My blog has posts going back over 11 years and the archive of posts by month in my sidebar was getting very much out of hand. In the search for a more compact way of displaying the monthly archive a plugin was born.
Compact Archive displays the monthly archive of posts in two compact forms. It can be shown as a block suitable for the body of an archives page, e.g.:
10 comments October 29th, 2006
Recent Comments Version 2.0.0 beta is now available. Largely rewritten, it includes better retrieval of comments, some new options and many more possible styles of display. Version 2 now has its own page where future developments will be documented.
Comments are now closed for this post but can be added to the new page.
8 comments October 26th, 2006
Recent Posts Version 2.0.0 beta is now available. Largely rewritten, it includes some new options and many more possible styles of display. Version 2 now has its own page where future developments will be documented.
Comments are now closed for this post but can be added to the new page.
26 comments October 26th, 2006
Random Posts Version 2.0.0 beta is now available. Largely rewritten, it includes some new options and many more possible styles of display. Version 2 now has its own page where future developments will be documented.
Comments are now closed for this post but can be added to the new page.
10 comments October 26th, 2006
I’ve uploaded a new version of Similar Posts. It allows you to exclude particular authors (if you have a multi-author blog), to specify the text that is shown when no matches are found, and to display the output as, for example, a comma-separated sequence rather than a html list.
Previous versions of Similar Posts used an option page as the sole method of governing its behaviour. This version lets you override those options on a case-by-case basis with a query-style parameter, e.g., <?php similar_posts('limit=3') ?> limits the output to three posts. The new scheme allows you to use Similar Posts in several different places in you blog with different behaviour. For example, you might want to display a few similar posts under each post on your home page and also have a longer list in the sidebar of your single pages.
Add comment October 26th, 2006
Readings: Ephesians 2:12-22; Luke 12:35-38
Paul is falling over himself with metaphors today, mixing and matching like crazy, but all to one end: the urgent communication of a distance dwindled to nothing.
In Christ, foreign has become familiar. In Christ, two become one. In Christ, distance becomes closeness; hostility, harmony; war, peace.
2 comments October 24th, 2006
That’s the title the London Review of Books gives Terry Eagleton’s savaging of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It’s a guilty pleasure to read something as well-written (pleasure) and scathing (there’s the guilt). He begins:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
1 comment October 22nd, 2006
Readings: Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45
I was watching a rerun of the West Wing the other evening, right back from the first series, and there was President Bartlett delivering an impassioned pep-talk to his daughter Zoë. She was about to leave for College and the passion flowed as the president grappled for words, trying to find how to say what he felt he needed to say. Here was his youngest about to step beyond the limits of his protection into an unsafe world and he wanted to say all that was in his heart of care and concern, of advice and admonition, of what to do and what not to do, who to know and who not to know—above all of who to be. All the stuff that needs to be said, yet cannot be said, but somehow is heard.
I remember being on the receiving end of just such a heart-to-heart—embarrassing and baffling and touching. To hear my father’s pride in me and his doubt and to see a strange vulnerability come over him as I realised the depth of my power to hurt him and the power of my desire not to. Here he was trying to give me the low-down, the pith of what he wanted for me, the essence of what he held most dear, the lessons he had learned, his fragile legacy of wisdom… for me, his son, to stand me in good stead, to make me a man.
Add comment October 22nd, 2006
Sweetgrass is used by certain Native American tribes as a kind of incense. Dried and braided, lit and snuffed, it smoulders with a sweet smoke that is used in ‘smudging’, blessing a person and making a space for prayer. I had the good fortune to worship on the reservation several times when I was in the US and smudging always feels to me like washing your spirit in the sweet smoke. My smudging ‘stick’ has long expired but I still treasure the story of its picking. It was given to me by a friend from the Oregon Province of the Jesuits, JK Adams, and he told me about being taken out to pick sweetgrass while he was supplying as priest in Browning, Montana (I think–it might have been Heart Butte).
It’s not something you do lightly and the places where sweetgrass grows are not bandied about. You go at invitation and you go with some ritual and intent but not in a ponderous way. When you reach the place you ask that you might be able to see and find the unassuming grass. And then the hard part begins. It’s hard because its so easy. You mustn’t look for the sweetgrass. If you look for it you don’t find it. JK swears this is how it is. You have to be there and to walk around carefully not looking for the sweetgrass and if you are lucky you will glimpse some from the corner of your eye and then you can cut some. But you can’t make it appear by hunting for it. It has to come to you and show itself. It will not be possessed.
1 comment October 21st, 2006
Thanks to the University of Cambridge the complete works of Charles Darwin are now available online and very popular, amassing 150,000 hits in 11 days. You can see facsimiles of his Beagle notebooks. It makes me very happy to see how bad his handwriting was…
The Independent today printed some extracts and got Richard Dawkins to write an appreciation of ‘one of the most admirable men that ever lived’.
1 comment October 20th, 2006
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