wrong type argument: stringp, nil

Finally, I remembered that I had required GNU ls in my Emacs settings, and had not installed it on the machine in question. A quick “brew install coreutils” to install the GNU Command Line Tools with Homebrew did the trick.

I started with the template provided by Sachin Patel that he describes here. I have changed some things, so I’ll describe the site as I’ve put it together. I highly recommend reading his post and cloning a copy of the template, though. Everything is in a directory named “orgblog” that has the following structure:

.
├── css
│   └── stylesheet.css
├── docs
├── drafts
├── html-templates
│   ├── postamble.html
│   └── preamble.html
├── images
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   └── posts
├── org-templates
│   ├── latex-pdf.org
│   └── post.org
├── pages
│   ├── about.org
│   └── index.org
├── posts
│   ├── 24-12-05-sample-post.org
│   └── index.org
└── publish.el

I’ve included a sample post and an about page as examples. I left the two files in the “org-templates” directory unchanged from the template, other than changing the author’s name. I changed the HTML templates, removing the image and changing the menu from preamble.html, with no significant changes to postamble.html. Here is preamble.html:

<div class="banner">
  <h2><a href="/">Randy Ridenour</a></h2>
  <nav class="navbar">
    <ul>
      <li><a href="/posts/">Blog</a></li>
      <li><a href="/about.html">About</a></li>
      <li><a href="/index.xml">RSS</a></li>
    </ul>
  </nav>
</div>

All the work gets done by the publish.el file. Here are some changes that I made to the template. First, since I’m the sole author, I don’t need “Published by…” by every post title on the index page.

(defun me/website-html-preamble (plist)
  "PLIST: An entry."
  (if (org-export-get-date plist this-date-format)
      (plist-put plist
                 :subtitle (format "%s"
                                   (org-export-get-date plist this-date-format)
                                   (car (plist-get plist :author)))))

I made some slight changes to the org-publish-project-alist. First, I added a posts directory to help keep things organized. I also added a pages directory, instead of using a directory for each individual page. I also changed every reference to the “public” folder to “docs”, since Github pages will serve a site from a directory title “docs”. Here are the entries for posts and pages — all of the others are basically the same as the template except for changing “public” to “docs”.

(setq org-publish-project-alist
      `(("posts"
         :base-directory "posts"
         :base-extension "org"
         :recursive t
         :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
         :publishing-directory "./docs/posts/"
         :exclude ,(regexp-opt '("README.org" "draft"))
         :auto-sitemap t
         :sitemap-filename "index.org"
         :sitemap-title "Blog Index"
         ;; :sitemap-format-entry me/org-sitemap-format-entry
         ;; :sitemap-style list
         :sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically
         :html-link-home "/"
         :html-link-up "/"
         :html-head-include-scripts t
         :html-head-include-default-style nil
         :html-head ,me/website-html-head
         :html-preamble me/website-html-preamble
         :html-postamble me/website-html-postamble)
        ("pages"
         :base-directory "pages"
         :base-extension "org"
         :exclude ,(regexp-opt '("README.org" "draft"))
         :index-filename "index.org"
         :recursive t
         :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
         :publishing-directory "./docs/"
         :html-link-home "/"
         :html-link-up "/"
         :html-head-include-scripts t
         :html-head-include-default-style nil
         :html-head ,me/website-html-head
         :html-preamble me/website-html-preamble
         :html-postamble me/website-html-postamble)

I have a folder for drafts that doesn’t get an entry in the =project-alist. When I’m ready to publish a draft, I have a function that copies it to the posts directory and deletes it from the drafts directory. I don’t use the serve.el or the makefile from the template. Instead, I use the org-publish-all function to build the site and serve from npm to serve a local copy. I dropped a copy of Neat CSS into the CSS folder and modified the me/website-html-head variable in publish.el to reflect that.

Here are the functions I use to build, serve, and deploy. To build the site, I run

(defun orgblog-build ()
  (interactive)
  (progn
    (find-file "~/sites/orgblog/publish.el")
    (eval-buffer)
    (org-publish-all)
    (kill-buffer)))

This function starts the server, waits for a second, then opens the default browser to localhost:

(defun orgblog-serve ()
  (interactive)
  (progn
    (let ((default-directory "~/sites/orgblog/docs"))
          (async-shell-command "serve")
          (sleep-for 1)
          (async-shell-command "open http://localhost:3000"))))

If everything, looks good, then I can push changes to Github. The fish function orgblog-push changes to the site directory, adds all modifications, creates a commit with a default message, pushes the remote, then displays the current status of the repo.

(defun orgblog-push ()
  (interactive)
  (async-shell-command "orgblog-push"))

This moves a draft to the posts directory by saving the buffer, copying it to posts, moving the original to the trash in case something goes wrong, and killing the buffer. It then opens the posts directory in Dired.

(defun publish-orgblog-draft ()
  (interactive)
  (save-buffer)
  (copy-file (buffer-file-name) "~/sites/orgblog/posts/")
  (delete-file (buffer-file-name) t)
  (kill-buffer)
  (dired "~/sites/orgblog/posts"))

Finally, posts have these header lines:

#+TITLE: Sample Post
#+date: <2024-12-05 Thu>
#+filetags: blog emacs org
#+setupfile: ../org-templates/post.org

I’m very happy with how things have turned out, and this should be enough to help others do the same. I’ve been converting old posts to the new format and still have some 250 to go. That’s giving me plenty of opportunities to develop my regex skills. The source for the site can be found on Github here.

On the door of the church,
Luther proclaimed his message,

“The true treasure of the church
is the most holy gospel
of the glory and grace of God.”

A treasure too great
to be kept to ourselves,
yet why is that
we who have received
so much grace somehow
seem to have so little
left to offer?

Forgive me, Lord,
and let me never again
confuse your river of grace
with the cesspool of
my self-righteousness.

Amen

The tomb is sealed,
the body is cold,
and heaven mourns
at what we have done.

God is dead,
and we have killed him.

Lord, have mercy.

Amen

Peter and John met a man
asking for alms
at the Beautiful Gate
of the temple.

We are not like Peter and John,
when they met the man
at the Beautiful Gate,
for we do have
silver and gold
to give.

But before we give,
we pray that you
would examine our hearts.

Do we give to maintain
the myth of our own superiority?

Do we give as a a means of exercising power?

Or do we give in a way that recognizes the
other person as one who bears
the image of Christ himself?

“Look at us,” Peter said.

Look at us, Lord.
Look with us.
Look through us.

Help us to see the ones
sitting outside our own
Beautiful Gates.

Amen

Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.

Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, p.11.

We live in fear
of failure and
disappointment,
afraid that we
might say or do
the wrong thing.

Paralyzed by risk,
we simply do nothing
and remain silent.

But who am I,
blind as I am,
to judge what does
or does not fail?

Help me to trust in you,
the one who makes all things
work together for good,
for, to, and through
those who love you.

Amen

In the end, it was a problem with my Emacs initialization file. I use an org-mode file, that is bootstrapped with an initialization file that requires org-install and tangle. Moving (package-initialize) to the first line of that file fixed the problem.

It appears that Mill was right — it is better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied pig.

Unfortunately, though, two things have kept me from being able to easily do that. First, I do almost of all my work in Emacs, and I’m afraid that Apple would never allow Emacs on the iPad. Second, except for blog posts, almost everything I write eventually becomes a LaTeX document that is compiled into a PDF.

I’m sure that most people wouldn’t be troubled at all by either of these problems. My projects usually begin as Markdown files, and there are some decent Markdown editors on iOS. Most of these are limited to using one subfolder in Dropbox, and I have a folder for each course, writing project, my website, etc. A larger problem is that Emacs becomes a finely tuned, personal tool for a user. With one keystroke, I can renumber ordered lists, insert a reference from my bibliography database, commit changes to a git repository, and many other things. Once this has become ingrained, it is very difficult to go to anything else. I can write LaTeX on the iPad, but I can’t compile. That still has to be done on another machine. So, while others are carrying their nice, light tablets, I’ve been schlepping a MacBook Pro.

A few days ago, I noticed that Digital Ocean has a remote server plan with 20 GB of solid state storage for five dollars a month. It only has 512 MB of memory, but that seems to be plenty for Emacs and Vim. I signed up, started a machine, and installed Ubuntu. I installed Emacs, Vim, Pandoc, and LaTeX. I changed the shell to the fish shell, and moved all of my configuration files. Since the configuration files are all on Github, moving them to the machine was simple.

So, the good news is that I’m now writing this in Emacs on the iPad. The bad news is, since I had given up being able to use the iPad to write, I traded in my larger iPad for an iPad mini. Now, I really will be looking longingly at those iPad Pros I see at Starbucks.

So, I am hopeful – but I’ll know when I call tomorrow.

UPDATE: I gave the Aetna representative the number for our AFLAC policy – she confirmed that Aetna was primary and AFLAC secondary, and told me that the claims would be resubmitted. Sometimes, things go well, even when dealing with insurance.

’You must be a philosopher.’ ’No, I’m a bum.’

From Barney Miller

But explanations become rationalizations,
and rationalizations become excuses,
and “Yes, but…” just means “No, thank you.”

Lord,

Forgive us for preferring
the familiarity of the present pain
to the joy of new life that you offer.

Amen

I guess that’s another way of pointing out that not a single Democrat voted to raise the federal deficit by 1.4 trillion dollars in ten years.

Traditionally, the theme of the second Sunday of Advent is love. Darley and Batson’s famous Good Samaritan study¹ shows that a major impediment to paying attention is simply being in a hurry. Ironically, then, the many activities and rushed pace of the Advent season make it harder for us to pay attention, and therefore less likely that Advent will be a season of love.

Let us begin to love by paying attention.

Holy Spirit,

Forgive me, for
although I can see,
I am too often blind.

Instead of obstacles in my path,
let me see opportunities
to slow down,
to linger,
to pay attention,
to love.

For time is never wasted
when it is spent in love.

Amen

Emacs has a feature called interlocking to prevent two different users from modifying the same file. If, like me, you regularly use two different machines, this may occasionally present a problem. Most of the time, Emacs behaves nicely and gives the user some options to either steal the lock, proceed with the edit, or quit. Recently, though, I had a file that I needed to edit that Emacs simply wouldn’t let me open. Every time I tried, I just got this warning: Unlocking file: Invalid argument. I suspect this might have had something to do with a system crash that prevented Emacs from saving the file and clearing its locked status. Eventually, I stumbled on a solution: delete the lockfile, which is a file in the directory that contains a “#” in the filename.

And if ‘indoctrinating’ students truly existed, I would have classes with 100% assignment turn-in rates, no one ever attempting to get on a cell phone, and I would never need to repeat instructions more than a couple of times.

