The Trans-Scribe

New post on my Library blog: Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope #bookreview

Bibliographic Info 

From WorldCat Title:  William Shakespeare's Star Wars: verily, a new hope. Author:  Ian Doescher; Daniel Davis; Jonathan Davis, (Narrator); January LaVoy; Marc Thompson; Publisher:  New York : Books on Tape, 2013. Edition/Format:  Audiobook : Fiction : English Genre/Form:  Adaptations, Parodies, imitations, etc Material Type:  Fiction, Audio book, etc. Document Type:  Sound Recording ISBN:  9780804191807 0804191808 OCLC Number:  869549899 Duration: 3 hr., 29 min. Performer(s): Read by Daniel Davis, Jonathan Davis, January LaVoy and Marc Thompson. Subjects: Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616 -- Parodies, imitations, etc. Star wars (Motion picture) -- Adaptations. Star Wars fiction.

Background

Being a good librarian who's always looking to improve, I attended the American Library Association's (ALA) Annual conference last summer (2017) in Chicago. It was an absolute blast! It was also my first ALA Annual since I didn't exactly have the means to attend before this past summer. While I heard my colleagues tell stories of the grand buffet of books to be consumed, I really was not ready for it. Some of these stories include an instance when a colleague packed boxes for the books they intended to pick up at the conference. These boxes were not going to fly back with her, they were headed back to Miami via the UPS store. Now that's what I call planning for a conference. Opening night at the exhibition hall is like turning children loose in a candy store or turning teenagers loose at a Cici's pizza. Free books for librarians, uh-YES! As luck would have it, I saw this set of William Shakespeare's Star Wars audiobooks as I was about to plunge into the children's section. I probably tripped a few fellow bibliophiles and momentarily lost a colleague, but I scored this impressive tome. It was not until later on that I inspected the cover at my hostel. (Yes, I stayed in a hostel in Chicago for 5 days this past summer.) This was not just a single title, but a trilogy--the original (IV, V & VI) Trilogy at that! What a score! Three titles in one relatively compact case. I knew this would be awesome!

Review

New post from my religious blog: All Your Strength: The antihero

Samson: The Antihero

A cautionary tale When I embarked on this study several years ago, I intended to seek the scriptures for a positive example of each command (heart, mind, soul, strength). Sadly, the Bible doesn't go out of it's way to fabricate success stories. Sometimes we need to learn from failure. When thinking of strength in the Bible, you have to think of Samson. There really is no one who compares to the lore of Samson's strength. Sure, Caleb is a close second. He did conquer the land of Giants in his generational twilight years. But Samson is the icon of strength--it is the thing for which he is known. It was also his downfall. Samson is an interesting case study. We have 4 episodes of his life. Four snippets of a 20-year ministry. (Or 40-year ministry depending on you interpretation of the two verses stating he judged Israel for 20-years.) This begs the following question:

What if...

What if God decided that your four biggest failures were more important to posterity than the remainder of a successful ministry? What would your weaknesses be? Samson's Achilles heel was women and pride. What are yours? Where are the weak points in your love for the Lord?

I would not like that and I doubt anyone would feel comfortable writing down their failures for the world to see. I've seen many people lay into Samson. I've seen precious few who use Samson's life as a mirror reflecting the human condition--a condition inside me/you--right back at them.

A Revealing Prayer

It's easy to gloss over Samson's prayer in Judges 15:18-20. After all, he just fought with the jawbone of a donkey! But it is his first prayer in the narrative, and it reveals some interesting details.

Consciousness: He acknowledges God's work through him.

Relation: He considers himself God's servant, even if his behavior is inconsistent.

Victory: He recognizes the enemy and desperately wants to avoid falling victim to the enemy.

I think these elements, if we're honest, can be found in our prayers.We know what to say to God. Sometimes we actually believe what we say. However, we fall so short. We don't have the strength.

The First Step...

So where are we? How can we live a successful life and love the Lord with all our strength? I guess our first step is to realize our weakness. We must admit that the strength we have in the flesh is not enough, though we wish it were.

The next step is to acknowledge the desire we have within us to please God. And to realize that this desire is likely only there because God placed it in us to begin with. Note the frequency with which "The Spirit of the Lord" comes upon Samson. It's not something he prays for or waits on, it's something that takes hold of him. 

