This is doing the rounds of the blogosphere, but is too good not to post:
Benny Hinn and the Force.
Almost as funny as Benny Hinn and the song “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”…
Category: Christianity
Tagxedo: A shapely Wordle
Steve at Communicate Jesus dug this up. Tagxedo. It makes shaped tag clouds. Beautiful.
Here is a dove shaped cloud from the sermon I preached on the Beatitudes for my “trials for license” in Townsville.
How to survive the Rapture (if not raptured)
There are plenty of services for pet care post rapture that you can google. But what do we do about people? Well. For posterity’s sake – this guy recorded a survival guide for the dirt/paper eaters who want to survive post rapture.
How to stop the atheists
Every time you sing this song/prayer an atheist loses his wings. And his Dawkins library.
2010 on St. Eutychus
I missed my end of year wrap up yesterday because I was reading a book. Sorry. But here are some facts, figures and highlights from the year that was.
Stats
In 2009, 31,705 Absolute Unique Visitors made 48,733 Visits, making 82,916 Pageviews
In 2010, 31,869 Absolute Unique Visitors made 52,965 Visits, making 83,668 Pageviews.
At the time of writing I have 78 Facebook fans (become a fan – I’m now sharing links to stuff I don’t blog, or that is in my queue, to Facebook fans ahead of time), and 22 Google Connections.
So small increases across the board – but more importantly. No decreases. Hooray.
In 2009 I posted 1,106 posts here on St. Eutychus. In 2010 I managed 1,434. A 29% increase. And some people said being a college student would slow down my blogging. As it was – I used college as an opportunity to create more content.
My favourite college related series and posts from the year.
1. Some language resources (some for Mac, some for typing on a Mac)
2. Reflections on the “Disciplines of a Godly theological student”
3. My guide to First Year Greek
4. The things I love about College
5. The things I’d change about College
6. My Wisdom Literature Essay (part two, three, four, five, six) – my favourite essay of the year.
7. Pre-exam prep: New Testament 101, New Testament 102, Old Testament 101, Old Testament 102, Church History 101, Hebrew 102
8. Greece and Turkey Report(s).
9. Liveblogging Ben Witherington.
10. Liveblogging Gary Millar (one, two, three, four, five)
My favourite useful posts from this year
1. How to write a Media Release to promote your church event
2. How to talk to Atheists about Christianity
3. Awareness Raising is Overrated, (and the prequel – The Facebook Booby Trap, and the sequel about Movember, and a follow up about Social Media)
4. How to not raise bitter ministry children
5. Social Media Strategies for Churches (and a follow up on Venn Theology)
6. How not to be very good at Facebook
7. My election posts – Julia Gillard’s atheism, my Christian values election scorecard, why I won’t vote for Family First, wrap up.
8. Coffee and ministry.
9. Five cheap ways to exegete your suburb.
10. My Five Steps to Better Coffee series
Many of these are the type of thing I hope to post at Venn Theology this year (2011).
My favourite coffee posts this year
1. Seven Deadly Coffee Sins
2. From Cherry to the Cup – a look at processing and roasting coffee: part one, two, three, four, five
3. Brisbane cafe reviews: Dandelion and Driftwood, Cup, BlackStar
4. The sin of Instant Coffee.
5. Coffee and Ministry
6. A coffee gift guide.
7. Science says “don’t freeze your coffee”
8. How to make Greek Coffee.
9. A beautiful guide to coffee drinks
10. My “Five Steps to Better Coffee” Series
My favourite frivolity
But it wasn’t all serious. Here are some of my favourite posts/series from this year.
1. Ten steps to planting a mega church (with a follow-up “how to name your megachurch“)
2. 23 Bacon products that will take your breath away.
3. Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook.
4. The Devil Wants you Fat (series – that I probably should finish now I have a scanner).
5. Backwards Masking Unmasked (The Jacob Aranza Series)
6. Mad Skillz Week
7. Liveblogging Chuck Norris’ Invasion USA (part 2, part 3, part 4, Robyn’s report).
8. The Make Me A Mexican Challenge
9. About “Hot Wives”
10. About Church Slogans (a bad example).
11. A Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (part one b, part two, part three)
12. The definitive and authoritative guide to the six basic plot lines
13. A look at “Objective Ministries” crazy Christian conspiracy to take over the moon
14. Reverse engineering the perfect chip
15. The Art of Improvised weaponry
16. K-Strass the Yo-Yo guy
Most popular posts in 2010
Here are the most popular posts (mostly because google loves them) by visits this year. A couple of these were written last year and continue to attract a steady stream of traffic.
1. How to make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast (2009), the 2010 follow up was equally popular
2. Five things that would make atheists seem nicer: this accounted for about a quarter of 2009’s traffic. By itself. Not so much in 2010, but still enough to rank second.
3. Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook: This one had a bit of a spike in traffic around publication, but continues to get about 10 hits a day.