From “September 1, 1939” by W.H. Auden

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we as Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying ’flee at once - all is discovered.’ They all left town immediately.

Mark Twain

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

G.K. Chesterton

Even though I’ve written almost everything in Org mode for over a decade now, I have always done these attendance sheets in a word processor. The problem is that the number of students enrolled would vary from semester to semester, and fitting everything into one page required adjusting column widths, row heights, etc., and it always seemed easier to do this in a word processor. This was only because I’ve never really done much with LaTeX tables. Finally, last semester, I decided to figure out how to make them in Org. It won’t be surprising to Emacs users that, in the end, it was far easier than using the word processor.

Just declare the tabularray package in the LaTeX header like this:

#+LaTeX_HEADER: \usepackage{tabularray}

In the body, insert the table formatting codes² and the Org table. Here’s a sample with names from 1000randomnames.com:

#+ATTR_LATEX: :environment tblr :align hline{3-Z}={solid},row{2-Z}={f,10mm},colspec={XXXX}
| Name             | Signature | Name           | Signature |
| Branch, Kassidy  |           | Graves, Amaya  |           |
| Duffy, Keenan    |           | Gentry, Micah |           |
| Fischer, Addisyn |           | Kaur, Amelie   |           |

Creating the table was still a slight pain. It involved pasting a column of names, then inserting the pipe character at the beginning of every line in the top half of the column, two pipe characters at the end of each line, then killing the bottom half of the column and inserting it as a rectangle at the right side of the top half. It wasn’t difficult using query-replace-regexp and a couple of rectangle operations, but even the slightly tedious task that will be repeated indefinitely is worth automating.

There were two parts that were tricky for me. The first was splitting the list at the correct row. If there were 34 students, then I needed two groups of 17 with the second group starting at row 18, but a class of 35 students required one group of 18 and another of 17 with the second group starting at row 19. I wanted the left column to be the larger for aesthetic reasons, and didn’t want to manually determine where to split the list. I solved it by first counting the lines in the list, then adding the remainder of a division by 2. This resulted in 34 for the class of 34, since dividing an even number has a remainder of 0, and 36 for the class of 35. I then divided that result in 2 and added 1, giving me the 18 and 19 respectively that I needed.

The second tricky part was the pasting the lines from the second half to the ends of the lines in the first half. The fortunate thing about using an editor as old as Emacs is that almost every conceivable question has been asked and answered online. That was fortunate for me, because I’m not sure I would have ever figured it out. You’ll see a few lines in the code below that split the last item in the kill-ring at line-breaks, and insert each resulting sub-string at the end of each line.

The rest is just inserting the characters to make it an Org table, killing an extra line, putting the columns in order, and inserting the LaTeX headers with a snippet. Here’s the result, with the usual disclaimer about my being an incompetent amateur and so on:

(defun create-roll-sheet ()
  (interactive)
  ;; Append signature cells to each line.
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (replace-regexp "$" " |  | ")
  ;; kill bottom half of buffer and move to top
  (setq lines (count-lines (point-min) (point-max)))
  (setq lines (+ lines (% lines 2) ))
  (setq midpoint (+ (/ lines 2) 1))
  (goto-line midpoint)
  (kill-region (point) (point-max))
  (beginning-of-buffer)
  ;; Append each line from kill-ring to remaining lines.
  (dolist (cur-line-to-insert (split-string (current-kill 0) "\n"))
    (if (eobp)
        (newline)
      (move-end-of-line nil))
    (insert cur-line-to-insert)
    (forward-line))
  ;; Prepend pipe character to each line and kill last line.
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (replace-regexp "^" "| ")
  (kill-whole-line)
  ;; insert LaTeX table format and header lines
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (insert "#+ATTR_LATEX: :environment tblr :align hline{3-Z}={solid},row{2-Z}={f,10mm},colspec={XXXX}\n| *Name*              | *Signature* | *Name*              | *Signature* | \n")
  ;; Clean up table.
  (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c)
  ;; Insert LaTeX header.
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (yas-expand-snippet (yas-lookup-snippet "roll-sheet")))

It’s 31 lines of code, but it wasn’t difficult. In fact, it took longer to write this blog post than to write the function.

To be honest, this is something that I only have to do maybe twice a semester. So, why bother? It’s fun and I get a sense of satisfaction from doing it, and that’s reason enough in itself. Still, there is good reason to automate something that you only rarely have to do. I think there are two kinds of tasks that deserve to be automated. The first is something involving several steps that you have to do constantly. The second is something involving several steps that you only do rarely, but since it’s done only rarely, it’s difficult to remember how it was accomplished previously. This task probably fits into neither category, but I still learned something about Elisp that I’m sure will be useful when have a problem that does.

I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned with the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, ’Now is that political or social?’ He said, ’I feed you.’ Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

Desmond Tutu

We’ve been able to work with the Methodists and the Episcopalians. The Baptists…, well, we have to be patient with the Baptists.

Ignorance may not be bliss, but it’s certainly less work.

Welcome to Nightvale, episode 30

In my haste to be heard,
give me the strength
to slow down,
think carefully,
and measure
my words.

Some words are poisonous fruit,
and others are seeds of grace.

Help me to sow
according to your will.

Amen

I can’t stand your religious meetings.
I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals.
I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes,
your public relations and image making.
I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.
When was the last time you sang to me?
Do you know what I want?
I want justice—oceans of it.
I want fairness—rivers of it.
That’s what I want. That’s all I want.

Amos 5:21-24 (The Message)

There is no doubt that regular expressions are very powerful. I’ve found that the documentation for regular expressions is often as mysterious as the things that the documentation is supposed to explain. Keeping in mind that I am certainly no expert, learning even a little about the use of regular expressions can be quite valuable.

The normal search dialogue in text editors will find all uses of the search term. You might not want to find all uses of a term, but only those that match a certain pattern. For example, assume that I want to search for any dates in a long file. If the file contains many different dates, then searching successfully for each one would be tedious, if not impossible. If my dates are in the form “YYYY-MM-DD,” then I can simply use the regular expression “dddd-dd-dd”. The “d” finds a digit, so the search string locates every string of text that consists of four digits, followed by a hyphen, two digits, another hyphen, and ending with two digits.

It could be that I wasn’t consistent in my dating scheme, some years have all four digits, and others have only two. The year could be first in some cases, but last in others. The search string “d*-d*-d*” easily handles all of the variations. The asterisk is a repeat operator that matches the preceding character zero or more times. This search will find any three groups of digits separated by hyphens.

Search with regular expressions is powerful enough, but replacement is amazing. Any string contained in parentheses can be referenced in both search and replacement strings. That makes it simple to change just part of a string.

For example, imagine that I have a list of students that I copied from a database. Each line has the following format, “First Last”, and I want to change it to “Last, First”. The following regex search and replace accomplishes the task in one stroke:

Search: ^(w*) (w*)n
Replace: $2, $1n

This search finds every line consisting of just two words separated by a space. The <code>$1</code> refers to the string matched by the characters in the first set of parentheses, and <code>$2</code> refers to the string matched by the second set. The replacement string tells the editor to switch the words and insert a comma between them. This changes a list like this,

George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson

to

Washington, George
Adams, John
Jefferson, Thomas

Imagine how difficult it would be to do this with a long file by cutting and pasting each name! Regular expressions can use Boolean operators, wildcards, and different character types. Different languages have their own particular syntaxes for regular expressions, and I assume that text editors might also have different syntaxes. The examples all work in Sublime Text 2. It’s well worth learning a little about how your preferred editor handles regular expressions, it can save a great deal of time and retyping.

The primary difference in Emacs is in referencing the strings to be searched for and used in the replace operation. The key is to put a backslash (“\”) before the opening and closing parentheses in the search operation, and to use a backslash instead of a dollar sign in the replace operation. So, this will work for the preceding example:

Search: ^\(\w+\) \(\w+\)
Replace: \2, \1

In biblical texts, victims are innocent and collective violence is to blame. ln myths, the victims are to blame and communities are always innocent.

René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 35

In today’s Washington Post, Petula Dvorak’s column includes a story about a 6-year-old who was told by her mother to scale back her Christmas list. So, she wrote a letter to “Dear Sata” asking for just one thing, a remote control that controlled the world.

When her mother pointed out that the salutation was missing an “N”, she simply added it to the end of the name. So, it read, “Dear Satan,…” Fitting, somehow.

God of grace, hear our prayer,

We give thanks for this day, for we need it desperately.
The world inundates us with messages of
helplessness and hopelessness, emptiness and despair,
until we are tempted to feel that all is lost.

Then we come to this place,
and we find that there is still hope,
for the love that spoke the world into being
has drawn these two people together,
so that they may create their own world,
a life together,
marked by beauty,
dedicated to peace,
and surrounded by love.

Protect, guide, and bless them in their marriage.
Surround us all with your love, now and always.

Now, may the slanting rays of the sun¹
light the path before you,
as the love of God surrounds you,
to guide you on this journey together.
May God guard your hearts
from anything that might separate you,
and shelter you in his love, forever.

Amen

All around us, we see pain and heartache,
the effects of fragmented and broken systems,
communities, and families.
When the pain of others becomes
too much for us to bear,
we respond by building up walls
that separate us from the world.

So here we stay,
safe and secure
behind our walls of division,
seeing only ourselves,
our own problems,
and our own hopes.

We boast of our love for humanity,
while at the same time,
fail to see the needs of our neighbor.

But God, You have called us to be your people,
and you have have given us a new commandment,
the commandment to love one another.
Loving others, though, is something that we cannot do
from a position of safety and security,
for to love is embrace vulnerability and risk,
all for the sake of the beloved.

So, guide our hands to reach out across our walls
and open our eyes to see beyond ourselves,
so that we might be used by you
for the healing of this world.

In the name of Jesus Christ,
who called us to be in the world,
but not of it,
we pray.

Amen

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

First, I deleted the app. I deleted BBEdit from the applications folder. Somehow, it was still in Launchpad. So, I deleted it from Launchpad. Surely that would be enough.

Unfortunately, after I deleted the application, the App Store still thought that it was installed and wouldn’t let me download another copy. With the aid of a great little application called Find Any File, I removed every trace of BBEdit from the machine, including all preference files and application support files.

The App Store was still convinced that it was installed.

Then, I began searching the internet, which revealed some frustrated App Store customers, who were mostly frustrated with their Xcode experience. The search didn’t help.

For some reason, I decided to go back to Launchpad and saw the BBEdit icon there. I clicked it and BBEdit started right up, though without my usual color scheme since I had deleted the application support folder. So, where was the file? On a whim, I disconnected my backup drive, opened the App Store, and BBEdit was finally gone with the option to install. I Pressed the install button, and BBEdit was automatically installed.

