_awakening

Speaking of the Canon...

Here's a useful interactive "Canon Comparison Chart" from Vincent Setterholm of Logos [click on image]. It's an easy way of seeing what is and is not in each of the major canonizations of the scriptures. Included are the canons of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Protestant. One major learning here is that even when you are talking about the scriptures, not everyone is following the same canon.

[HT: Biblical Studies and Technological Tools]

Online Helps.

Recently a few new search engines directly related to academics and scholarly research have appeared on the web.If you are looking for research in the area of biblical studies, these sites might be of some help. RefSeek is fully functioning at this point, while RefEx is still in the development phase. Below are the descriptions from each of the websites.

RefSeek (rĕf-sēk) is a web search engine for students and researchers. RefSeek aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.

Reference Extract is envisioned as a web search engine, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, unlike other search engines, Reference Extracts will be built for maximum credibility by relying on the expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe. Users will enter a search term and get results weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the State of Maryland, and over 1,400 libraries worldwide. This grant will support planning for Reference Extract and building the foundation necessary to implement it as a large-scale, general user service.

[HT: Mark Hoffman at Biblical Studies and Technological Tools]

Faith and the iPhone.

Unless you've been living in a cave, the date of June 29th should be etched into your subconscious. It's the day that Apple finally releases the new iPhone [pause for a moment of reverence].

Anyway, with all the hype over the release you knew it was just a matter of time... the exploration of the endless connections between the iPhone and faith has begun. Today Andrew Sullivan tipped off his readers to this article on the faith and the newly approaching iPhone. Here's a sample...

Message here? The quest for, and appreciation of, beauty still exists in the world—and a bitten-into piece of fruit marks its vanguard.

As an amateur architecture buff I see a parallel at work. While the modernist project in design sought to exalt utilitarianism, banishing what it saw as a superfluous emphasis on the "decorative," the post-modern movement has restored the balance, as if to say, "Sure, functionality is helpful, but in our focus on function the uplift of something bigger went missing."

There's an analogy of faith in this. People want to belong to something that makes greatness manifest in our own time, a movement that can show beauty and achievement as more than just traits of the past. If that weren't true, today's masses wouldn't go to the ends of the earth—or, alternatively, blow thousands of bucks after keeping vigil all night on a strip-mall pavement—to it seek out, bring it home and plug it in.

As far as some of our own are concerned, man's expression of his God-given creativity halted sometime around 1570. But just as there'd be no internet without Gutenberg and no iPhone without Bell, tradition's clock never stops ticking. It extends even into our own time and becomes our responsibility to cultivate, grow and pass forward even richer than we found it, but just as faithful to its beginnings as it was before.

Soularize Podcast.

The Soularize Podcast is up and running. Here's the upcoming festivities...

Andrew Jones, blogger extraordinaire, is on tomorrow - Wednesday, June 13th at 11am PST.

Margaret Feinberg, author of the recently released The Organic God, will be on Wednesday, June 20th at 11am PST.

If you'd like to be on the live conference call, the phone number is 218.486.1300 and the bridge number is 900438. Enjoy.

Inbreaking.

Okay, let's admit it. There's a ton of blogs out there. So here's the big question... Is there a way can you sift through the mounds of words to find the jems? Yes, yes there is.

John Chandler has put together Inbreaking.com - a social bookmarking website where you can find links to noteworthy posts pertaining to the emerging and missional church. Here's how it works. Anyone can register and submit a link to noteworthy piece of posting. Once a link is submitted it is voted upon by other registered users. If it receives enough "votes" it is published on the front page. [If you want a more indepth look at how to use Inbreaking, you can check out What can you do on Inbreaking.com?]

Things like Inbreaking get better and better when more users register and decide to use it. More users = more submissions = more noteworthy leads = blogging happiness! So take a moment and register... right now... and submit away!