What I like about Twitter is the short little SOS micro-blog entries you can send off. This morning for me it was “Driving to work like Ace Ventura because I don’t have an ice scraper.” Later this evening I said, “Sitting in my Jonathan Edwards class (taught by Andy Davis) while sipping Pai Mu Tan.” These surely aren’t ground-breaking statements about which I should or would blog, but they’re (kinda) interesting enough. The purpose of Twitter after all is just to shoot off a letter 140 character of less note saying what you’re doing at the moment. I usually limit tweets to things I think others may find interesting instead of just saying “I’m eating” or “I saw a dove.” No one cares and it does nothing for anyone whereas I like to think mentioning Edwards, Ace Ventura, or Pai Mu Tan may pique the interests of my followers.

Secondly, what I enjoy about Twitter is that I’ve got it tied to my Facebook account such that when I do a new tweet it becomes my status on Facebook. What’s great about this is that my Facebook friends can and more increasinly often comment on my status/tweet. It’s great, just a little feedback on what I’m up to and what others think. Social interaction.

What I don’t understand about Twitter, however, is the seemingly random people who follow me. I usually check ‘em out and most often find that they’re also following 3000+ others. What’s that all about? Is it a marketing ploy to get me to follow them so that I would receive their updates? Or, are they truly interested in me and my tweets? I lean towards affirming the former.

I was first introduced to The Autobiography of Jacob Bower in my Baptist History course at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Jacob Bower, early 19th century Baptist preacher and missionary, continues to have a lasting impression in my own spiritual journey. Much like David Brainerd, Bower is a man driven by conviction and a sense of divine calling to preach the gospel even in the face of staunch opposition. I find less impressive the 40,000+ miles he rode while fulfilling his preaching circuits when compared to the candor with which he relays his daily struggles as a frontier father, preacher and sinner. The details are fascinating as they both reveal his spiritual journey and the life of a 19th century American missionary.

Until now, it appears that The Autobiography of Jacob Bower, a work in the public domain, has existed only online on just two or three websites and has never seen a published (and edited) printed edition. A PDF of the work is made available through Baptist Studies Online in the primary source section located at the following URL under the sub-heading Baptist Biography: http://baptiststudiesonline.com/baptist-biography.

With this post I would like to present my first attempt at an audiobook: The Autobiography of Jacob Bower Audiobook. My hope is that this audiobook will help to popularize this little-known work by making it available in a format accessible to all and under a license that permits its free, non-commercial distribution. It is offered free of charge to be enjoyed by lovers of history, biographies, and the Christian pilgrim’s progress as well as the audiobook/podcast/MP3 addict.

Download

MP3s are available in two qualities, 64kbps and 128kbps. These files should play normally on all computers, MP3 players, and burn to CD without problem. Browse the directory for individual files or download the entire book bundled together in one of the zip files below. If you’re not sure which quality you want, download the 64kbps.

11 tracks, 1hr 38mins, ~50mb (64kbps)/90mb (128kbps)

Download 64kbps Zip

Download 128kbps Zip

Stream

Parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven.

Disclaimer

A causal glance of the manuscript will prove to the listener the difficulty of recording a work which does not adhere to standardized spelling or punctuation. This made reading The Autobiography oftentimes tricky and resultingly awkward. Please excuse any misreadings and/or mispronunciations that I did not catch or failed to slickly edit out. Hopefully, these won’t render the audiobook “illegible.” I do recognize after re-listening that I should have spoken slower overall. Sorry. Try to keep up.

License

The Autobiography of Jacob Bower Audiobook by Drew Maust is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at baptiststudiesonline.com. Basically, you can download, listen, distribute and enjoy (and even remix, if you like, under the same license); but you are not permitted to sell or even include this audiobook in any commercial product. Also, please do not host this elsewhere. Instead, link to this post.