Lesson: Launchpad sees apps on external drives, so disconnect any external drives to install a deleted app to your main drive. Then, reinstalling should be the quick and easy process that it’s supposed to be.

The eight goals are outlined on the United Nations Website:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
   
2. Achieve universal primary education
   
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
   
4. Reduce child mortality
   
5. Improve maternal health
   
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, marlaria and other diseases
   
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
   
8. Develop a global partnership for development

You can read a progress report here. Each region of the world shows progress in almost every category, but there is still much work to do. These goals should be the goals of the church, for they certainly seem consistent with Jesus’ stated mission in Luke 4:18-19: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

May his mission be our own.

So calm down and smile and loosen up your judgy pants because I can see your muffin top of hate and it’s so not flattering.

Autumn Raines Lockett

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams

Holy Saturday,
the day of waiting,
after all of our
hopes and dreams
have been crushed
by a cruel world
and a naive idealism
is forced to succumb
to a harsher reality.

But even after the
horrors of Friday,
the morning sun still
rose on Saturday.

And we have hope,
however faint,
however absurd.

So we wait,
wait to see
what Sunday
will bring.

Amen

God of love,

We open our arms
to hug and to hold,
welcome and invite.

With outstretched hands,
we lower our defenses
and accept the vulnerability
that comes with love.

Did the soldiers know
what they were doing
as they stretched the arms
of Jesus onto the cross?

Humiliated and scorned,
the Eternal King
chose vulnerability, love,
and reconciliation
instead of rejection.

Give us the courage
to do the same.

Amen

How would you have us known to the world?

By whom we exclude?
By what we hate?
By whom we refuse to serve?
By our purity?

Instead, we are to be known
by our love…

Love,

in all its
messy,
entangled,
accepting,
and sometimes awkward
beauty.

Amen

The way to Christ is first through humility, second through humility, third through humility.

Augustine of Hippo

“Do you think it’s OK for the U.N. to be on our soil attacking our gun rights?”

I was instructed to press “1” if I did not think was OK for the U.N. to be on our soil attacking our gun rights. That was followed by a repeat instruction to press “1” if I did not think it was OK. I was then instructed to press 2 if I did think was OK for the U.N. to attack our gun rights. (Note that I was only given that instruction once.)

I am not criticizing the NRA’s position on the U.N. Small Arms Treaty, primarily since I have no interest in making enemies of the most well-armed group in the country. NRA membership outnumbers the people serving the U.S. Armed Forces by over a million. Even if there are no problems with the policy position, there are several problems with the survey. First, it is obvious that the NRA is not concerned what people think about the treaty. The survey is a classic example of a push-poll. It’s designed simply to push a message out to the population. This is evident from the question. What useful information do we expect to gain from asking people if they think it’s OK for the U.N to attack our gun rights. Do we really not know how people will answer that question? It’s no different from my polling my students to find out if they would like to get out of class early. I expect to soon hear an announcement from the NRA proclaiming that the American people are nearly unanimous in their rejection of the Small Arms Treaty. As far as information gathering goes, it’s a complete waste of time and money. For propaganda pushing, on the other hand, it’s very effective.

I wonder what the response rate would have been had the question been “Do you think it’s OK that the U.N. negotiate a treaty designed to prevent guns from falling into the hands of terrorists?” Another group could report that the American people nearly unanimously support the Small Arms Treaty. This survey would be no better as a survey, but just as effective as a propaganda tool.

I will be curious to see what percentage of respondents the NRA reports as supporting their position. It should not be 100%, since I pressed “2” just out of spite.

At last Frodo spoke with hesitation. “I believed that you were a friend before the letter came,” he said, “or at least I wished to. You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way the servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would - well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.”

What does a king look like?

Is he haughty,
unapproachable,
controlling,
and cold?

Regal and magnificent,
to be respected and admired,
but only from afar?

Majestic and powerful,
a conquering hero
who rides into the city
astride a warhorse?

Surely the king
would not appear
as the son of
a poor family,
a laborer with
calloused hands?

Homeless,
who owns nothing,
and rides into the city
on a shabby, borrowed donkey?

One who suffered injustice,
and was executed by
the forces of the state?

Father,

Teach me to
embrace the King
as he is,
and not the King
as I want him to be.

Amen

The greatest tragedy
is not to hate God,
for the one who hates
has God ever present
before his mind.

It is ambivalence,
thoughtless and uncaring,
a life that is at once
both full and empty,
full of trivialities,
yet empty of meaning

Heal my lukewarm heart, Lord,
and restore me to my first love.

Amen

I have read the entire Koran and can find in it no guidance on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society. I have read the entire New Testament and can find in it no guidance on how Christians should live as a majority.

In those times
that we feel alone,
lost in the crowd,
and disconnected
from those around us,
we take comfort in knowing
that at the center of reality
is an unending community of love,
and that we, your children,
have been invited into
the eternal fellowship
that is the
Father,
Son,
and Holy Spirit,
three persons,
but one God,
forever and ever.

Amen

You’re never too old to have a happy childhood.

Mike Bumgarner

1. Write each premise on a separate, numbered line,
2. Draw a line underneath the last premise, and
3. Write the conclusion underneath the line.

I’ll first show how to format an argument in HTML, then show an easier way in Markdown with Hugo.

<ol>
  <li>
    First Premise
  </li>
  <li>
    <u>Last Premise</u>
  </li>
  <li style="list-style:none;">
    Conclusion
  </li>
</ol>

<ol>
  <li>
    First Premise
  </li>
  <li>
    Last Premise
  </li>
  <li style="list-style:none;">
    Conclusion
</ol>

<ol class="arg">
  <li>
    First Premise
  </li>
  <li>
    Last Premise
  </li>
  <li>
    Conclusion
  </li>
</ol>

<ol>
  <li>
    P ⊃ Q
  </li>
  <li>
    P
  </li>
  <li style="list-style:none;">
    Q
  </li>
</ol>

<ol>
  <li>
    P &#8835; Q
  </li>
  <li>
    <u>P&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<;/u>
  </li>
  <li style="list-style:none;">
    Q
  </li>
</ol>

<ol>
  <li>
    P ⊃ Q
  </li>
  <li>
    P
  </li>
  <li style="list-style:none;">
    Q
  </li>
</ol>

[markup]
  [markup.goldmark]
  [markup.goldmark.parser]
      autoHeadingID = true
      autoHeadingIDType = "github"
      [markup.goldmark.parser.attribute]
	block = true
	title = true
    [markup.goldmark.renderer]
      unsafe = true

.arg li:last-child {
  list-style: none;
}

.arg li:nth-last-child(2) {
text-decoration: underline;
}

.arg li {
margin: 0px;
}

1. First premise
2. Second premise
3. Conclusion
{.arg}

There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible – until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves. But then we are perhaps too used to it and too at home in it. Let us not be too sure we know the Bible … just because we have learned not to have problems with it. Have we perhaps learned … not to really pay attention to it? Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it?

Thomas Merton, from Opening the Bible

I don’t know if she was doing it to spiritually prepare for Sunday, but Sheri, my wife, had been playing the 2012 film version over the past week. A few days ago, she pointed out that there is an ethical problem in the film—specifically, the conflict between mercy, on the one hand, and faithfulness to the law on the other.

In Victor Hugo’s novel, Jean Valjean was an embittered ex-convict, unable to find food or lodging. When the the Bishop of Digne offered him shelter for the night, Valjean repaid him by stealing a set of expensive, extravagant silverware. The next morning, the police apprehended Valjean who told them an implausible story of how he had been given the silverware by the Bishop. When they dragged Valjean back to verify the story, we are given one of the most powerful scenes of grace found in literature:

The door opened to disclose a dramatic group. Three men were holding a fourth by the arms and neck. The three were gendarmes; the fourth was Jean Valjean…

’So here you are!’ he cried to Valjean. ’I’m delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, and worth a good two hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?’

Jean Valjean’s eyes had widened. He was now staring at the old man with an expression no words can convey…

He fetched them from the mantelpiece and handed them to Valjean. The two women watched him do so without seeking by word or look to interfere. Valjean was trembling. He took the candlesticks mechanically and with a distracted air.

’And now,’ said the bishop, ’go in peace. Incidentally, my friend, when next you come here you need not go through the garden. This door is never locked.’ He turned to the gendarmes. ’Thank you, gentlemen.’

The gendarmes withdrew. Valjean stayed motionless as though he were on the verge of collapse. The bishop came up to him and said in a low voice:

’Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.’

Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:

’Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.’¹

Jean Valjean was transformed, but like most transformations, it was not instantaneous—after he went on his way, in his confusion, he stole a coin from a boy. He soon realized what he had done, and attempted to return the coin, but the theft has already been reported. If he were caught, he would be sentenced to life as a repeat offender.

Valjean adopted an alias and went on to forge a new life for himself. Eventually, he became a wealthy factory owner, the town mayor, and by all accounts, an honorable man. When Valjean learned that an innocent man faced punishment for Valjean’s past crimes, he went to court and proclaimed his true identity.

This led to a series of arrests and escapes, and Valjeans constant pursuit by Javert, a fanatical police inspector, who seemed to seek only the enforcement of the law. At a critical point, Valjean had an opportunity to kill Javert, but instead, saved his life. Javert could not reconcile mercy and the law, and after this act of mercy on the part of Valjean, he could neither arrest Valjean nor let him go free. Javert’s only escape from his cognitive dissonance was suicide.

In May, several news sources² reported the story of the arrest of Cornealious Anderson. Anderson was convicted and sentenced when he was 23 for his role in a robbery. He was then told to wait for orders to report to prison, but those orders never came. He never hid his identity, and even asked his attorney what he should do. In the meantime, he married, raised four children, started and operated construction businesses, coached his son’s football team, and ran the video during the services of his church.

When his original sentence was supposed to end, the state realized its clerical error. Anderson, through no fault of his own, had never served any part of his sentence. Eight US Marshals were immediately sent to his home to take him into custody.

Should the state of Missouri have enforced the original sentence or should it have shown mercy? Does acting on one show no respect for the other?

Judge Terry Brown of Mississippi County, Missouri freed Anderson after a ten minute hearing, and granted him time-served for his entire sentence—he walked out of the courtroom with his family and no requirement for parole. Anderson’s attorney said that the case shows that “justice can be swift, justice can be harsh, but justice also can be merciful.”

There lies the solution to the problem. The law should serve the interests of justice. So, we shouldn’t ask if mercy is compatible with the law, but rather if mercy is compatible with justice, and that depends on what justice is. Is justice an act of revenge upon the one who committed the wrong, or is justice an act of restoration?

