I want to announce a new podcast that will automatically deliver an audio recording of a chapter from the Hebrew Bible everyday directly to whatever device or software you use to podcast. It’s called Memra and you can subscribe by adding the feed: http://podcast.katadrew.com/feed/podcast.

The podcast features recordings from mechon-mamre.org and an enclosed text translation from the English Standard Version. The readings alternate from the Tanak: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Yesterday’s edition wasGenesis 1. Today’s isJoshua 1 and tomorrow’s will be1 Chronicles 1.

I have it set up to deliver straight to my Droid where I collect numerous podcasts and listen through them daily. I’m already listening through a daily English reading plan, so original language daily reading makes a lot of sense.

Let me know if you subscribe or have any thoughts or suggestions.

photo credit: Lawrence OP

Sing for Joy

Every Sunday morning the pretentiously titled local classical station–The Classical Station–airs several syndicated programs featuring sacred music. One of those is Sing for Joy, a production of Minnesota’s St. Olaf College. Every week the College Pastor presents choral music selected to coincide with the readings from the revised common lectionary. The result is a beautiful production that is well worth your listen, especially if you come from a non-liturgical tradition such as I. I’ve found that keeping up with the common lectionary vocally enhanced by world-class choirs is a delightful way to connect with the Church universal. Sing for Joy presents that certain bountiful depth of sacred music that is too often forgotten. My only disappointment is that the broadcasts, as far as I can tell, are not available via podcast. There is, however, a vast streaming archive available on their site of current and past episodes. You can listen wherever you are no matter the day of the week. Check it out.

Lectionary at Lunch

I discovered this second gem on iTunesU. Concordia Seminary St. Louis hosts an enviable Lectionary at Lunch group every Wednesday that is led by a professor who reads through the OT and NT lessons in Hebrew and Greek, translates them and discusses particular points of interest. The podcast of the group is available free of charge and is well worth your listen, especially if you’re interested in exegesis, translation and original language study. I can’t tell you how beneficial this is to listen to. Check it out.

photo credit: jurek d.

Earlier in the week I listened to just an outstanding Veritas Forum presentation by Dr. Farr Curlin entitled What Moves the Scalpel? Science, Religion and the Practice of Medicine which was recorded back in September of this year. Below I’ve included the summary of the presentation from the Veritas site so you can get an idea of what it’s about and see if it piques your interest.

You can watch (or download) the video or listen to (or download) the audio of this pointed presentation which quite frankly floored me.

It’s refreshing to hear a medical doctor point out the necessary God-ward foundation of medicine. Not “necessary” in the sense that without a theological foundation medicine fails, but that without God and human beings created imago dei medicine fails to be consistent within a naturalistic worldview.

Summary:

No one ever asks what science has to do with medicine any more than they ask what books have to do with education and tools have to do with carpentry. Over the past century and a half, medical science has generated enormous advances in alleviating human illness and forestalling death, and there is good reason to expect substantial further progress. Yet, for all of the contributions of science, medicine remains animated and directed by other, less tangible, forces. A reasonable practice of medicine must give an account for what makes human life worthy of care and attention and how the medical arts contribute to human flourishing. For most people, such accounts begin in religion; for some they begin in a secular moral tradition. In this lecture, Farr Curlin unpacks the way medicine looks beyond science to find forces that motivate care for the sick, direct the application of medical technology, and ground clinical care in an orientation to the patient as person. He suggests that even though religious ideas are rarely made explicit in public and professional discourse about medicine, they are everywhere implicit and operative, necessarily so. In this light, Curlin argues that the time is ripe for clinicians and laypeople to develop practices of medicine that are more fulsomely and self-consciously grounded in and informed by religion.

Here lies the dust of a poor hell-deserving sinner,
who ventured into eternity trusting wholly
on the merits of Christ for salvation.

In the full belief of the great doctrines he preached while on earth,
he invites his children, and all who read this,
to trust their eternal interest on the same foundation.

Lemuel Haynes,
who died
September 28th, 1833.

Love in death.

Lemuel Who?

I only learned of Lemuel Haynes today while listening to the Reformed Forum’s interview with Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman. Check out the podcast interview (MP3, 48 minutes). Hearing Haynes’ epitaph near the end of the interview brought tears to my eyes. I thought it was good enough to share. What a succinct summation of the gospel and lasting exhortation to Christ! He is believed to have composed this during his last couple of days.

