Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

  • Fedora makes rapid progress

    Some statistics on the growth of Red Hat’s Fedora community-driven Linux distribution for web serving. Of interest to me as I used to administer and use some Red Hat web servers, though with Mac OS X on the desktop now I tend to use that for testing web stuff (e.g. various flavours of Movable Type are installed locally for testing and potentially to maintain a personal blog/database of research information).

    Anyway, see Netcraft: Fedora makes rapid progress

    For a breakdown of web servers by server type see March 2005 Web Server Survey Finds 60 Million Sites.

  • CiteULike

    AKMA : You want this points to the free CityULike service for organising references and citations online, as well as forming virtual communities around research interests. The experimental import from BibTex format looks helpful as does the ability to set up watch lists on various journals.

  • Stanley Grenz (RIP)

    Progressive evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz died of a massive brain aneurism about 4am 12th March. I first encountered Grenz’s work in the class “Gospel in Post-Christian Society” when his primer on postmodermism was prescribed reading. Over the years I’ve picked up various of his books, and have used bits of his understanding of the imago Dei in my own research. His book co-authored with Roger Olson “Who needs theology? An invitation to the study of God” is recommended to my students as a good example of someone who holds that theology is essentially linked with pastoral ministry. Much of my own theological journey has been accompanied by his writing – challenging me and getting me thinking about theology.

    I’d always wanted to meet him. Praying for his family, friends, colleagues and students.

  • Amazon patent thinks pink

    Disturbing. Very disturbing. Oh well, all those Amazon affiliate/associate links on people’s blogs probably aren’t contributing to the evil empire, are they? The irony of a blog pushing gender-equity having links to Amazon products that might suggest gender stereotyped gift-wrapping.

    Amazon patent thinks pink | CNET News.com

  • The Liberating Image

    Reading this paper this morning and this quote stuck out,

    Humanity created in God’s image-and the church as the renewed imago Dei-is called and empowered to be God’s multi-sided prism in the world, reflecting and refracting the Creator’s brilliant light into a rainbow of cultural activity and socio-political patterns that scintillates with the glory of God’s presence and manifests his reign of justice.

    Middleton, J. Richard. “The Liberating Image? Interpreting the Imago Dei in Context.” Christian Scholar’s Review 24, no. 1 (1994): 8-25.

    Middleton doesn’t really unpack how the church is the renewed image of God in the article beyond the it being the rule of Christian life. The bulk of the paper being a call for theologians to take the OT consensus about the image seriously but I imagine his new book will flesh out the “body of Christ” metaphor in relation to the image of God in more detail.

  • Wiki Becomes a Way of Life

    Wiki Becomes a Way of Life has been linked to over the blogosphere in the last few days. I’m happy there are other people out there like me.

  • No Sweat sneakers

    Walking in the local mall today I saw the local Trade Aid shop (Asanti) had a big sign up for Trade Aid : No Sweat sneakers.

    Its here! the only 100% union made sneaker in the world! Sweat shop free from Jakarta, Indonesia where it is union made instead of Nike owned. Fair Trade for a fair price – Buy yours today and help us make history.

    Anybody know anything about them? Anybody have a pair? (I see there’s more information at No Sweat Stuff (Australia)

  • Reclaiming the office

    Today will be spent attacking the cupboards in the office at home in order to reclaim some storage space. Primarily that will involve going through the boxes of computer parts, old software that hasn’t been used in years and the nest of cables and creating a pile to get rid of to a good home. With the new space a better storage area than the floor becomes available for files, papers and books.

    I’m a magpie when it comes to hoarding stuff that might be useful one day. Truth be told though the parts are probably of far more use to others than me at the moment.

  • Justin in Cyberspace

    I spent a large chunk of today checking some of my footnotes in the section I wrote 18 months ago on the theological interpretation of the image and likeness of God in Christian history. All fine until my footnote for a reference to Justin Martyr arguing that the human body was valuable in God’s sight was incomplete – Lost Fragments should have read Fragments of the Lost Work of Justin on the Resurrection. Erk. Spent a while skimming Lost Fragments wondering what I was on when I wrote that part.

    Somewhat ironically, for the missing reference speaks of a rejection of those who would spurn the earthly life, the answer was found on the internet. Incarnational, embodied reference found excarnationally. Here’s the source I used to find it: www.earlychristianwritings.com/. Tomorrow I’ll go to the library and haul out a paper tome to peer at.

  • Last of the summer milk

    For years and years we’ve been getting our milk delivered to our house by the local milkman. Just put out the appropriate plastic token and at about 5pm there’s milk in the letterbox. Tomorrow that all ends when they make their last delivery to our street. Apparently there aren’t enough of us left having home delivery in this area to make it worth their while delivering here. It’s been great. With our milk consumption being high through the children and entertaining it’s always been reassuring to know that several times a week we can stock up without having to make a trip to the supermarket or dairy.

    As a child I remember bread being delivered the same way, and when we came to NZ and lived out Templeton way near Christchurch way back in the early 70’s the butcher would turn up in his van every few days or so. Where Kim grew up the milk was delivered by horse float (even up until we got married). So it feels like something good is now missing in the weekly routine. I guess advocates of the market economy will argue that it’s cheaper and there’s more range at a our local supermarket but it was nice to have some sort of ongoing relationship with the deliverers. Plus when you try to only shop fortnightly at the supermarket (vegetables and fruit from the local greengrocer) it’s a pain to go more than you need to.