An act of robbery has many more victims than just the one who was robbed. The criminal obviously harmed the one who was robbed, but also harmed the greater community. This explains, at least in part, why the state, not just the individual, has in interest in the prosecution of crime. Socrates thought that the greatest harm was done to offender himself, self-harm that consists in harm both to one’s moral personality and one’s relation to other members of the community.

The restorative justice movement understands justice as the repairing of the harm that was caused by criminal act, the harm done to victims, the community, and also to the offenders. The goal of justice, then, is the restoration of community and the transformation of those involved.

In the fictional case of Valjean and the actual case of Anderson, meeting the demands of the law would do more to harm the restoration of community than had already been achieved. So, in these cases, justice is not only compatible with mercy, but demands mercy.

For more information on Restorative Justice, see Restorative Justice Online.

I’m surrounded by voices
telling me what I want to hear,
voices urging me to seek my own good,
to protect what is mine,
that my security is more important
than the needs of others.

Help me, Lord,
to hear a different message,
one that challenges me
to become something
better than I have been,
and to dismantle my own petty kingdom
for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

Amen

We often put arguments in what is called “standard form.” The premises are written on numbered lines, with a line underneath the last premise. The conclusion is then written beneath the line. In LaTeX, this is easily done with this code:

\begin{enumerate}
\item First Premise
\item \underline{Last Premise}
\item [$\therefore$] Conclusion
\end{enumerate}

For HTML, I use a class that I named “arg” and defined in my custom css file:

.arg li:last-child {
  list-style: none;
}

.arg li:nth-last-child(2) {
  text-decoration: underline;
}

.arg li {
  margin: 0px;
}

This tells the rendering engine to not put any number before the last item of a list (nor any other styling) and to underline the penultimate item of the list.

To use an HTML class in org mode, just put this immediately before the element you want to style:

#+ATTR_HTML: :class classname

The argument is written like this:

#+ATTR_HTML: :class arg
1. First premise
2. Second premise
3. Conclusion

which produces this:

1. First premise
2. Second premise
3. Conclusion

The year that I was born, 1963, was marked by these significant events:

• In April, Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed in Birmingham.
• In May, “Bull” Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham used police dogs and fire hoses on a demonstration in Birmingham.
• In June, Medgar Evers, the NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, was murdered outside his home.
• In August, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
• In September, four young girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Tuesday, an African-American man was elected President of the United States.

The country has certainly come far. European countries are generally viewed as far more progressive than the United States, but, as far as I can tell, no European country is even remotely close to being able to select a member of a minority racial group as head of government.

That said, we still have a long ways to go before we can claim to have achieved racial reconciliation. On November 5, David Garland, President of Baylor University, issued a statement concerning recent incidents of racial conflict on Baylor’s campus. We cannot hope to achieve reconciliation in this country if we are not even able to achieve it in the Church. It is time for the Church to not only ask forgiveness for our past sins regarding slavery, but to recognize that failing to take action to create a better future is itself a sin.

If nothing else, this week’s election is a sign of hope.

The events of the past eight years proved that progress requires more than simply hope.

| Miley Malone | \phantom{xxxxxxxxxx} | Ruben Espinosa | \phantom{xxxxxxxxxx} |

Then, to make sure there was enough vertical space, I would add some extra blank rows between each row, having to adjust several times to make everything fit. It worked fine once completed, but it was certainly a pain in the neck. After seeing Matt Maguire’s post, Exporting Org Mode Tables to LaTeX, I realized there had to be a better way.

Using the LaTeX tabularray package, I can simply do this:

#+ATTR_LATEX: :environment tblr :align hline{3-Z}={solid},row{2-Z}={f,12mm},colspec={XXXX}
| Name         | Signature | Name         | Signature |
| Miley Malone   |             | Ruben Espinosa |             |
| Braylee Brandt |             | Naomi Warren   |             |
| Abel Bullock   |             | Winnie Weaver  |             |
| Tucker Sexton  |             | Ellen Hayden   |             |
| Leroy Skinner  |             | Damir Phillips |             |

to produce:

Here is what the values of align do:

• Ordinarily, hline puts a border line on the top and bottom of every row. I don’t want them on the first row, so hline{3-Z}={solid} omits the first two lines.
• row{2-Z}={f,12mm} aligns the text to the bottom of the row and sets the row height to 12mm for all of the rows except for the first.
• colspec={XXXX} widens the row to the length of the line. Since the signature columns are blank, I don’t really need to specify particular column widths.

Now, instead of inserting and deleting rows and setting horizontal lines manually, I can just adjust the row height as needed by changing one number. See the excellent tabularray documentation for other settings.

Forgive me,
when I quickly judge
a harsh word,
or impolite response
without knowing
the full story.

Everyone has a story,
and every encounter
affects the plot,
and each moment
is another opportunity
to transform the tale
from hopeless tragedy
to divine beauty.

Amen

What should I do to get even? Maybe we’ll have to reinstate those daily presentations.

According to Sojourners, 25% of U.S. adults polled attributed this quote to either Obama or the Dalai Lama. (February 2010, p. 9)

You are never under obligation to preach a great sermon, but you are eternally obligated to grapple with great ideas. And if you grapple with great ideas, you might, occasionally in a lifetime, preach a great sermon.

Otis Moss, Jr., quoting Dr. Howard Thurman

Holy God,

Protect me from the temptation
to mistake sarcasm for honesty,
cynicism for realism,
and cleverness for wisdom.

Cleanse my heart from anything
that keeps me from loving
and learning from everyone
that you place in my path,
especially those that make me uncomfortable.

Teach me to rejoice in the differences,
for what can I learn
from those that already
think as I do,
believe as I do,
and speak as I do?

Amen

My mistake, as if often the case, is to think of Mary only as the young girl in the Christmas story, and neglect the woman that reared a child whom she surely could never keep — anguish foreshadowed by Simeon’s remark by Simeon’s cryptic remark to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” Mary, though, despite her anguish, has hope, as we must also. As Hauerwas states:

So may we never forget that we, the church, comprise Mary’s home. A home, moreover, that promises not safety but rather the ongoing challenge of being a people called from the nations to be God’s people. A people constituted by faith in the One who refused to triumph through the violence the world believes to be the only means possible to achieve some limited good, to insure we will be remembered. The refusal to use violence in the name of the good does not mean this people can forget those singled out in Mary’s song of triumph— that is, the poor and powerless. Rather, it means that such a people, Mary-like, must live by hope— a hope that patiently waits with Mary at the foot of her son’s cross.¹

(use-package tex
    :ensure auctex)

and everything worked except for sync with Skim on OS X. C-c v would not launch the Skim, even though I was confident that the Skim was set to be the default viewer. Instead, no viewer would launch, and I’d see “View command: dvi2tty -q -w 132” in the minibuffer.

After seeing that some others had used a slightly different configuration, I changed mine to

(use-package tex-site
    :ensure auctex)

and everything started working fine. I still have no idea why, but it may help someone else.

Loving God,

We give thanks this day,
for those who care
for children,
for aging parents,
and for neighbors,
for anyone who needs
a warm smile,
a cheerful greeting,
or a kind word.

And we are blessed
by those who
love every child
as one of their own,
for reflected
in their eyes,
we see the face
of Jesus.

Amen

The graphic shows two people on opposite ends of an ambiguous figure on the ground. One person points down and says “Six.” The other points down, saying “Nine.” The original caption is “Just because you are right, does not mean I am wrong.” That caption is crossed out, and this rebuttal placed below:

But one of those people is wrong, someone painted a six or nine, they need to back up ad orient themselves, see if there are any other numbers to alight with. Maybe there’s a driveway of a building to face, or they can ask someone who actually knows.

People having an uninformed opinion about something they don’t understand and proclaiming their opinion as being equally valid as facts is what is ruining the world. No one wants to do any research, they just want to be right.

There are number of things wrong here. First, the minor and less interesting problems:

1. The distinction between opinion and fact — an opinion is just something someone believes. A fact is something that is the case. True opinions express facts; false ones do not. So, an opinion can very well be as “valid” as a fact, if it indeed expresses a fact.
2. I do think that people having uninformed (I assume that is what was meant, not “uniformed”) opinions is bad, however, I suspect there are worse problems in the world. Failure to be informed is not evidence that people want to be right, but that they want to win. There’s an important difference.

Now for the more interesting issues:

One thing the explanation gets right is that context is important. Context might very well show that one person is in fact wrong, but context could also show that both are right. The explanation assumes that the figure is painted on the floor or ground, but that’s not clear from the cartoon. Another possibility is that the two people are looking at a large sign that was not intentionally placed, but simply laid down. To save money, the sign-maker may have produced 9 different signs for the numerals, intending the same sign to be used for both 6 and 9. So, both are correct. It is both a 6 and 9. The explanation assumes that the person who placed the figure there was trying to communicate something, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

Another possibility, imagine that the two people live directly across the street from each other — one at 6 Elm Street and the other at 9 Elm Street. Not being very bright, they thought it would be cute to paint this large figure on the street between their houses. One points out that it is a 6, the other, a 9. Both walk away happy, and there is no real disagreement.

To the broader point communicated by the original statement:

We’ve all probably had disagreements that seemed irresolvable. Then, after some patient discussion, one person says, “You know, I think we’re really saying the same thing.” We often find that there are many different ways to express the same thought. One way being right does not mean that the others are wrong.

Statements also have meaning relative to a linguistic context. We may assume the other is wrong, but we’ve just misunderstood the context. For example, one person says that it is 25 degrees outside, but another says that it is -4. Can they both be right? Of course, if they are assuming different temperature scales.

So, in cases of disagreement, there are several possibilities:

1. The disagreement is merely apparent. The parties believe the same thing, but do not understand each other.
2. The disagreement is genuine, and the issue is such that only one party can be correct.
3. The disagreement is genuine, but the issue is such that, even though they don’t realize it, both parties can be correct.

To know if someone’s being right entails that another person is wrong, I have to know facts about the question, the issue, the linguistic context, etc. That’s often not very difficult, but sometimes it is very hard. It’s important to note that we are always hypothesizing about these things and our assumptions may be wrong. So, in situations of disagreement, maybe we should try to exercise a bit more charity.

In the end, then, it is both one person’s being right and facts about context that determine if the other person must be wrong. So, the original statement stands, one person’s being right is not alone enough to guarantee that another person is wrong. We should certainly seek to be informed, but we should also seek to understand.

Thank you
for the one
who offends me,
for in offense
my heart is laid bare
and my idols are revealed.

My anger declares
the object of my worship.