For a preaching class I’m taking this semester I have to turn in a sermon report form each week, providing a critique of preachers and sermons. I was listening along tonight and filling out my sermon report form when the preacher had a comical slip of the tongue. This is too good not to share.

Download Clip (350kb MP3)

I’m not sharing the preacher’s name or church because I don’t want to shame him in any way, but I made this little clip/excerpt just to share his slip-up anonymously. If you’re interested in finding the complete sermon, I’ve included enough information to get you there in the comment field of the MP3 ID3 tag.

It doesn’t matter if your MP3 is a sermon, a podcast or a song you’ve recorded, it should be tagged with metadata for the following reasons. If you have a podcast, post your sermons online, or freely share your musical productions online, you should tag your MP3 files with metadata. But first, What is metadata?

What is metadata?

Metadata is simply data about data. If an MP3 podcast of an interview you conduct is data, then data about your data would be the date of the recording, the web site hosting the podcast, the interviewer, and the notes concerning the interview’s discussion questions. This is the podcast metadata. The data about the podcast.

This is precisely the kind of information MP3 metadata (called ID3 tags) stores. These tags can easily be added to any MP3 so that the file carries along with it the information you have tagged on it. Another more technical way of saying this is that you add ID3 tags to your MP3. ID3 tags are MP3 metadata.

Why Tag Your MP3s with Metadata

#1 – Because it’s your MP3 and you don’t want people to forget it.

Oftentimes MP3s are disseminated without any sort of metadata, meaning that after the file has been downloaded, it’s difficult to impossible to figure out where the file came from. Personally, if this happens, I just delete the file.

Consider this example: you are reading a blog that posts an MP3 recording of a Socratic Club debate at Southeastern wherein John Piper debates Greg Boyd on the openness of God. The file you download is called 2009-01-29-sebts.mp3. Apart from knowing the date of the recording from the filename, you know no other information concerning this recording (excepting of course what you’ve read on the blog previously). Imagine further that months go by and you come across this file in your download folder, only vaguely remembering anything about it and having  not listened to it yet. It’s near impossible to figure out what this MP3 is if it lacks metadata. Therefore tag your MP3s.

#2 – Because it will send listeners back to your site.

Information tagged onto your MP3 goes with that file wherever it goes. MP3 metadata provides a slot to insert your web site URL. Should a curious listener then open up your file information, the URL will be there staring back at them. Moreover, simply tagging the name of your podcast in the metadata (e.g., “KataDrew’s Amazing Blazing Podcast”) gives just enough information enough for the average user to Google your organization’s name and get back to your site. Without it, the file is likely deleted or your presence is lost. Therefore tag your MP3s.

#3 – Because many MP3 players require it.

My Sansa sorts files on it by the metadata. MP3s without metadata are all lumped together in the folder labeled “Unknown” and usually then only show the filename which is most often doesn’t provide the information an interested listener is looking for. Properly tagged MP3s, on the other hand, display under their respective name as expected. Therefore tag your MP3s.

#4 – Because Last.fm will give you statistics if you do it properly.

Do you know about Last.fm? It collects information on what its users have listened to. For an example, see my last.fm account @ last.fm/user/admaust. Last.fm users can install a small program that runs in the background of one’s computer which sends played song information to its database periodically only if the MP3s are appropriately tagged. This makes sense for how otherwise would last.fm know to which artist and to which of that artists’ songs to accredit that play?

Because of last.fm’s social networking features, its aggregation is free publicity and also takes the pulse of your file with no extra work on your part except the extra seconds it takes to tag your MP3. Therefore tag your MP3s.

#5 – Because a telling filename (however so) isn’t enough.

No matter how helpful you think you’ve made your filename, you can always make the filename less invasive by including the desired information in metadata. Instead of a filename including a podcast’s name, date, subject, episode number and URL (e.g., KataDrewsAmazingBlazingPodcast-2009-01-20-ChristianityInTheNewWorld-Episode202-KataDrew.com.mp3), the filename could simply include  one or two of these and rely on metadata to carry the rest of the desired information.

#6 – Because software uses it to categorize.

Winamp, for example, catalogs downloaded MP3s according to metadata (artist, track name, album name, date, genre, etc.). Without this information the program becomes a lot like many portable MP3 players in being forced to list files lacking metadata all together in an “Unknown” category, proving useless for searches and quick finding. Tagged MP3s are found and listened to with ease. Windows Vista even now reads MP3 metadata.

