Pisteuomen - πιστευομεν - T. Michael W. Halcomb

At the church I'm currently attending, there's a bi-weekly series going on called "Kingdom Testimonies". The point of the series, from my understanding, is to simply have congregants share their life/faith stories. So, that's what I did. While I could've said so much more, because it was a "church" setting, I focused a lot on my church experiences. Anyway, here it is, so, give it a listen and let me know what you think:

This evening I was on my way to take my daughter to Chuck-E-Cheese when all of a sudden, I got rearended by a Jeep. It was rainy out and the roads were slick and unfortunately, I could see him panicking in my rearview just before he smashed in the back of my Scion XB. Needless to say, he wasn't a jerk about and although my back is kind of sore (I've been in MUCH worse wrecks than this one), I still got to take my little one to Chuck-E-Cheese to have some fun. Still, I'm not looking forward to all the headaches that come after this crap, though. Here are some snapshots of the wrecked Scion XB:

Recently, we received a package from Ethiopia that bore some very cool and authentic, hand-crafted relics. As many of you know, the wife and I are adopting and we will be heading overseas, hopefully in November or December of this year to wrap things up. Anyway, the gifts shown in the pictures below really got us excited, so, have a look at them. The image of the square looking photo is actually Ethiopian wildlife painted on a piece of papyrus; pretty cool!

It's no secret to many of you that I'm not a very patriotic fellow. I recently ignited a firestorm of comments on Facebook for saying that it was nice to attend a Church the sunday before Memorial Day where the message did elevate the idol of patriotism and/or preach the cliche' "Memorial Day Sermon" that spent 90% of the time talking about America and then in the end say, "And communion itself is a type of memorial service". People, there is no link there, no matter how hard you to try create one; it is a fictitous link people have created in their minds. The idolatry of patriotism is hardly comparable to communing with the Triune God. Anyway, the overarching narrative of the Bible does not exclude one people from another. In fact, whenever Israel tried to do that, she always got rebuked! But early on in Genesis, the promise from God to Abraham is that through one of his heritage, all nations would have a way to be united. As the story goes on to show, ...

Last night, I watched an amazing video of up-and-coming technology that is allowing us to become more and more able to read the contents of ancient scrolls and other texts without even opening and/or damaging them. In a nutshell, the concept is to get the scroll, take x-ray footage of it, input that x-ray data into a computer program and then, let the program separate out the layers so that it performs a virtual unrolling of the scroll (this is being used for other types of documents too, such as the ancient codices). The technique, dubbed the EDUCE Project , is incredibly fascinating and got me really excited about the potential of this project, led by University of Kentucky professor W. Brent Seales . To really wrap your mind around the process, give the following video a watch and I promise, you won't walk away without your interest piqued!!!

So, now that I plan to get back in the regular swing of blogging, I'd like to invite everyone to follow Pisteuomen. There are two ways to do this and both of them are located here in the post and docked permanently on the right sidebar. Check these features out and keep up with the latest.

So, I've ended up taking a month long hiatus that was never intended but somehow, things just worked out that way. I hope to be back in the swing of things posting again now and I'm grateful to Brian Fulthorp for giving me the impetus to do that. He asked if I'd share some thoughts on writing an abstract / paper proposal, so, what follows is exactly that. Let me know your thoughts! ----- Believe it or not, writing an abstract for a paper proposal can be an intimidating thing. The trick is to basically encapsulate the thrust of your paper in just a few, catchy sentences; you want to write something that will pique the interests of readers…even if they’re not particularly interested in your area of study. By no means am I yet an expert at doing this. In fact, I’ve only presented about 6 or 7 papers at conferences at this point. However, I was asked to share a few thoughts on the matter, so, I’ll gladly do that here. I’ll use a few examples of abstracts / proposals that I’...