Is it myself,
the empire,
or you?

Lord, have mercy.

The creator of the universe
came to us as a helpless child,
reminding us that there is no
reconciliation without risk
or love without a chance of loss.

But we sacrificed peace
on the altar of security,
preferring to remain in darkness
than to venture out into the light,
desiring our kingdom more than yours.

Give us the courage
to drop our guard,
and open our lives
both to you and
to one another.

Amen

Almighty God,

We grieve this week,
crying with those who suffer,
lamenting with those who mourn.

Even in our anger,
May we always seek justice,
and never revenge;
healing, not harm;
and a measured response,
instead of thoughtless reaction.

When circumstances tempt us
to sink into the depths of despair,
may we hear the prophet’s voice,
as he surveyed the destruction of Jerusalem
yet still found hope,

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning,
great is your faithfulness.”

When faced with the choice
between burning hatred
and callous indifference,
remind us again that there is a third way,
the way of love.

And may that love shine so brightly
that the entire world will know,
the light still shines in the darkness,
and the darkness will never defeat it.

Amen

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Penn Jillette¹

There is a lot to think about here. Keep in mind that I haven’t read the book, but have only seen this single paragraph. Here are my initial thoughts in no particular order.

The argument seems to be this: imagine that a body of belief were somehow completely eradicated from human minds. If humans were somehow to replicate this body of belief, then such replication would be evidence in favor of its truth. Failure to replicate the body of belief would be evidence in favor of its falsity.

Now, as I often say in class, it’s a bit more complicated than this. First, science itself is not a body of belief. It is instead a method of producing beliefs. So, the proposal must be not to “wipe out science” but instead to eradicate all belief in and memory of all propositions that we consider part of science, that is, claims in physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Then, we should ask if these beliefs would eventually be replicated.

I assume that Jillette requires only that current scientific beliefs be replicated. There’s no reason why he should require Galen’s ideas about physiology and anatomy or Aristotle’s physics to be replicated, since they are false. Why believe that current scientific beliefs would be replicated? I guess because Jillette assumes that they are true. Now, only the most radical antirealist would assume that nothing in current science is true, so I’ll grant that we have good reason for believing that at least much of current science is in fact true. How much of current scientific belief is true, though? Surely not all of it. As Newtonian mechanics was eventually replaced with relativity theory and quantum mechanics, might there at some point be another theoretical framework that replaces current physics? There’s no reason to think that everything science asserts now is true, so there’s no reason to think that it would be exactly replicated. So, what is true of religion is also true of science - “There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.”

So, if we won’t demand exact replication in science, then we shouldn’t demand exact replication for religion either. Does that mean that those religious beliefs that would be replicated then should be considered true? I don’t find it difficult to believe that the belief that a god exists would find its way back into the human psyche, along with other beliefs about the god’s role in causing the universe to be, the demands that the god makes on humans, etc.

I suppose that the reply would be that these are individual religious beliefs, what must be replicated is a system of religious belief, and that there’s no reason to believe that any current system of religious thought would be replicated. Surely though, there are bodies of religious belief that could easily be replicated. Some minimal deism, for instance, is very likely to be replicated.

There is reason why one would think that, if scientific knowledge were somehow eradicated, that we would come to discover those scientific truths again. That is because we think that the method of science is truth-conducive. That is, the scientific method, in the long run, will produce true beliefs and eliminate false beliefs. This is something famously argued by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).² Now, that doesn’t mean that every use of the scientific method produces true belief or eliminates false beliefs. Some people may just not be very good scientists. In other cases, the particular scientists may be very good, but simply have some false background assumptions.³ The particular beliefs that are true, though, would be replicated if science is truth-conducive. So, would religious beliefs be eventually replicated if they were eradicated? That depends on the means by which such beliefs were produced. If religious beliefs are formed by a truth-conducive method, then there is every reason that they would be. What could be the method that produced my religious beliefs? One possibility is that God gave them to me, and surely that’s a truth-conducive method.

So, in the end, Jillette’s argument begs the question. That is, he hasn’t given us a successful argument that religious belief is false because religious belief would not be replicated. Instead, if he argues successfully for anything, it is that religious belief would not be replicated if all religious belief is false. I grant that the conditional is true, but I haven’t been shown any reason why I should grant that all religious belief is false. If one paragraph was this thought-provoking, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

Into our darkness, there came a light,
As a babe was born on that holy night;
The angels sang and the shepherds prayed
When the Son of God in a manger lay.

As we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We remember that child, a gift for us.
As we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We remember that child, a gift for us.

The fullness of God in human form,
Was that night, in Bethlehem born;
Giving up his throne in heaven above,
To teach us to serve, to give, and to love.

As we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We remember Jesus, a gift for us.
As we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We remember Jesus, a gift for us.

He came to this world, in all its strife,
For our sins, to give his life;
Lifted up, with his arms held wide,
The Son of God was crucified.

As we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We remember our Lord, a gift for us.
As we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We remember our Lord, a gift for us.

Long ago,
a tree was planted by your grace
and watered by your providential care.

It was robbed of
life and beauty,
and used to fashion a cross
to bear body of the Christ,
broken for our redemption.

And so, Lord, like that tree,
we have been planted,
watered, and have grown,
yet the time has come for us
to offer our lives to you,
not just to bear,
but to become
the body of Christ
in this world.

Amen

On this day, Lord,
give me a vision
of the horror of the cross,
for without it
there is no beauty
of the cross.

Amen

Nowhere is the grace of God more evident than in the fact that some preachers will be saved.

Karl Barth

Like all great art, it imparts to the audience a profound sense of empathy and belief, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate.

Yoni Brenner, referring to Brahms’ Symphony No. 2¹

This does not mean that the church should not be developing creative ways of caring for those that Jesus and the prophets called “the least of these.” It does mean, though, that the church taking on more of a burden² does not relieve the state, nor the rest of the country, from sharing that burden. In Psalm 72, a prayer for guidance for the king, Scripture describes God’s hope for the one who leads the state: “May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.” To allow the state to shirk its responsibility for caring the poor means that the state will no longer fulfill its God-given role of crushing the oppressor, but instead allows the state to become the oppressor — surely not something to which a government of the people should aspire.

Bayes’ Theorem

God of all hope,

When those seeking food and shelter
are told only to pray to Jesus,

When those fleeing the devastation of war
are told only to go to Jesus,

And when those who
have lost all hope
are told only to hope in Jesus,

Then, Lord, I have failed.

For if I will not welcome
those whom the world now rejects,
then why would I welcome the child
whom the world did reject?

So, instead of the usual
empty platitudes of the season,
may I offer real hope,
a hope that feeds,
clothes, and shelters,
heals broken lives,
and mends broken spirits.

In the name of Christ,

Amen

Venndiagram, like my method, uses TikZ to make the diagram. The advantage, though, is that we don’t have to dig into the details of TikZ for everything, that is already done for us. For example, here is the code for the diagram for an A-sentence using my previous method.

\begin{tikzpicture}[thick,scale=1, every node/.style={transform shape}]
  \begin{scope}
    \begin{scope}[even odd rule]
      \clip \pred (-1.5,-1.5) rectangle (1.5,1.5);
      \fill[gray] \sub;
    \end{scope}
    \draw (-2,-0) node {$A$};
    \draw (4,0) node {$B$};
    \draw \sub;
    \draw \pred;
  \end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}

Here is the code for the same diagram with the venndiagram package.

\begin{venndiagram2sets}
  [tikzoptions={scale=1,thick}, showframe=false]
  \fillANotB
\end{venndiagram2sets}

It produces this:

Here’s the code for Disamis (IAI-3):

\begin{venndiagram3sets}
  [
  tikzoptions={scale=1,thick},
  showframe=false,
  labelOnlyB={x},
  labelABC={x}
  ]
  \fillCNotA
\end{venndiagram3sets}

The resulting diagram looks like this:

There was no way that I could remember my all of the details of my original method, so I had an 84-line snippet that I inserted for each diagram. I would then comment and uncomment various lines to produce the diagram I needed.

Now, I just use this snippet for a 2-circle diagram:

\begin{venndiagram2sets}
  [
  tikzoptions={scale=1,thick},
  showframe=false,
  labelA=S,
  labelB=P,
  labelOnlyA={x},
  labelAB={x}
  ]
  \fillANotB
\end{venndiagram2sets}

I use this for a 3-circle diagram:

\begin{venndiagram3sets}
  [
  tikzoptions={scale=1,thick},
  showframe=false,
  labelA=S, %label circle A with "S"
  labelB=P, %label circle B with "P"
  labelC=M, %label circle M with "M"
  labelOnlyA={x}, %puts an "x" in the region belonging only to A
  labelOnlyBC={x}, %puts an "x" in intersection of B and C.
  labelABC={x} %puts an "x" in the the intersection of A, B, and C.
  ]
  \fillANotB %fills the region belonging only to B
  \fillBCapC %fills the intersection of B and C.
  % To put an x on the lines, uncomment the following:
  % \setpostvennhook % places an "x" in other locations of the diagram.
  % {
  % \node[above = 1.6cm of labelC] {X};
  % \node[above left = 1.4cm and .25cm of labelC, rotate=45] {X};
  % }
\end{venndiagram3sets}

Both have enough detail that I can remember what to change to make a particular diagram. I’ve added some extra comments to explain what everything does. I Include the scale=1 only so that I can remember what to do when I want to change the size of the diagram. The only tricky part is when I have to place an x on the border of a particular circle, that requires a little bit of TikZ fiddling, hence the commented lines at the end of the snippet.

Sometimes our prayers are as parched as the desert
and our hearts as dry as the dunes of sand.

We take offense at things that don’t matter,
but ignore the ones that do.

When others are hungry,
we are full.

When others are hurting,
we are numb.

When others are cold,
we rest comfortably
beneath warm blankets of apathy.

But even in our self-righteousness,
we still feel something,
a deep ache of longing,
a thirst for something
greater than ourselves,
a lingering thought
that you are still there.

Emmanuel,
God with us.

Despite our weakness,
you have called us to be your people,
ambassadors of your kingdom.

Lead us once more to the well of your grace,
Bathe us again in the streams of your mercy.

Open the floodgates of your love,
and let the rivers flow.

Amen

True, but it’s a classic error in statistical reasoning. The vast majority of drivers involved in accidents are sober, but it doesn’t follow that one is more likely to have an accident if one is sober than if drunk. That is, the probability that a person was drunk given that he was in an accident is very low, but the probability that someone will be in an accident given that he is drunk is very high.

