Education
Crash Course is the brainchild of the “VlogBrothers” (John and Hank Green). It is a clever little animated series found on its own YouTube channel. It teaches big topics in a way that’s simplified for the general public. Oh yeah, and they’re entertaining, too. Crash Course has a large number of 15-minute lessons on everything from ecology to American history to biology. What’s of particular interest to me is Crash Course World History #11: Christianity from Judaism to Constantine. While it’s done from a secular perspective, it’s still fair and it’s pretty good. It’s worth sharing and quite frankly a lot of good could come from it.
Fonts
It’s not for everyone, but a few of you might actually be thankful for this. (I’m thinking especially of you Hebrew students.) As any student of biblical languages knows, incorporating biblical lettering into your work is often a pain. With Hebrew, which is written right to left, this is especially true. However, there is a solution. Thank you, Unicode. You can download both Greek and Hebrew fonts for word processors for free through the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the Fonts and Writing Systems section.
“Christian” Jokes
ChristWire is a satire site. The many authors use inaccurate reports, made up stories, and much more to parody Christian conservatives and what the authors see as fundamentalist Christian fears. ChristWire first came to notoriety when the Huffington Post picked up on one of their stories, titled “Is My Husband Gay?” believing it to be a serious article. As the good folks at ChristWire pretend to be conservative Christians, it does stand to reason that some might miss the fact that it’s satire. Still, perhaps the fact checkers at the Huffington Post should have read a few more articles in their investigation. For further reading, might I suggest the article titled “God Creates 12/12/12 to Let us Know Obama is Twice as Bad (2 X 666).” christwire.org
Preach it Baby (Part Deux)
Kanon Tipton first gained some fame when he climbed up to the pulpit at the age of 21 months and preached his first “sermon.” Now it’s worth noting that Kanon’s father is the preacher at a Pentecostal church in Mississippi and that the only intelligible words Kanon says in that first video are “in Jesus’s name” but it’s still quite an interesting clip. Well, well, well, it seems little Kanon is now four years old and he’s still at it. Recently a new set of videos have been trending around the old interwebs featuring the pint-sized Pentecostal. While Kanon can’t be scheduled to preach he does simply walk up to the pulpit when he feels inspired by the Spirit with a specific message and is seen as a true blessing to the church. He runs and jumps and yells and even flips through books of some sort—and according to his father, Kanon occasionally “says something that has substance” and when he does he “captures the audience.”
