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 …
Yearly Archives: 2006
Sunday Week 29 Year B
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 ZoĆ«. She was about to leave for College and the passion flowed as the president grappled for words, …
Sweetgrass and Grace
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 …
Darwin Online
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 …
Time Weighing Heavy on Your Hands?
Simpsons’ fan? You could spend many a happy hour … er moment … with the map of Springfield
Roses and Fragility
There was a spell in my prayer a good while ago when Jesus gave me roses. I was drawn over and over to an image of a red rose and my spiritual director helped me stay with that simple experience and trust it. She suggested I let Jesus buy me one. So I did. And …
Similar Posts: Version 1.03
I’ve uploaded a new version of Similar Posts. It allows you to exclude static pages from the list of similar posts and also to exclude posts based on their category (thanks to commenter Upekshapriya for the suggestion). There is also a better list of stopwords based on the one MySQL uses for the full text …
Oops
I’ve been trying out a download tracking plugin. Most of the time it has worked fine but intermittently there have been scrambled downloads. My apologies to anyone served gibberish. I’ve reverted to plain untracked downloads for now.
Apologies
I’m sorry if anyone came visiting in the last 12 hours or so and found a bunch of gobbledygook in place of this site. My host was ‘having a database outage’. Service has been resumed and seems normal but a little slow. Let’s hope it settles.
11 Years Old Today — Well Almost
Quite by chance (I was fiddling with the archive page) I noticed that the first post on this site is dated exactly 11 days ago today. I’ve never really thought about how long I’ve been posting stuff on the web in one form or another. I started with some components for the Delphi programming language. …