Whites comprise 62% of the population, while African-Americans are only 13%. Of people killed by police officers, 49% are white and 24% are black. Since Jan 1, 2015, roughly 1,500 people have been shot and killed by police in the United States.¹ This tells us that a person who has been killed by police is twice as likely to be white than black, exactly as the commenter stated. As is often the case with statistics, though, what we’re given is not what we want to know, but it can be used to derive what we want to know.

Let $W$ be white, $B$ be black, and $K$ be killed by police. The probability that someone is white if they are killed by police, $\Pr(W|K)$ , is 0.49. The probability that someone is black if they are killed by police, $\Pr(B|K)$ , is 0.24. What we need to know, though, is the probability that someone will be killed by police given their race. To do this, we need to use Bayes’ theorem.

$$\Pr(K|R)=\Pr(K)\times\frac{\Pr(R|K)}{\Pr(R)}$$

Since $\Pr(K)$ is the same for both whites and blacks, we can safely ignore it when determining how much more likely a person is to be killed given that their race. We simply need to compare $\frac{\Pr(W|K)}{\Pr(W)}$ to $\frac{\Pr(B)|(K)}{\Pr(B)}$ .

$$\frac{\Pr(W|K)}{\Pr(W)}=\frac{0.49}{0.62}=0.79$$

On the other hand,

$$\frac{\Pr(B|K)}{\Pr(B)}=\frac{0.24}{0.13}=1.84$$

That is, a person that is an African-American is 2.34 times more likely to be killed by police than a White-American.

All lives do indeed, objectively, equally matter. Unfortunately, though, we must confess that America has a history of black lives not mattering subjectively to those who have held social power. When a truth has been ignored, even suppressed, for so long, it must be emphasized to gain its rightful standing in our social reality. To do otherwise, that is to simply say “All lives matter,” is to maintain an unjust status quo that serves the interests of some, but not all Americans.

UPDATE (October 2, 2016): I want to be careful to note what I am arguing here, and more importantly what I am not arguing. I am merely pointing out the fairly trivial claim that $\Pr(A|B)$ does not necessarily equal $\Pr(B|A)$ , and, in this case, actually does not.

I am not accusing the police of being racist, and I have not endeavored to show that anyone has been unjustly shot. I am simply showing that, even though more white Americans are killed by police, black Americans are more likely to be killed by police. There are many possible explanations for this, ranging from racial bias in the police force to high rates of violent crime in predominately African-American communities. There are significant studies that conclude that the former is more likely than the latter to be the correct explanation, but that will have to wait for another post.

You warned the disciples
to be wary of claims
that the messiah had come.
You said, “When told
he is in the inner rooms,
do not believe it.”

When Thomas was told
that you appeared
in the inner rooms,
he heeded your word
and did not believe it
until he saw for himself.

And of those who claim
to have special insight
of your will for us,
may we be like Thomas,
the skeptical and
obedient disciple.

Amen

We should have much peace if we would not busy ourselves with the sayings and doings of others.

Thomas à Kempis

There’s no need to point out the irony of posting this.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

A commandment to love, though, should strike us as odd, because we generally think of love as a feeling or emotion. It makes no sense to command a feeling or emotion, however, for those are not within our immediate control. We can only be commanded to act. So, unless Jesus’ command is simply pointless, love must be a way of acting, or living as Jesus lived; in his words, “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (John 13:15)

I have good reason to continue to think of love as just an emotion. By thinking of love as a feeling, I avoid having to keep the commandment to love. So, I have taken something that I simply do not want to do, and turned it into something that is impossible for me to do. As long as I pretend it is impossible, I can deny that there is any obligation to keep the commandment. That way, I can go on loving only those whom I like, and thus continue to rest comfortably in my own self-righteousness.

May God forgive me.

The problem would be just as acute had Churches of Christ been captured by Democratic as opposed to Republican interests since both parties — indeed, all political parties — are wed to the right-side-up interests of power, wealth and control. Disciples of Jesus, however, pledge allegiance to the upside-down kingdom of God where they serve the least of these, place the interests of others above their own, and stand in solidarity with oppressed and marginalized people.

Hughes is speaking about the Churches of Christ, but it is true of all Christian denominations. It is tempting to align ourselves with a political party in order to use that party as a tool of the gospel, but the inevitable consequence is that the resulting perversion of the gospel instead becomes a tool that the party uses to maintain power.

We have but one Lord and one King, Jesus Christ.

At the same time, though, I think the title of the post does a disservice to those who might read it. First, recognize that the analogy is particularly weak. Depression is a condition, a mammogram is a diagnostic tool. A better analogy would be this, “If you wouldn’t go to your minister because you have cancer, don’t go because you have depression.” So, the question, then, should be “Would you go to your minister if you had cancer?” I certainly hope that the answer is yes; cancer may not be a spiritual condition, but surely having cancer affects one’s spirit, and the patient should get as much support as she can. In the same way, having depression affects one’s spirit, and support from a caring pastoral counselor should be valued.

Is pastoral counseling good treatment for the depression itself? No, but then again, neither is a mammogram good treatment for cancer.

We come to you bearing many things. Some are burdens, but others are idols:

The idol of superiority,

The idol of certainty,

The idol of believing that we are the gatekeepers to your kingdom,

The idol of making the gospel an object of mere belief, and not a way of life.

But when the burdens are lifted, and the idols are destroyed, What remains is truly precious:

Women and men in community, Gifted people of all ages working together so that your kingdom may come, and your will be done even here, even now.

Amen

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What denomination?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?“ He said, ”Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.“ I said, ”Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

It’s a funny joke, and like most good jokes, it captures something true, in this case disturbingly true, about our history as Christians. Today, according to Oxford’s World Christian Encyclopedia, there are over 33,000 Christian denominations in the world. This is partly a sign of healthy diversity, but it’s also a sign of some deeply unhealthy divisions.

The first three verses of Ephesians 4¹ contain this beautiful plea for Christian unity:

Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I encourage you to live as people worthy of the call you received from God. Conduct yourselves with all humility, gentleness, and patience. Accept each other with love, and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together. (Eph. 4:1-3)

Eight verses later, Paul speaks of another kind of unity that Paul calls unity of faith:

He gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. His purpose was to equip God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God’s Son. (Eph. 4:11-13a)

The unity of the Spirit is something that we are to work towards now, while unity of faith and knowledge appears to be eschatological — something that we will have in the end. We continue to exclude more and more people from our various groups, acting as if cooperation and fellowship require doctrinal unity. Paul’s charge to preserve the unity of Spirit assumes disagreement, otherwise there is no need to urge patience.²

When we exclude, we show pride, impatience, and hardness of spirit, not the humility, gentleness, and patience of Paul’s mandate. In the end, we sacrifice the thing that Paul urges us to protect, for the sake of something that we cannot yet have. We either demonstrate intolerance, or, at best, show tolerance from a distance. Neither is the love that Christ commanded.

While we were on the bus traveling to the rain forest, our guide, Oliver, gave us a lesson on the history, geography, and culture of the country. Two things that he was particularly proud of were that the country has no army and that they have more teachers than police. Speaking of human rights in Costa Rica and the lack of class conflict, he said “We were lucky to be a poor country.” I found his comment to be particularly striking. Why does this country develop into a stable and prosperous one that is free from both internal and external conflict? Oliver implies that it is because they didn’t have anything that the developed world really wanted.

Things could be changing, both for us and the rest of the world, though. In this interesting piece in today’s New York Times, Roger Cohen points out that two-thirds of last year’s economic growth was in the developing world. This could indeed be a reversal of fortune.

Art as mimesis - No human being has eyes like that, so it’s a bad imitation.

Art as expression - Surely the artist couldn’t have been experiencing the same emotion that I’m experiencing as I look on these. I wouldn’t wish that on any human being.

Formalism - What do you really think Clive Bell would say about this?

Institutional theory - Purporting to confer the status of art in this case is conclusive proof that you never had the right to confer such status at all.

I’m standing by my earlier claim: it’s still not art.

I hope that sale at the dollar store ends soon.

1. Run pdflatex to to create the labels, table of contents, and undefined bibliographic references.
2. Run bibtex or biber to get the relevant bibliographic data from the bib files.
3. Run pdflatex to put that bibliographic data into the document
4. Run pdflatex again to fix any page numbers that need to change because of the new material.

latexmk -pdflatex -bibtex sample.tex

# LaTeXmk configuration file

# Usage example
# latexmk file.tex

# Main command line options
# -pdflatex : compile with pdflatex
# -lualatex : compile with lualatex
# -pv       : run file previewer
# -pvc      : run file previewer and continually recompile on change
# -c        :
# -C        :clean up auxiliary and output files

# Use bibtex if a .bib file exists
$bibtex_use = 1;

# Define commands to compile with pdfsync support and nonstopmode
$pdflatex = 'pdflatex -synctex=1 --interaction=nonstopmode %O %S';

$lualatex = 'lualatex -synctex=1 --interaction=nonstopmode %O %S';

# Also remove pdfsync files on clean
$clean_ext = '%R.synctex.gz';

$pdf_mode = n

latexmk sample.tex

arara sample.tex

% arara: pdflatex: { interaction: nonstopmode, synctex: yes }

% arara: lualatex: { interaction: nonstopmode, synctex: yes }
% arara: biber
% arara: lualatex: { interaction: nonstopmode, synctex: yes }
% arara: lualatex: { interaction: nonstopmode, synctex: yes }

% arara: latexmk: { engine: pdflatex }

When Mitch Randall was a little baby,
sitting on his father’s knee.
He tied a ribbon on his finger,
and he held it in the air.
Said, this bow tie’s gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord
This bow tie’s gonna be the death of me.

When Mitch Randall was just a little boy,
his parents noticed that he was an unusual child.
When other kids would want cookies and milk,
all Mitch wanted was a piece of silk.

He’d tie that silk to anything he could reach,
the table leg,
the chair leg,
the dog’s leg,
his father’s leg.

Nice neat bows,
straight,
even on both sides.

And then one day,
He was standing in front of the mirror,
seeing what he could see.
He tied that piece of ribbon right around his neck, and said,
this is the look for me, Lord, Lord.
This is the look for me.
So, he started wearing a bow tie to church.
Everybody thought it was cute.
Then he wore it to school.
That was not so cute.
When he started wearing it with his baseball uniform,
everybody thought it was just a little weird.

When the other kids started to tease him
His dad decided to have a talk.
He said, son,
that may be the look down in Texas, Austin, that is,
but this is Oklahoma, 1975.
It’s just not that progressive a state.
But here’s what I want you to remember:
Don’t let them make fun of your bow tie,
You gotta be who you gotta be.
So, when you wear a bow tie round your neck,
You gotta wear it with your head held high, Lord, Lord.
Wear it with your head held high.
Then he went off to college.
As it was for many young people,
college was a place for experimenting,
pushing the envelope,
things you wouldn’t necessarily tell your parents about,
getting wild…

Striped bow ties,
plaids,
polka dots,
paisleys,
there were parts of town where you could slip a man five bucks
and he’d give you a floral pattern tie.

