Announcing the launch of a new website designed to help ministers, ministerial students, and Bible students everywhere. BestCommentaries.com polls the most referenced commentary lists (and throws my own list in for good measure) and provides rankings and reviews. If you know John Dyer, give him a virtual pat on the back for providing a truly useful site for those who love good commentaries. Thanks, John.
Bookmark BestCommentaries.com today.
If you’ve never heard S. M. Lockridge preach the “My King” (also known as the “Do You Know Him”) sermon, you owe it to yourself to visit this site where you can download or listen to an mp3. You can also watch a video slide show with the straight audio (w/o background music other sites add). Enjoy - and Praise God.
(Thanks, 4:14!)
Berean Bible Study is a great, bare bones electronic bible program. It comes loaded with the ESV. The software is simple, intuitive, and small enough to load directly onto a usb flash drive (my key chain). This is a great single minded tool that allows a good reading platform and searchable ESV where ever you are, regardless of internet availability.
We most often think of the ancient world as a completely barbaric place - strictly speaking, it was of course - what with the freedom with which the Romans labeled everyone else, but that is beside the point here. People were not different people back then. They were the same types of people we have now, just in a different cultural and technological situation. It does not surprise me that the ancients had many “advanced” activities, constrained only by their relative technology.
Case in point, Roman doctors performed cataract surgery:
“Interestingly the Roman author Celsus described cataract extraction surgery using a specially pointed needle - and possible cataract needles (specilla) have been found in Britain as well as elsewhere in the Roman Empire.”
If you are one of those people who stay up at night stressing over what exactly the apostle Paul’s thorn in the side was, perhaps now you can rule out cataracts, since there was apparently a remedy for that. Just trying to be helpful…
For the past 17 years, the Italian government has funded the excavation of a Roman doctor’s house - the Domus del Chirurgo (House of the Surgeon). An interesting read for a student of the Bible if you first consider that Luke (who wrote the Gospel) is widely considered to have been a physician during this time.
From the article:
An ancient doctor’s surgery unearthed by Italian archaeologists has cast new light on what a trip to the doctor would have been like in Roman times. Far from crude, the medical implements discovered show that doctors, their surgeries and the ailments they treated have changed surprisingly little in 1,800 years.
Sore joints were common, patients were often told to change their diets, and the good doctor of the seaside town of Rimini even performed house calls.
“This is the largest find of surgical instruments anywhere,” said Dr Ralph Jackson, the curator of the Romano-British collection at the British Museum and an expert in ancient medicine.
Are the tools found similar to the tools Luke carried with him while he traveled on missionary journeys with the apostle Paul? Did the physician follower of Jesus attempt some of these methods to help Paul with his famous unknown ailment? Fascinating.
Pro-life ethicists have been riding the wave of success lately with the proof of pluripotency from adult (not embryonic) stem-cells. In spite of several Hollywood types’ vigorous endorsements of destroying embryonic human life in a hoped-for attempt to save other full-grown human lives, researchers have found a more immediately useful and ethically better potential for medical solutions in these adult stem cells.
These discoveries should serve as an abrupt warning and highly visible illustration that ethical does not equal anti-science. Ryan T. Anderson writes a Weekly Standard opinion piece commending the bravery and vision of President Bush on this issue. Discovery News also reports that sickle-cell mice have already been cured by this technology using stem-cells derived from their own tails. Not a single therapeutic method has been developed or is in trial from embryonic stem cells.
Bioethics is a frightening field in an age of such advanced technology. We are beyond making better tomato plants - we are now discussing making “better” people. It is time more of those who consider themselves the cultural elite begin listening to the cautious voices who, while not trying to impede progress, nonetheless caution, “Just because we can do something, does not mean that we should do something.” The result of the “stem-cell wars” demonstrates that we can still conduct ethical scientific inquiry. We can both enjoy progress and honor the dignity of all human life.