At first, it comes upon him for every mighty act. But, slowly, it becomes replaced by his own strength. Finally, in the case of Delilah, he doesn't even realize that the Spirit of the Lord was not with him. It is a sad state of affairs that has direct correlation with the ability of a believer to grieve the Holy Spirit.

New post from my religious blog: Bible Map Viz: The Pauline Epistles

Bible Map Viz: The Pauline Epistles

In getting ready for an overview of the first Epistle to the Corinthian church, I decided to create an all-out visualization of this data to complement my Bible Maps. Hope you enjoy it! I also like feedback. So if you have any information to share, I'd love to incorporate it. As with my other visualization, here's the link if the embed code doesn't pan out. It gets kinda crunched in Blogger sometimes... Bible Map Viz: The Pauline Epistles

New post from my religious blog: Little Flock. Large Transfiguration Data Visualization and Digital Scholarship is HUGE in my profession. So I thought I'd play around with Tablaeu and some data I came across on the development of the Little Flock and other hymnals used by the Plymouth Brethren. If the embed doesn't play nice in the post, check out the viz on it's own here: http://tabsoft.co/2nOIQW9

New post from my religious blog: 3 Fold Nature of Man I'm getting ready for Sunday morning, when I will be preaching on the third part of my series on the Greatest Commandment: The Soul. Here is a little graphic to which I will refer during the message.

New post on my Library blog: Facebook for News. A Rant

A Little Rant

Do you go to Facebook for news? One of the big stories that keeps clogging my email feeds is the controversy that Facebook is now engulfed in regarding fake news that influenced this years election. Never mind the whole "Silicon Valley is Anti-Trump" line that would actually imply that they would have used their influence to push the election in the other direction if that's what they intended to do. Here's the thing, why would you go to Facebook for news? I understand that the sharing of links can be helpful. I also understand that trending topics can help keep people informed of what others are saying and doing, but c'mon, man! Facebook for news? I don't even trust that my friend's photos aren't doctored/filtered/posed to high heavens. Why would you trust Facebook friends for news during an election when so many emotions run high and everyone is divided into one of two camps. (Although you could argue for four camps: 1) For Him, 2) For Her, 3) Against Him, 4) Against Her) Everybody is pushing some agenda.

Curated Content

New post from my religious blog: The Flying Inn. G.K. Chesterton #bookreview

The Book

The Flying Inn G. K. Chesterton I saw this book on a friend's GoodReads list and decided that since I like Chesterton I'd give it a try. As a bonus, since Chesterton's works are in the public domain, I was able to get the book free of charge (and you can too!). So there really is no excuse for not cozying up with a little G. K. Chesterton. To add to my bonus, I scored an audiobook from LibriVox. If you are not familiar with LibriVox, you can go to their website. In short, people volunteer to record books in the public domain and distribute them. You can actually subscribe to a book in your favorite podcast app and listen to it that way! NOTE: While this is not a review of LibriVox, and beggars really can't be choosers, but note that when you subscribe to a LibriVox audiobook you are at the mercy of the readers who volunteered. Some readers are top notch. Some should be encouraged to volunteer to do other things. Some need better equipment if they plan to continue doing this type of work. Enough on this. Overall it's a great service you should totally look into!

The Review

G. K. Chesterton was bold, brash and british. He writes with the dry wit one commonly associates with his type. As a result, it takes some time to acclimate to his prose if you are completely unfamiliar with his writing. But once you get used to it, there are many gems embedded in his writings. The premise of The Flying Inn is that the English government is slowly being infiltrated by a group of Muslim extremists while in the process of enforcing the Temperance Movement. Inns (pubs/taverns) can only sell alcohol if they retain their sign as an inn, something that law enforcement has been restricting. Enter Humphrey Pump, hero of the story. Pump is an innkeeper who owns and operates The Old Ship. After a scuffle with Lord Ivywood, Pump and Captain Patrick Dalroy grab their sign, rum and cheese and canvas the countryside serving liquor under their traveling sign. The pair effectively executes their subversion by finding other such loopholes throughout the story as the law becomes more and more restrictive.

The Conclusion

New post from my religious blog: Screwtape Letters #bookreview

The Book

The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis As is my tradition, I try to read a C.S. Lewis Signature Classic every year. This year, the lot fell on The Screwtape Letters.

