how we respond to them"

Donna and i have been thinking for some time about character issues, and how to help people change from the inside out. Barna's surveys seem to keep proving that there isn't a lot of difference between most Christians and their neighbors: i think a major reason is that we don't see growth in character as a normative part of Christian experience, but rather an "extra" for really spiritual people. But it's clear that people don't significantly change the way they act unless change happens on the inside.

Reading: the Laws of Software Process

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 21:52:42 GMT

This book hooked me with a simple statement from the first chapter that seems completely obvious in retrospect: but i'd never thought of it that way, and it's profound.

"Software is not a product ... Software is a medium." (p. 1) In particular, it's a knowledge storage medium, and software development isn't a manufacturing process, it's a knowledge acquisition process. "The 'product' is the knowledge contained in the software", which is a kind of "executable knowledge."

Why don't programmers include comments, or test things that should fail? Those things aren't crucial to getting your software to execute on a few test cases, but they're critical aspects of encoding the knowledge that someone will need later to understand whay you did, why, and how to fix it for the cases you didn't anticipate.

Why are progrrammers such lousy estimators? Because we typically don't know everything we need to know in order to solve a problem (Armour calls this "First Order Ignorance"), and furthermore, we don't know what we don't know ("Second Order Ignorance"), and we don't have a process for acquiring the knowledge we need ("Third Oder Ignorance"). It's not that we don't know how to code: it's the unpredictably nature of the work required to to acquire the critical knowledge that we then translate into code.

Reading: Spiritual Innovators

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 21:30:53 GMT

I'm always interested in biographies, because of the way they show the embodiment of abstract principles in real lives. We often wonder if what we do really makes a difference: books like this confirm that they do.

The book is a reflection on "seventy-five extraordinary people who changed the world in the past century." I've only just begun, but i wanted to share a quote, and a factoid from the preface.

The quote is from Paul Tillich to his Harvard seminar students:

"The Bible's prophets were not theologians: they were storytellers, determined to give us all much pause."

I still have a lot to learn about telling God's story in a way that gives others "much pause."

The editors polled "journalists, authors, book editors, and other experts" when deciding which seventy-five people to include. The top "vote getter"? Robert Holbrook Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The time donna and i spent supporting a Celebrate Recovery group at our church gave me a much deeper appreciation for the recovery movement. I learned that spiritual growth has much more in common with recovery from various addictions than most of us are comfortable thinking about.

More on the English Standard Version Bible

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 13:12:58 GMT

I've been getting more and more interested in the English Standard Version (ESV) translation. My initial interest was because Crossway Bible seems to be the most technologically savvy Bible publisher in terms of web technology: you can search it on-line, there's an RSS feed and web service interfaces (which i've actually used). In other words, they're starting to "get" how the digital age calls for new uses of the Bible.

What i didn't know (but learned today) is that J.I. Packer, author of numerous Christian books, including the classic Knowing God, is General Editor: there's an audio interview here where he addresses questions like why another Bible translation, what their goals were, etc.

If you're interested in different Bible translations and their strengths (and any student of the Scriptures should be), i recommend you investigate the ESV. In particular, its attempt to more closely model the wording and language of the originals makes it a great choice for more detailed study purposes

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 21:13:21 GMT

Picked up A is for Abductive yesterday at church: "a post-modern primer" to introduce terminology and concepts of post-modern ministry. Looking for some material to help with a seminar i'm teaching in a couple of weeks: i'm thinking about how we use Scripture, especially for personal study, in a post-modern context.

Reading: Quicksilver

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 23:19:04 GMT

Neal Stephenson's latest, Quicksilver, makes great recreational reading for geeks. If nothing else, you get an exciting lesson in the history of technology. Frankly, i can't imagine how he puts all this detail together.

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 12:54:40 GMT

Jonathan Delacour's comments on information overload are right in line with Eriksen's Tyranny of the Moment. I've just started the chapter where he comments on how to cope with information overload ...

The Speed Addiction (Reading: Tyranny of the Moment)

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 14:22:03 GMT

My friend Eric Henning caricatures his father's impatience like this:

He's the kind of guy who stands next to the microwave while it's cooking his dinner, tapping his foot and saying "Come on, come on, do you think I have all minute??"

More and more, i find myself in this caricature. It's been many years since i first read Charles Hummel's classic 32-page booklet Tyranny of the Urgent (ironically itself an abridgement of a larger work). Hummel's booklet was first published in 1967, and it was an early voice warning that, just as the good is the enemy of the best, the urgent is the enemy of the important.

Measured by Internet Time, 1967 was ages ago, and the pace has only become more frantic since. Tyranny of the Moment, by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, shows how it is no longer merely the urgent, but the imminence of next moment, that now threatens us. Eriksen, a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, brings in a wide range of examples to illustrate the acceleration of modern culture and its impact on how we live.

The book grew out of a sabbatical where, despite a constant busyness of answering emails, reading articles, and review proofs, not much research got done: "there were always so many other little tasks that had to be undertaken first that i never got going with the slow, tortuous work that is academic research." Sound familiar?

The chapter on speed documents our "history of acceleration" with these headings:

speed is an addictive drug: "Unless we understand how speed functions, what it adds and what it removes, we are deprived of the opportunity to retain slowness where it is necessary"
speed leads to simplification
speed creates assembly line effects
speed leads to a loss of precision
speed demands space: "the great scarce resource for all purveyors of information - from advertisers to authors - is the attention of others."
speed is contagious: "If one gets used to speed in some areas, the desire for speed will tend to spread to new domains."

There's a lot of thought-provoking material here for those who are trying to swim against the cultural stream of ever-accelerating life. Unless we learn to focus on what's truly important (which is rarely in the present tyrannical moment), we're unlikely to live like the One who said He finished the work the Father gave Him to do (John 17:4).

Maintaining a On-line Reading List

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 00:46:25 GMT

A post by John Udell pointed me to AllConsuming, a site that scans weblogs looking for Amazon/B&N/etc. references, to see what people are reading. You can also maintain your reading list there, and they'll generate a little javascript to make a nice display for your blog.

Given the stability of the reading lists over the last few time periods, though, i wondered how many people were really being scanned. I couldn't find any of my books there.

New Blogos Category: Reading

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 14:09:33 GMT

I'm adding a new category to my blog for what i'm reading. I don't often add categories, because i don't want to splinter information, and Radio Userland doesn't yet offer a great mechanism for managing a full ontology's worth of topics (though Dave is interested in that these days, and Tucows has a new service which might support something like this).

But this is a deliberate attempt to help me focus more attention on information of lasting, rather than transient, value. Of course, i read lots of things every day: my threshold here will be things that are too much to be read in one sitting. So other blogs, magazine and newspaper articles, technical papers, and the like are off limits. That mostly means books, though it's not the number of pages but the time commitment required that's the real determiner.

I had thought seriously about only posting here about a book once i finish it: one of my character flaws is that i'm much better at initiation than completion (that's a strength too, of course). But i want to be able to build my responses to books incrementally, rather than hoard them all up for an end (that may, after all, never come, either because i get distracted and don't finish the book, or because some other initiation will have stolen my attention by then). I'll try to also post what's currently being read (as opposed to what's on my bedside table, usually a much larger list).

I can't possibly go back to things i've read even earlier this year, or i'll get hopelessly bogged down. I'm just going to focus on moving forward. Maybe i'll include what's on the top of my reading stack, if i find a good way to manage it.

Maybe this category will only matter to me, providing a memory and mechanism to see how i'm growing in knowledge: that's still good enough for me.