Posted on Fri 25 April 2025 in Posts
On Palm Sunday, we sang a hymn new to our parish. This is "By Gracious Powers" and it is a musical arrangement of a poem by Dietrich Bonhoffer. He wrote this poem in a Nazi prison cell where his resistance cost him his life 80 years ago on April 9 …
Posted on Thu 09 September 2021 in Posts
The Revised Common Lectionary for Proper 19B assigns the reading Mark 8:27-38, referred to as the Confession of Peter:
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered …
Posted on Sat 16 May 2020 in Posts
Today protestors will gather at the NH State House for a Christian service and demand to return to large, in-person worship gatherings in their churches. Churches that closed too slowly or opened too quickly soon showed new COVID cases.
If your worship service is harming people, then God does not …
Posted on Sat 11 April 2020 in Posts
See this on GitHub with data updates!
I've been wanting to visualize how cases of COVID-19 in New Hampshire are progressing. The State of New Hampshire puts out a daily updates with this information, but it's in narrative form and scattered across PDF files uploaded daily.
So, I decided to …
Posted on Thu 09 April 2020 in Posts
Picture: Communion service with New England United Methodist Conference, Garden of Gethsemane, February 2020
"Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:31).
As many …
Posted on Fri 03 April 2020 in Posts
Posted on Thu 02 April 2020 in Posts
Palm tree with dates, Mount of Olives, 2020
In the Gospels, Jesus' followers cut palm branches for his way into Jerusalem. In the Bible, palm branches are associated with the celebration of the Festival of Booths or Sukkot (Lev. 23:40).
But the Festival of Booths is a fall festival …
Posted on Mon 23 March 2020 in Posts
Posted on Mon 23 March 2020 in misc
At today's White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Vice President Mike Pence closed his remarks with the words "heal the land." This phrase has a lot of resonance among charismatic evangelical Christians. I'll explain:
The relevant verse here is 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If my people, which are called by …
Posted on Sat 21 March 2020 in Math
A palindromic number is a number that is the same, backwards and forwards, e.g. 12321. It so happens that for almost all numbers, repeatedly adding a number to its reverse eventually produces a palindromic number. For example:
78 + 87 = 165
165 + 561 = 726
726 + 627 = 1353
1353 + 3531 = 4884 …
Posted on Sat 21 March 2020 in Posts