Seminary was tough, though,
cause this was fort worth,
where they wore their hair short,
And their ties long.
He felt alone,
nobody understood.
But then one day,
in a course on religion and the state,
he learned about the Baptist Joint Committee,
with men like James Dunn and Brent Walker,
who wore their bow ties in the service of the Lord.

And, hallelujah, Mitch had found his calling!
When he saw the men with the bow ties,
He said, you know I got to go,
Down to Washington DC, to fight for liberty,
I gotta be on the BJC, Lord, Lord.
I gotta be on the BJC.
Then he came to NorthHaven.
Growing up had been tough in northeastern Oklahoma,
but Norman was different.
There were liberals,
hippies,
Democrats,
people who wouldn’t look twice at a man with a bow tie.

And the people of NorthHaven admired his skill.
Even on both sides,
nice dimple in the center.
Straight, not crooked,
good-looking ties.

Everything was good, until…
In one day, walked Bryan Partridge,
With a smile on his face.
The bow tie that we saw, was completely without flaw.
And the challenge had been thrown down, Lord, Lord.
The challenge had been thrown down.

Yes, my friends, it was the beginning of the end.
The old ways were dying,
passing away before a new generation.
The age of the clip-on had come.

And Mitch Randall said to Bryan Partridge,
I don’t care if my tie is a wreck.
Before I put that clip-on on my shirt,
I’ll die with a bow tie round my neck, Lord, Lord.
I’ll die with a bow tie round my neck.

They decided to have a contest.
Whoever could put on the most ties in an hour
would be the NorthHaven champion.
It was old-school vs. the young upstart.

And so, Mitch Randall, he started tying.
His fingers went round and round.
But he couldn’t make it last,
cause the clip-on was so fast.
It left poor Mitch on the ground, Lord, Lord.
It left poor Mitch on the ground.

He couldn’t keep up the pace
With those small, delicate ties.
He needed something bigger, easier to grasp.
So, he reached for the secret weapon,
The Barnum and Bailey special.

But when he wrapped that clown tie around his neck,
Disaster struck.

Then his tie got caught in the shredder,
and it pulled his head straight down.
And the next thing that we knew,
it looked like he was through.
We’d have to plant poor Mitch in the ground, Lord, Lord.
We’d have to plant poor Mitch in the ground.

Nobody knew what to do.
One person screamed.
Another person laughed.
(One of those was Cheryl, another was Kim. I’ll let you decide which was which.)
And then Sheri walked into the room.
she muttered something about boys and their foolishness,
and cut that bow tie clean in half with a pair of scissors.

Then Mitch Randall said to Bryan Partridge,
Lord knows, I’ve been a fool.
Well, before I die with a bow tie round my neck,
I’m gonna get me clip-on too, Lord, Lord.
I’m gonna get me clip-on too.

In these weeks of violence and tragedy,
we have mourned with those who grieve,
cried with those who weep,
sat in silence with those in pain,
and protested with those who suffer injustice.

But what should never happen even once
seems to happen over and over again,
until we are left with nothing
but bloodshot eyes and numb hearts.

Banish our fears, restore our hope,
and give us a vision of what can be,
if we were to give our neighbor
the same grace that you have given us.

Amen

My guess is that we will all try to find the one cause of the crisis, and each group will propose a different cause depending on their political leanings. We should keep in mind that complex situations generally have complex causes, and oversimplification often exacerbates the problem. Here are a few things that need to be considered.

First, serious research needs to be done on the effects of climate change on agriculture and fisheries. Some of the best evidence that climate change is occurring is the change in elevations and temperate zones in which plant species are growing. One of our guides in Costa Rica even mentioned that crops are growing in higher elevations now, which means that they are not growing in some of the lower elevations.

Second, we need to take a serious look at where our aid dollars are going. On June 3, <a title=“The world only needs 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger”

Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, appealed to the developed world for 30 billion dollars a year for agriculture aid. Incidentally, he estimated that 100 billion dollars of food is wasted every year in a single country, although he failed to mention which country it was. Aid for agriculture fell from 8 billion dollars in 1984 to 3.4 billion in 2004.

There are other things that are likely to be playing a role in the increased food shortage such as the ever-increasing percentage of agricultural output that is used for biofuels and decreasing agricultural efficiency in many developing countries. One mistake we cannot afford to make is to fail to consider how this problem is related to other problems that the world faces, as this NY Times editorial points out. Agriculture and climate are obviously related, but so are food costs and energy costs, as are the dollars available for agricultural aid and dollars spent to combat terrorism. On the other hand, it also seems likely that hungry people that have no hope are more likely to be potential recruits for terrorist organizations. These problems are complex enough now, and they are not likely to get easier to solve with time. It’s time to get started.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense, Vol. I

I never thought I would see Richard Dawkins taking the same position as conservative Christians.

This chapter is perfect reading for the week following Ash Wednesday. The traditional liturgical declaration uttered by the minister “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” is a reminder of our mortality. Ash Wednesday is quickly forgotten, though, just as the somber reflection that occurs after a funeral quickly fades as life returns to normal. As Hauerwas points out, this death, the death of the Son of God, is like no other. To truly come terms with the death of Jesus is to understand that life can never return to normal. Jesus’ plea from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,” challenges our understanding both of God and of ourselves. In Hauerwas’ words, “We are made members of a kingdom governed by a politics of forgiveness and redemption. The world is offered an alternative unimaginable by our sin-determined fantasies.”¹ We are offered a glimpse of this kingdom in the lives of a few who are able to live in the shadow of the cross. May we find the strength to dwell there during this season of Lent.

I claim to be person of faith,
yet live as a person of fear.

I build walls,
because I fear the stranger;

Hold on to the present,
because I fear the future.

And make my own plans,
because I do not trust yours.

What a fool to think
that what I do out of fear
could ever be better than
what you do out of love.

Thanks be to God,
there is no wall that cannot be torn down,
no stranger that cannot be a friend,
and no future that cannot be redeemed.

Amen

Not to know is bad, not to want to know is worse.

Gambian Proverb

/Users/rlridenour/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Documents/teaching/critical-thinking/notes/probabability-presentation.tex

This line is 136 characters long, and unless I expanded the size of the Emacs frame to at least half of the size of my 32-inch desktop monitor, I couldn’t see the filename in the recent files list.

Adding this to my Doom Emacs config solved the problem:

(use-package ivy-rich
  :after counsel
  :config
  (setq ivy-rich-display-transformers-list
        (plist-put ivy-rich-display-transformers-list
'counsel-buffer-or-recentf
    '(:columns
      ((counsel-buffer-or-recentf-transformer (:width (lambda (x) (ivy-rich-switch-buffer-shorten-path x (ivy-rich-minibuffer-width 1.0))))))))))

Now, when I run counsel-buffer-or-recentf, Emacs abbreviates enough of the file paths to make each line fit into the frame. How much is abbreviated depends on how large the frame is. No matter how narrow the frame, though, I can still see the filename.

God refuses to play by our rules. Thanks be to God.

If you’re going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can’t pick and choose who’s going to be the sparrow. It’s everybody.

Madeleine L’Engle

Dear students,

May God calm your anxieties,
refresh your minds,
and honor the faithfulness
you have shown this semester.

Remember that God has gifted you
more than you can imagine,
and you are capable of more
than you’ve ever dreamed.

May the great wisdom of the Father,
the incomparable love of the Son,
and the mighty power of the Spirit
be with you all this week.

Amen

Holy God,

Let me not be deceived;
these things that I possess,
do I use them,
or do they use me?

Help me to loosen my grip
on that which I so tightly grasp,
so that I can open my hands to you.

Amen

You are with me,
and in your presence,
I will not be afraid

of the world,
for it is your creation;

of the future,
for you have already redeemed it;

of the unknown,
for surely you have seen it;

of the stranger,
for she was made in your image,

of my weakness,
for you will give me strength.

of the darkness,
For I carry the light with me.

You are there,
and I am not alone.

I will not be afraid.

Amen

In the blindness of our arrogance,
we think that we are free,
yet, so often, we are in chains,
slaves to the satisfaction of our own desires,
and to the pursuit of our own selfish ends.

Our prayer today is that
we may be transformed,
freed, so that we may
live as Christ lived,
and love as he loved,
every moment of our lives
an act of restoration and redemption,
and our faith a witness to
coming of the Kingdom of God,
when the justice of the Father
and the love of the Son,
rule together with the power of the Spirit.
in perfect fullness and harmony.

Let these gifts today be
the first acts of our new lives.

Amen

In our blindness,
may the light of God
keep us from stumbling.

In our sorrow,
may the hand of God
dry our tears.

In our questions,
may the grace of God
be enough, until that day
that we know fully,
even as we are fully known.

Now, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of the Father,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with you all,
now and forever.

Amen

All I know is that
if my glass is only
half full it’s
because I have
drunk deeply
from the
joy,
wonder,
and
love
that is you.

(Mosaic: Carrying the Cross of Christ by Gabriel Loire)¹

It is a sign
that we cannot
really understand
what it means
for God to die,
that we remember
this day when
truth and beauty
hung upon a cross
and we call it good.

What our minds cannot comprehend,
our words cannot express.

So, we can do nothing
but stand in silence
before the glory
and the horror
of the cross.

Amen

And so, a terrorist was released
so that the Prince of Peace
may be taken to be silenced.

Lord, have mercy.

Amen

Despair or hope?

That was the choice
on that day when
all seemed lost.

Though it may
seem foolish,
we choose hope,
and wait to see
what tomorrow brings.

Amen

You can’t fix stupid with duct tape, but you can sure muffle the sound.

Soldier, Round Rock, TX

VERSE 1: I-40 East, on a cloudy day, Memphis up ahead, had to get away; Had nothing in mind Just looking for a place to roam. Thought I could see, but I was dumb and blind; Gave no thought to what I left behind, The people that I love, and my Oklahoma home.

CHORUS: They say that heaven’s paved With streets of gold, There’s no more tears Or so I’ve been told No more pain, And no one feels alone. But by those streets Where the children play, I hope to find just a little red clay To remind me Of my Oklahoma home.

VERSE 2: Mind starts to wander when you drive for miles, You think about faces, remember the smiles, And you realize you’re old, But you’ve never ever really grown. So you turn the car into the setting sun, The journey goes on, but the running is done. God help me back To my Oklahoma home.