For the past hour I’ve been trying to figure out why Windows Explorer was caught in a loop of crashing, checking for a solution and then restarting, only to crash again and continue the loop. The first step to get Vista (SP1) usable again was to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and open up the Task Manager and end the explorer process. This stops the crash and restarts the loop. And if it tries to tell you that access is denied when you are attempting to end the process, try again and if that doesn’t work close out the Task Manager and then open it back up. This happened to me a couple of times, but a closing and re-opening the Task Manager allowed me to end the explorer process.

Step #1: Think of Possible Culprits

Now that you’ve got the crash-restart loop stopped, stop and have a good think about what might be giving you hassle. For me it was a video file on my desktop called, believe it or not, video.mpg. It was a file I had converted via media-convert.com and was in the process of downloading from the same site when the explorer crash-loop started. After some reading around, I figured it was most likely this file as that was the last action I did before the crash started. This may be the cause of your consternation, too, but if not, unfortunately, there is a long list of reported culprits that throw Vista into the same fit. A search and a little bit of reading will most likely help you to narrow down your problem file or installed program. Also, as part of this initial step go ahead and allow a spyware scanner to run in the background. You never know.

My Culprit

Offending file: a video file I attempted to convert through media-convert.com. The problem is almost certainly with Vista and not with this or any other site (excluding of course any malware or virus that may have been installed).

Restore is a Last Resort

Don’t go straight to flat-out restoring your computer. Attempt everything in your power to find out the exact problem and fix it. Most likely someone has had the same problem before and there’s a simple fix. You just need to be patient and find it out.

Step #2: Create a New Administrator Account (Optional)

You may not need this step. Try step three first and if that doesn’t work come back here to step two.

If all you’ve currently got open is the Windows Task Manager and this blog post, you’ll need to get to the Control Panel. In the Task Manager click File and then New Task (Run…). Type “C:\Program Files” (without the quotes of course) in the Create New Task dialogue box. Hit OK. Up should pop a window, so make your way to the Add or Remove User Accounts page in Control Panel in order to add a new Administrator Account. CTRL+ALT+DEL will bring you back to the crazy in-between worlds Vista screen where you can Log Off and change users. Switch over to the new administrator account. Like a cool breeze washing over you, you should again feel the sweet repose of a prelapsarian Vista world, a world without crashing explorer processes. If your file was on the desktop as was mine, things quickly get sticky because any click leading you towards the desktop of the first user who suffers the crash will result in an invading crash breaking through to your newly created administrator account. Don’t worry though. You can sort it out.

Step #3: Delete the Folder Containing the Bad File

Logged in with the new administrator account I browsed to and deleted the desktop folder and its contents which belonged to my first user who was suffering the crash loop. I’m not quite sure if it’s necessary to be logged in with a separate account to delete the offending folder or not as far as avoiding the crash loop goes; but this is how I did it (see Step #2). I deleted the desktop folder, re-created it, logged off and back on again to the first account and now the first account seems to be working normally. I had to delete the entire folder because the crash loop would show up regardless of the user even if I tried to browse the desktop folder and most definitely if I tried to select the bad file to delete it (whether with right- or left-click). Deleting the whole folder with the bad file seemed the only option left. You could of course restore from the recycle bin the not-bad files, so don’t worry about losing stuff. You can get it back.

You can now go back and delete the second administrator account, if you created one.

My Hope

I was immensely frustated by this explorer crash loop and know that if you’re reading this, you are most likely greatly frustrated as well. Hang in there. The solution may be just as simple as mine: deleting a bad file. Leave a comment here if this fix worked for you. I’d love to here if writing this has helped anyone.

You’ve heard Rihanna’s song Live Your Life? It sounds an awful lot like she’s using wayehi, a Hebrew waw consecutive. Anyone who’s heard this song now knows how to say “(And) there was” in Hebrew. This word is all over the place inGenesis 1.

“And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was [wayehi] evening and there was [wayehi] morning, the second day” (Genesis 1:8).