4. Ten steps to planting a megachurch: This was one of my favourites, so I’m glad it did well.
5. Chuck Norris Jeans: The little engine that could. Google loves this post.
6. How to get the Facebook Like Button working on WordPress: Certainly my geekiest post of the year.
7. Bible Stories for Boys: Ehud the Left Handed
8. Eight things I’ve learned from arguing with atheists online (and why I’ve mostly given up).
9. Let’s not fly Jetstar: a 2009 post about a Jetstar nightmare.
10. Facebook Login Fail: a little post about a funny story about people googling “facebook login” and landing in the wrong place.
Most popular posts from 2010
A slightly different list – because it does away with a couple of “long tail” posts from last year.
1. Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook
2. Ten steps to planting a megachurch
3. Chuck Norris Jeans
4. How to get the Facebook Like Button working on WordPress
5. Bible Stories for Boys: Ehud the Left Handed
6. Eight things I’ve learned from arguing with atheists online (and why I’ve mostly given up).
7. Facebook Login Fail: a little post about a funny story about people googling “facebook login” and landing in the wrong place.
8. Some Greek and Hebrew Resources
9. How to make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast How to Make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast: The 2010 follow up was equally popular
10. Typographic Moustaches
Thanks for reading.
Jumping for Jesus: Highlights from Christian Fitness TV
Never have the words “we serve a Great God” and “I feel like a pointer dog” been juxtaposed with such poise and dignity.
I’ve posted some Exercise for Jesus videos before. But this one even includes dieting tips.
Each sold separately: Pocket Canon
As a couple of commenters have already pointed out – it turns out my idea was “nothing new” (cf Ecclesiastes). Enter the Pocket Canon series:
Pretty much what I described, only using the KJV. And a bit old (published in 1999). Reasonably priced too – 10 for . $24.95 on Amazon
The good news is, obviously there’s a market for this stuff.
Here’s a glowing review from a blog that’s all about Bible design.
How to lead the singing/interpreting at a Pentecostal Church
There are instructional videos for all sorts of things on YouTube. This one’s a doozy.
If you can stick it out until about 5 minutes – through two gibberish sessions and two vague interpretations that would make Johnathan Edwards (the psychic, not the theologian) proud… you’ll hear that there’s a movement and things are breaking free. And there are vibrations. Things that don’t belong. He says “the right things will remain” – I can only hope that this movement dies a rapid death.
It’s easy to be one of these training facilitators. You don’t have to write your own stuff. You just let the people on the floor do your job for you.
Urgh.
That’s my one-word tongues response to this video.
BibleCloud
This is cool. While doing a little googling for that last post I came across this. It’s called 66 Clouds.
You can buy posters for each book of the Bible – or a coffee table book. It’s exactly what it looks/sounds like. Word clouds of each book of the Bible, get it on Amazon
Obviously you can make your own with wordle.net. Where you can even tweak the colours. But ’tis nice.
An Idea: Bible books sold separately
As I travel the internet defending the veracity of the Bible (most recently in this thread on Steve Kryger’s post on the popular ThePunch.com.au) it’s often struck me that one of the major truths about the Bible that is lost in the noise as the nu-atheists, armed with their well-thumbed copies of tomes by Dawkins and Hitchens (replete with highlighted cliff-notes so that they all sound on message), clamour all over just about any thread that dares to mention God, is that the Bible is actually a collection of volumes. Volumes collated over a great amount of time – and finally signed off by a series of councils in the early years of the church.
One of the Bible’s great strengths against other religious texts is this diversity of authorship and development. The consistency of message and theology demonstrated across the 66 books is impressive (even if some people would rather look for contradictions – contradictions which are usually just poor reading/interpreting of the text – the number of contradictions is hugely overwhelmed by the number of corroborations and overall consistency). So here’s what I’m picturing in my head. It’s a piece of performance art. Of sorts. Perhaps better described as a piece of literary art. And I hereby claim this idea as my own – and if you think it has legs I’d like you to tell me (also, if it doesn’t)…
Here’s what I think we should do.
Design a set of the 66 books of the Bible in separate volumes (one chapter per page to pad out some of the smaller books – and perhaps some “Study Bible” or commentary type notes, just so Jude is publishable…
I’m thinking nice typography and minimalist cover designs (or perhaps designs like these from Jim Le Page), maybe with spines that link together as an image. Good quality printing. It’d probably be expensive. Maybe with an approximate date of composition on each spine (I know this is notoriously hard to pin down).
Image Credit: Jim Le Page, on Flickr.
But what do you reckon? It’d make a nice statement about what the Bible is, and be oddly functional – because you could take a single book to church if you know what the sermon is going to be on in advance… Anybody have any idea what a set of 66 volumes would cost to publish?
Buy Your Plastic Jesus
I’m sure some people could find some use for this commercial for a non-existent Jesus action figure (there are real ones out there).
New Third Eagle Single out now.
Check it. It’s about having children. Surely a sign that the end times aren’t happening just yet…
Fighting the war on Christmas
While I may think that some of the stuff these guys are saying is true – I may even agree with some of their thinking – I don’t think the way to fight the “War on Christmas”TM or put the “Christ back into Christmas” is to take an inflatable Santa to a firing range in order to pump him full of lead.
Dumb.