TED curator Chris Anderson has an article in Harvard Business Review (2013) that seeks to digest key presentation advice derived from the past several decades of TED’s work. Perhaps not all Anderson’s advice is appropriate to the genre of the academic conference paper, but doubtless a good many would substantially benefit from a healthy dose of some of the advice he offers.
...To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James Version in 2011, Crossway released an edition of the English Standard Version’s Gospels illuminated by Makoto Fujimura ( cloth, leather). A short introduction to the project is available below (HT: Bryant Owens):
...The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:
Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Studies
New Testament and Cognate Studies
...According to the New York Times,
...Random House and Penguin completed their planned merger Monday morning, creating the biggest and most powerful book publisher in the world.
The new company, called Penguin Random House, will control more than 25 percent of the trade book market in the United States, giving it unmatched leverage against Amazon.com, a growing force in the industry.
After about an 8-year term, Pope Benedict XVI is apparently set to resign on February 28, citing health difficulties. For more information and the NBC report from earlier this morning, see here.
Codex Bezae with text Luke 23:47–24:1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Logos Bible Software is now taking $0.00 pre-orders for their upcoming edition of Codex Bezae. Among the manuscript’s noteworthy characteristics,
...It is the oldest-known manuscript containing the story of the adulterous woman found in John 7–8, as well as a longer ending of the Gospel of Mark. There are also several apparent additions, including a story found nowhere else of Jesus addressing a man found working on the Sabbath.
After several years’ blogging at jdavidstark.com, the site has now moved into its own domain at jdavidstark.com. All of the site’s links and RSS feeds should redirect automatically. But, you may see somewhat faster service by coming directly to jdavidstark.com or subscribing directly to jdavidstark.com/feed/rss/.
...Jim Davila notes a report of a new German bill that explicitly permits the continued practice of infant male circumcision on religious grounds. The legality of the practice in Germany had been thrown into question by a related decision by the Cologne court earlier this year.
And you haven’t completed your optional profile information, you should. Apparently, doing so makes you eligible for a random monthly selection of two members to receive a year’s free membership dues.
University of Oxford (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Oxford University Classics Faculty’s PINAX “is a digital library comprised of collections of displayed papyrus images and texts at Oxford.” Texts include papyri from Antinoopolis, Herculaneum, and Oxyrhynchus, as well as magical texts (HT: Charles Jones).
...ABC News (HT: Michael Bird) and the AFP (HT: Jim Davila) are reporting that the regional court in Cologne, Germany, has rendered a verdict that makes involuntary circumcision on religious grounds illegal, although the practice remains permissible if done for medical reasons. The decision follows on the treatment of a four-year-old Muslim boy for post-operative bleeding and the prosecution of the doctor who had performed the procedure.
...On the web:
Via Michael Bird:
...I’m glad to announce that my Ph.D padwan Adam Copenhaver has passed his doctoral viva. His thesis was: “The Colossian Heresy? An Investigation of the Christological Polemics and Socio-Cultural Background in Colossians.” Adam boldly argued for M.D. Hooker’s position that there was no specific “heresy” or “heretics” in Colossae, and Colossians was written as a general exhortation against a variety of possible religious encroachments against a cluster of house churches in the interior of the Lycus Valley.
On the web:
On the web:
Image representing New York Times as depicted …
Sunday’s New York Times had a disquieting article about a potentially dramatic increase in substance abuse among teens for the sake of improved academic performance:
...The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it.
Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same thing.
The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.
“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.
On the Web:
On the web:
Amid a program with a number of other engaging-looking sessions, Miroslav Volf, founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture will be lecturing next week at Lipscomb University’s Christian Scholars Conference. Further details about the lecture are as follows:
On the web:
English: logo(type) of LibreOffice Deutsch: Lo…
From the Document Foundation Blog:
...The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.4, the fifth version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family. LibreOffice 3.5.4 offers significant performance improvements over the previous versions of the product, which are the combined result of the many code optimizations executed during the last months and the bug and regression chasing activity performed regularly by volunteers and developers. As a result, LibreOffice 3.5.4 is the fastest version of the best free office suite ever, with up to 100% performance gains when opening large files (depending on operating system, hardware configuration and file contents).
On the web:
On the web:
...BibleWorks Manuscript Project [that] allows the user to compare original manuscripts, with high quality digital images of the texts that are fully searchable. . . . BibleWorks 9 includes, among others, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Bezae. These have full transcriptions (and notes), digital images, verse tags, comparison tools, and, though incomplete, some morphological tags (with more to come). Furthermore, the New Testament Critical Apparatus from the Center for New Testament Textual Studies is also included, securing for BibleWorks a place as the preeminent electronic resource for detailed manuscript analysis and textual criticism.
On the web:
On the web:
Socrates in the City has made available Eric Metaxas’s April 9, 2010 lecture that digests his then newly released Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2010). After the introductory farce, the lecture proper commences at about 12:45.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/11208555 w=400&h=300]
...On the web:
Image representing rollApp as depicted in Crun…
For iOS users, rollApp has now graduated into public Beta and is offering iOS-compatible versions of OpenOffice.org (now Apache OpenOffice) and LibreOffice. The LibreOffice app seems to have a bit of difficulty opening files stored on Dropbox, but my own tests thus far with the OpenOffice.org app seem to have worked quite well. Although these apps run entirely on rollApp’s servers, and so require a fairly decent Internet connection to function, they do offer extended support for additional file formats (like ODT) not natively readable in iOS.
...Via Michael Bird:
From Larry Hurtado:
...[A]nother dreadful “thought for today” on Radio 4 this a.m., this one ostensibly taking as its pre-text (and I use the word advisedly) that today is Ascension Day, and opining that Jesus’ Ascension (portrayed solely in Luke-Acts in the NT) means that Jesus has deaked out and we’re on our own! So, children, the moral lesson is that we should just face up to it and learn to cope. Hmm. Well, just goes to show you what the exegetical equivalent of a drive-by-shooting can produce!