The Review

The Screwtape Letters serves as a window to the correspondence between a young devil and his affectionate uncle naed Screwtape. Being a novice tempter, he seeks advice to properly ruin his assigned human being. Screwtape offers his advice in letter form. You only read what Screwtape has written throughout the entire book. This is another example of Lewis' masterful work. This is still my least favorite of his works due to the limitations of the format. Although, it can be argued that the format he chose was apropos to the subject matter. It would have been far more difficult to get all the content into a tradional prose-style work of fiction. Note that since this is a collection of letters, the chapters are really small. This makes it a great on-the-go read when you are not sure if you have 30 minutes or just 5 to get a chapter in. Content wise, Screwtape generally advises to use current culture as a means to distract the human through life. It does not matter which side of any issue the mortal takes, so long as he confuses it for Christianity. Extremism, whether it be extreme pacifism or extreme warmongering, is really the goal. Below are a few of my favorite bits of Screwtape's awful advice:

It is funny how mortals always picture us putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out. (p 16)

The safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. (p 61)

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakeably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. (p 64)

Parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in a kind of unity that the Enemy desires. (p 81)

The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin they already had... The 'Gospels' come later and they were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made. (p 126)

[Substitute] negative unselfishness for the Enemy's positive Charity. You can, from the outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in foregoing them. (p 141)

Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is important thus to cut every generation off from all the others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. (p 151)

The Conclusion

New post from my religious blog: Retrieving the Tradition & Renewing Evangelicalism #bookreview

The Book

Retrieving the Tradition & Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants D.H. Williams This is the second in a series of books recommended by a colleague centered around a discussion on Sola Scriptura and it's validity as a protestant argument. While an older work (published in 1999), it still holds an important conversation around several pertinent questions of tradition and the Church's catholicity.

The Review

As another scholarly piece, the text is not readily accessible. That is, if you are not familiar with Patristics or any Church history, you may get a little lost. Sadly, D.H. Williams is keenly aware of the fact that most Protestants, particularly Free Church Protestants are out of touch with the history of the church. He apologizes right away for all the historical discussion he must have in order to prove his points and advises unfamiliar readers to catch up on the topic. Once critique I have at this point is the lack of supplemental material to help with the historical part of his argument. There is a lot of text when a chart or timeline could have provided a nice visual to go with the sentences and paragraphs explaining the flow from the Apostles to the Church Fathers. He argues that, historically speaking, the Church Fathers arose sequentially and naturally from the Apostolic age. A chronology could have illustrated this point powerfully and elegantly. In addition to a seamless transition from the Apostles to the Church Fathers, Williams argues against the notion of Constantinian corruption, explains the place of councils and creeds and discussed how Luther and the Reformers protected Patristics as a guide to Orthodoxy. However, William's main point centers around the fact that Scripture does not live in isolation. We have Sacred Scripture because Church Tradition venerated and preserved it. Conversely, whatever was proposed as Church Tradition was first measured by Sacred Scripture as part of acceptance. The two go hand-in-hand and could not be separated. Tradition (capital T) is different than tradition (lower case t), which can also be called mere custom. Scripture itself refers to the Traditions that were being "passed down". In fact, the term "passed down", Williams points out, is a form of the word translated "tradition". Hence, Tradition refers to how the Church interprets and hands down doctrine from generation to generation. In other words: Jesus teaches the Apostles who pass the teaching on to the next generation of believers who encounter challenges to the faith and draw from the teaching to answer said challenges. Doctrine is synonymous with Tradition in the sense that it is the extraction and communication of a coherent system of belief based on the Bible. Without Tradition, doctrines of the Church must be re-formed and re-argued while heretical beliefs will need to be re-refuted. Things that are settled in orthodox teaching will be up for grabs once again. I close this out with the following quote from the text:

Whereas Scripture does indeed define the center of gravity of the true faith, it does not set the limits of its reading or knowledge. The Reformers' appeal to scriptural sufficiency was crafted on the assumption that the Bible was the book on the church's faith. That faith of the church, New Testament and patristic, was seen as contiguous with the biblical narrative, so that the only proper way to read the Bible was within the framework of the church's teaching and practice. (Williams, 200)

The Conclusion