#7 – Because more than all this, you can tag it as you please with whatever you please.

Seventh and finally, MP3 metadata features all sorts of slots for any sort of information you may want to include. There’s even a “Comments” field where miscellaneous information you wish to add may be included. Tag your MP3s because you can add whatever you like.

How Do I Add or Change Metadata on My MP3s?

I most often use Winamp to add metadata as its my main media player and its interface for adding tags is very straightforward. For example, while the MP3 you wish to tag is playing, right-click in the program and select View file info (or alt+3). A dialogue box then appears wherein you can enter desired information effortlessly. This works extremely well for single files.

To tag multiple files, try a freeware program like Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en). Note: you should never pay for any software that enables tagging or adding metadata. Freeware solutions are readily available. Don’t buy one for this easy task.

If you are exporting your podcast from the freeware recorder Audacity, take the opportunity Audacity gives you during the process to tag your MP3. It’ll take ten seconds maximum.

With no additional software, tags can be added in Vista as mentioned above. Browse to the folder containing the MP3 you wish to tag. Select the file. You should then see the metadata displayed in the bottom portion of the window. Files without tags will look like screenshot below. Adding tags is as easy as clicking on the text Specify and entering the information.

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 those who love the darker, harder side of electronic music, The Prodigy is offering their new single Invaders Must Die for free download on their website at theprodigytickets.com/download. The main hook is rather catchy and I think the sample from which the song takes its name is the Doctor Who villain Dalek. Might be a good song to run to for you runner friends.

Peep the embedded player for a preview of the goods.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a weekly review post; but since I’ve listened to some rather impressive things this week, I wanted to fill you in with the goods:

1. Upon recommendation I bought Flame’s latest album entitled Our World Redeemed. Amazing Christian rap. I especially like the last track, Joyful Noise, and number seven, Hold On. Deeply and richly biblical. Powerful.
2. Dr. Russell Moore presented a very moving treatise against abortion from the first chapters of the Gospel of Matthew in Southern Seminary chapel on October 16 entitled “Joseph Is a Single-Issue Evangelical: The Father of Jesus, the Cries of the Helpless, and Change You Can Believe In.” Definitely worth your time. Download the MP3.
3. Al Mohler just today preached a very timely message here in Southeastern chapel on How Not to Raise a Pagan fromDeuteronomy 6. Listen to the MP3 or watch the video (MP4). Your children need to know that “God kills people.”
4. On the latest edition of The White Horse Inn Dr. Michael Horton and company give unique Election Coverage. No mention of Obama or McCain here; only the biblical concept of election presented from a decidedly reformed standpoint with plenty of helpful discussion.
5. If you listen to nothing else from this list, download the interview with Burl Cain, Warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, on The Drew Marshall Show. The testimony of the power of the gospel to transform lives that is taking place right now at this prison in Louisiana will astound you. It could only be God.

photo credit: Mc Morr

Charles Latham in his antifolk song My Perfect Church offers this bit of truth-in-jesting cynicism concerning spirituality:

I pray from my toilet seat, “Make my holy life complete”

My god hears me when I speak, can yours say the same? My god lets me have my way, I can pray for it not to rain today, I can chant cars off the motor way when I’m late for work. My god grants financial miracles and the rules are always flexible, my god watches my vehicles when they’re parked in the street.

My perfect church is built only for one: where I am the priest and the congregation, my one regret is that no one can come, it’s gonna be awful lonely in this private heaven.

My god likes human sacrafise, his services demand a price and mine’s the only blood he likes, no virgin’s will do. He can’t heal me should I go blind, he can’t burn a bush or absolve my crimes, he can’t turn my water into wine but he can point me to the bar.

My perfect church is built only for one, where I alone experience salvation. My one regret is that no one can come; it’s gonna be awful lonely in this private heaven.

He gives me no creation myth, the commandments end with the fifth, the prophesies are pretty hit or miss but I don’t give a damn because every day’s a holy day and you can’t work on a holy day, my god wants me at home to pray, begging for more things.

My perfect church is built only for one, where I am the priest and the congregation, my one regret is that no one can come, it’s gonna be awful lonely in this private heaven.

There’s an MP3 of the song available on what looks to be a legit (i.e., not illegal) site.