Anyways…that’s what I think of when I hear this song…not that I listen to that kind of music…Who’s Rihanna?

photo credit: applejan

Case against bookmarks is almost certainly language too strong for this but brief thought I had several days ago.

We use bookmarks to remember where we left off reading a book. But shouldn’t the reading be so stimulating that we remember exactly where we left off and therefore have no need for a bookmark? Bookmarks seem to aid in the task of “working” one’s way through a book instead of enjoying the material. For example, any student knows the feeling of having a required reading which they are not looking forward to. The material is hardly stimulating and the reading proves rather onerous. It’s burdensome! But we “work” through it because it’s required, perhaps taking breaks periodically to do something more interesting (or from going crazy) so we slide in a bookmark to remember exactly where we left off in order to safeguard against reading the same (burdensome) material twice. Reading it once was bad enough.

But it’s not only with these kinds of books that we use bookmarks, we use them all the time with books of all sorts. Harry Potter. Bible (ribbon bookmark). Such-and-such theology. So-and-so’s novel. All over the place. We should ask ourselves, Is my reading really worth my time if I need a bookmark? If the answer is no, then we should adjust how we read to make it worth the while. If the answer is yes, maybe you’re just reading a fortified man-book that’s rocking your world and a bookmark’s understandable. If we don’t care, we should ask if we’re just reading for the sake of reading or for the privilege of being able to say, “I read that book.” You may have read it, but did you read it? Did you enjoy it? It’s easy to slip into reading for the sake of reading and thereby need a bookmark to remember where we left off “reading.”

But what if we could close a book, walk away, come back later, and remember right where we left off? That’s a great feeling! Now we’re reading! I’ve recently tried simply remembering the page number (which I guess is a mental bookmark, but still guards against forgetting what I was reading). If we do forget the page number, it shouldn’t take too long to get at least in the ballpark of where we left off and after skimming, find where we left off. If we don’t remember reading a section, but think we did, we probably didn’t. Read it again for the first time!

Respond

Do you use a bookmark? How do you remember where you left off? Is it reasonable to eschew bookmarks? I think so. It seems the less we test our memories the less we’ll get out of them.

photo credit: mnadi

It’s not that you have a place “around the table” of Christianity, for there is no table. There’s a person, Jesus Christ. We don’t gather around, rally around, an abstract idea or a metaphorical table but a person. He is the what we gather and rally around. We should then ask ourselves whether we have a place around Jesus to discuss the things of Christianity, not whether we have a place at an abstract “table.”

Several semesters ago during the presidential forum at Southeastern (SEBTS) the question was asked of President Danny Akin whether Arminians had a place at the table of Southern Baptists. His response was to the effect that if you can affirm the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M), you have a seat around the Southern Baptist table. You see within the BF&M is contained the basics (and not so basics) of what it is to be a Southern Baptist and on many counts what it means generally to be a Christian. What Akin is driving at is if you cannot afirm along with those with whom you wish to fit in that which they affirm, you have no place around “the table.” A place at the table is contigent upon like affirmation.

So, to find out if you have “a place at the table of Christianity,” ask if you affirm the basic teaching(s) of Christianity: the gospel. I am a sinner in need of a savior. Jesus Christ is that savior. From there, there is much to learn as the whole of the Bible testifies to; but starting here, one gains a seat around Jesus Christ whom we love and worship. He’s the around-which we should be looking to gather.

It is with this understanding of Christianity that we can proceed to enjoy the multiethnic beauty of Christians that make up his body. One musn’t have completed seminary to have a voice. Neither must one be Caucasian, nor must one be non-Caucasian. You gather around him because you love him, and you there (read: at him) find others around him much (un-)like yourself. What this all means completely I’m not quite sure; but that’s OK. It’s a good place to re-orient one’s thinking to.

(Reading The Mission of God has inspired this post [Chapter 1]. Yes, you should own it. Thanks, JBA!)