Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Starting Summer, Useful URLs

The spring semester at Amarillo College is long gone. Students were taking their final exams two weeks ago, and Commencement ceremonies were held on Friday, May 15th.

The week after that, I'd been preparing to teach a summer section of Introduction to World Religions. It was to have started yesterday. But hardly anyone had signed up for the class and it wound up being canceled late last week.

It's not like I don't have anything to do, though. Here's a bit of what's going on in my world:
  • Last Sunday, I visited the little Church of Christ at Adrian, Texas. What a great group of people. When you go to Adrian, you teach the Sunday morning adult class and preach during the morning worship. Then, you go home for lunch with one of church families and, then, preach again at 4:00. It's a full day in the country.
  • Tonight, at The Colonies Church of Christ, I'll finish out a series of lessons on the Psalms. We'll close with Psalm 137.
  • Of course, a few projects around the Bible Chair are waiting to be done.
  • Next Monday, we start a nightly Vacation Bible School at San Jacinto. As usual, I get to lead the opening and closing assemblies.
  • At the end of next week it's off to Connecticut where I'll get to spend a little over a week.

- - - - - -

Every once in a while, I spend some time searching (not surfing) the Web for sites that I can use and recommend to my students and people who show up at this blog. Here's some of the better stuff I've recently seen for the first time:

1. A complete, searchable Greek New Testament edited by Westcott and Hort. Yes, that's an old edition of the Greek text. But most of the differences between this and newer editions are few and insignificant. What I really like about this on-line edition is that you can click on any Greek word and get a ton of grammatical information about it. One odd thing about this page is that the NT books are listed alphabetically.

2. Here's the English version of the official website of the Vatican. Want to look around? The homepage has a search window. I typed in celibacy and, later, Vatican II and came up with dozens of hits for each. Interesting stuff.

3. You might also check out the searchable Yale Divinity Digital Image and Text Library. By going to this site, you get both the image database for biblical studies plus the image and text database for Christian history. Thinking about biblical studies, I searched for Crete and came up with several photos (along with descriptions). Predictably, searching under Ephesus gave me even more hits. Turning to Christian history, Campbell brought up nothing (ironic for some Church of Christ people), but Geneva rendered several hits, and Luther dozens.

What are some of the more interesting or useful websites you've recently discovered?

1 comment:

Lannie Cox said...

Ah, how many have pailed in the face of PS 137: 8-9. Isn't this one of the greatest testimonies to the truth of God and the Bible. No editors pen made those lines quietly disappear. This is one we should claim and lean into. This line from C. S. Lewis, for me, takes all the air out of any thing critics would say to stain God's honor: "lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us."

When I have spoke about PS 137 a few things I have brought up: There are, at least, more than 60 laments in the psalms, obviously, something very relevant to our experience as people. I like to show Num 11:11; Jer 20:7; PS 22 and the words of Jesus to showcase how we don't need to have our feelings squared away before praying: quite the opposit.

Good links as well in this post. I'm always looking for full texts online. Facilitates reading them for me. Thanks.