Tony Kummer has added some new tools for the Said at Southern Network. The best new tool (imho) is the Network Search box. It is a Google custom search engine defined to only search Said at Southern linked blogs and resources. This way, you can search within a relatively narrow field for topics where you’d like some information from those with the mindset represented by faculty, alumni, and students of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Yes, of course it is not your only search tool - by all means open yourself up to the wider web community. However, this search tool will be incredibly valuable searching for book reviews from like-minded reviewers, or in finding a good starting point to think about certain theological topics. If I want to meditate on the Lord’s Supper, I might want to start with the thoughts of those in my own faith tradition, etc.
Overall, it is a great value-added tool capitalizing on Tony’s other tremendous work pulling the Said at Southern blog aggregator together. You can access the search from the sidebar on this site’s homepage or at Said at Southern. Well done!
Many Eyes is a social data-visualization site. They have several cool visualizations of data sets, but have recently added a Word Tree for Genesis (KJV). Check it out.
If you get a chance, take a look at The Pulpit & the Pew by Thad, a fellow Southern grad and pastor in the Western United States (Colorado to be exact). Among his posts are some helpful links and he apparently has good taste in commentary commentators [grin]. He also has the coolest pastor-blog banner graphic I’ve yet seen (sorry Jon).
Just in case you were looking, audio of my sermons are online here at the First Southern Baptist Church of Camp Verde, AZ website.
I’m still new at preaching, so be nice.
Various pop-science shows annually trot out the “oh, look what progress we are making in teaching monkeys to act like us and thus learn something about ourselves from evolution” show. These always bother me with their bold claims that a communicating, “art-loving” primate demonstrates that humans are not really that special after all. I know that the idea is wrong-headed, but do not know enough about the experiments to come up with anything other than biblical-theological reasons why.
This is why I found an interview with Marie I. George (of St John’s University, New York) enlightening and refreshing. She speaks to a few of the more popular “chimps are humans too” arguments from a philosophical perspective and generates thoughts and talking points for the next time I have the “99% human conversation” with someone. A sample from the article:
Again, language for apes is a way of getting things, and of making their trainers happy. It is useful to contrast Helen Keller with the apes that people have tried to teach language. Helen Keller had ideas, but lacked a means of communicating them. Once it clicked with her that the signs Annie Sullivan was making were a means of expressing ideas, she was eager to learn new words and she began carrying conversations which were simple at first, but which gradually increased in complexity.
It was because Helen Keller had ideas that language for her served as a key which unlocked the expression of these ideas, and also allowed her to acquire new ideas. The apes people have tried to teach language to fail to manifest this same progression. The cause underlying this failure is plainly the apes’ lack of abstract thought.
Interestingly, George holds open the possibility that non-human hominids can qualify for human rights - if they display the transcendent characteristics that only humans genuinely display. I’ll close with one of the best quotes from the article: “Apes have a life cycle, they don’t have a life projects, and so there is no reason to accord them rights so that they can pursue their life projects unimpeded.” Sounds compatible with what I also know to be true.
Openbible.info has released a searchable topical Bible that gets better (we hope) the more it is used. There are other topical Bibles online, but this one is dynamically updated and has the ability to improve results through user votes.
The topical Bible combines the Yahoo! and ESV Bible web services to identify topics and find relevant verses. It currently has about 4,000 topics. Searching for a topic that doesn’t exist will automatically add it to the topical Bible, which will then scour the Internet for relevant verses.
You can vote on whether the listed verses are relevant to the topic—or you can suggest new verses. Over time, the topical Bible should become better at identifying what people think the Bible says about a topic.
Try it out: OpenBible Topical Bible.
This is just too, too, too absolutely cool.
1) Download Google Earth. Install the program.
2) Visit Bible Geocoding. Start clicking on stuff.
Dude mapped out every place in the Bible during his spare time. Fly from Bethpage to Jerusalem. Magna cool.
The commentary set is now online! You can access it via the tab at the top of the blog, as well as leave comments. Links to the tab by my friends will be appreciated. Share, and share freely.