VERSE 3: You can’t leave, even if you tried, When you’ve got red dirt deep down inside, No matter how much you wanted To leave it alone. When you’re running away to another town, No road is straight, they all circle around, Bringing you back To your Oklahoma home.

BRIDGE: Okemah up ahead, the tears are making me blind, And I hear the voice of Woody deep inside my mind, And It’s taken thirty years, but now I understand, That these are my people, and this is my land, And these Oklahoma hills will always be home.

(Painting: Lamb by Francisco Zurbarán)¹

The sounds of Passover
fill the streets with
desperate bleating
as all the animals
must be dragged
to play their
sacrificial roles.

All, that is, save one
who goes quietly
with determination,
strength, and purpose.

Lamb of God
have mercy on me.

Amen

I admit that I wouldn’t have been able to do some of the more complex things in my config file without the help of the many generous people in the Emacs community who constantly share their knowledge with others. This means that for any configuration problem you might have, it’s very likely that someone has already explained in detail how to solve it. It probably is easier to set the font in other text editors; in VSCode, for example, open the settings, select the font menu, and type in the font family in one text field and the font size in another. That is admittedly simpler than what I have in my Emacs config, but a quick search for “Emacs set font” reveals pages and pages of results, each explaining how it’s done. That means a new user can learn how to set the font in nearly the same time as it takes to do it in any other editor.

I admit that my claiming that Emacs being only slightly more difficult to configure than other text editors does not amount to a good case that someone should consider using Emacs. The power of Emacs, in my opinion, is that you can, with a little Elisp, make it do nearly anything that you want to do with text. How much Elisp? The answer is very little, actually. Whenever I find myself repeatedly using the same series of commands, I create a command that does the same thing with a single command. This only requires learning to write simple functions. For a very simple example, I often would delete a window, then balance the remaining windows in the frame. This is just two commands, but there’s no reason why I have to execute both myself. I can simply string them together into a custom command like this:

(defun delete-window-balance ()
    "Delete window and rebalance the remaining ones."
    (interactive)
    (delete-window)
    (balance-windows))

I have other examples that are more complex, but they’re still just instances of taking ordinary Emacs commands and combining into a workflow that meets the needs of the particular user. This is ridiculously simple in Emacs, but I suspect it would be much more difficult in another editor.

Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible.

Jacques Ellul

Before there was anything else,
there was love,
perfect and pure.

It was a love so full
that it manifested itself
in the creation of the infinite universe
in all of its beauty and diversity.

We rejoice today with those
who shed tears of joy
when, against all odds,
love won.

Our joy, though, is not yet complete,
as we grieve today with those
who shed tears of sorrow
when, as churches burned,
hate seemed to overcome.

But even now, as we stand
between the forces of hate
and the forces of love,
we will not despair,
for we know which side
you are on.

Amen

From the NY Times: “A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: ‘On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.’”

Surprising.

The palm branches
waving in Jerusalem
symbolized the dreams
of the people,
dreams of defeated enemies,
and a peace gained by
the overwhelming force of
divine power and might.

Instead of palms,
we wave flags,
grander symbols
of the same dreams.

Give us a new vision
of a world where
there are no enemies
to vanquish and
no wars to fight.

Not because we have won,
but because we have
finally surrendered,
and all of our weapons
have been thrown down
at the foot of the cross.

Give me the courage to be the first.

Amen

Amen

And I say,

“Thank you, Lord,
for I am not like him.”

I see a woman
alone, in tears,
mourning,

And I say,

“Thank you, Lord,
for I am not like her.”

I see a man
upon a cross,
humiliated, scorned,
despised,

And suddenly my
foolish pride is clear
even to me,

And I cry,

“Forgive me, Lord,
for I am not like you.”

Amen

Like most people, I have a somewhat love-hate relationship with myself, which means that I also have a love-hate relationship with mirrors. When I pass by a mirror, I can never resist the urge to look, but I’m never completely satisfied with what I see. I look into some mirrors, and I’m confronted with the cold, harsh reality — the ugly truth, as it were. I look into other mirrors, like those found at the carnival, and I like what I see; I’m a bit taller, and a bit thinner. Neither mirror can give me what I need. The first mirror shows me the truth, but only as it is now, whether I want to see it or not. The second mirror shows me what I want to see, even if it could never be possible. What I need is a mirror that shows me what I truly am, but also gives me a glimpse of what I truly could be. That’s the mirror I need, even if it may not be the mirror I want. We have such a mirror in Scripture. In fairness, we must confess that we can bend and distort Scripture so much that it functions exactly like those carnival mirrors, showing exactly what we want to see, confirming our desires and reinforcing our biases. There are times, though, when I come to the text openly and honestly, and it shows me who I am, as I cry with David in Psalm 51:

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

But Scripture can also show me what is genuinely possible — the beauty of a life lived fully in the Kingdom of God; more than just a glimpse of who I am, but a vision of who God wants me to be. The book of Isaiah was written when the people of Judah desperately needed both of these mirrors. The small nation of Judah, what was left of the once mighty nation of Israel, had not only been defeated by Babylon, but had been taken away in captivity. The people of God were apparently forsaken by their God — prompting the psalmist to lament, “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” Even in the midst of that despair, however, there is a voice of hope. We hear it in what are called the “servant songs” of Isaiah, found sprinkled in the text, from chapter 42 through chapter 53. In these passages, God speaks of his promised servant, who will establish justice in chapter 42, be the light to the nations in chapter 49, be vindicated in the face of humiliation in chapter 50, and exalted and lifted up in chapter 52. And so, we sit back and wait for the promised servant, the one who will finally do the will of God. Who is this servant? It is difficult to read chapter 53 and not see Jesus there in the text:

But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.

I do believe that this text speaks prophetically of the Crucified Christ, but that doesn’t mean that the servant songs are simply about Jesus, a point that is made clearly in Isaiah 41:8,

But you, Israel, my servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
you whom I took from the ends of the earth,
and called from its farthest corners,
saying to you, ’You are my servant, ….’

A message that is repeated in chapters 44, 45, and 49: We will see the servant, if we will but look in the mirror. The reflection that we see, however, is harsh and unyielding. It is a clear picture of what God wants us to be: people who seek justice, something that is mentioned three times in the first four verses, yet seek it in a way that is not self-serving. It is a kind of justice that does no harm to the weakest in society — we are to be the light to the nations, helping the blind to see, and freeing those who are in darkness and imprisoned, in a way that does not call attention to ourselves. It is, at the same time, a beautiful image of what can be, and a devastating contrast to what now is, one that forces me to ask, what is it that I really seek?

Is it justice, or merely my own advantage?

Is it righteousness, or merely my own rights?

Is it to serve, or to be the one who is served?

This day, Ash Wednesday, is the day on which the church is faced with the truth. The ashes are remnants of the palms that we waved on Palm Sunday, a vivid reminder of how quickly our vows of dedication to God become cries of denial and betrayal. We come before the altar of God to hear the humbling words, “Remember, you are but dust, and to dust you shall return.” We come, bringing our pride, our pretension, our vanity, and our feelings of superiority to be cleansed in God’s holy fire. Out of the ashes that are left, God has chosen to raise up his servant. Thanks be to God, for his mercy and grace.

Amen

As always, I’ll start with this disclaimer: I am an amateur elisp hack. I borrow and steal from others, cobbling things together that never initially work, then fiddle with them until they finally do what I had intended. With that out of the way, here’s what I put together.

(defvar-keymap notepad-mode-map
  "C-c C-c" #'copy-kill-buffer)

(define-derived-mode notepad-mode
  org-mode "Notepad"
  "Major mode for scratch buffers."
  )

  (defun rlr-create-notepad-buffer ()
    "Create a new notepad buffer."
    (interactive)
    (let ((buf (generate-new-buffer "*notepad*")))
      (switch-to-buffer buf))
    (notepad-mode)
(shell-command-on-region (point) (if mark-active (mark) (point)) "pbpaste" nil t))

(defun copy-kill-buffer ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-max))
  (newline)
  (mark-whole-buffer)
  (copy-region-as-kill 1 (buffer-size))
  (kill-buffer)
  ;; (app-switch)
  (shell-command "open -a ~/icloud/scripts/beep.app"))

beep 2

function notepad
    emacsclient -e "(rlr-create-notepad-buffer)"
    open -a emacs
end

"Rabbi Tarfon would say:

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now, Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now."¹

In response, a friend said that, although my claim was technically true, the majority of Clinton Foundation money goes back to the Clintons through the its two largest program expenditures, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and the Clinton Presidential Library.

It is true that CGI and the Library are two of the largest program expenditures of the Clinton Foundation, ranking second and third, respectively. They are not even remotely close to the majority of expenditures, however. Even together, they account for, at most, only 18% of the Foundation’s annual expenditures.¹

Now, I’m not defending the spending of the Clinton Foundation.² I have no idea how effective its charitable work is. The point is that too many people (myself included, to be honest) simply share, retweet, or repost anything that is consistent with our own biases without checking the material for accuracy, even when verification would be relatively simple. This is called confirmation bias, something that we all must take care to minimize. Remember Reagan’s dictum, “Trust, but verify.”³

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

John Watson

Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.”

Hugh of Saint Victor, d. Feb. 11, 1141

It’s a moving experience to see a century of history and heroism from one spot on the South Carolina coast.

You found a man living in a cemetery,
bound by chains that he did not forge,
forced on him by people who were afraid.

I, too, am bound in chains,
some forged by ignorance,
every link a failure to recognize
your image in another human.

Others forged by arrogance,
of thinking that there are those
not fit for your kingdom,
or for your service.

Still others forged by fear,
the fear of rejection,
the fear of difference.

You who created the world
in all of its diversity
and declared it to be good,

Free me from the arrogant presumption
of thinking that I would have done better.

Amen

I’m pretty good at feeling sorry for myself, [but] … the fact that he survived the Holocaust always kind of seemed to him that something good had happened to him in life. And life since the Holocaust always seemed to surprise him for the better, and there was no bitterness in him. He said, “You know what? I’ve been smoking two packs a day since I was 14 years old for more than 65 years and if after that you get a cancer, it’s a fair deal,” he says. “It’s fair. I’ve got nothing to complain [about] and I’ve lived a full life, I want to live as much as I can, but when I die when I die, I won’t go out kicking and screaming.”

Could it be that the force of the problem of evil is a matter of one’s attitude? What is the difference between people who focus on their suffering and those who focus on their overcoming that suffering?

It’s moral imagination that has provided me with some solace, these past six months, as I try to understand the sense of fear that people like me appear to trigger in others.

It’s moral imagination that I have tried to ask others to have, when they set about trying to erase people such as me from the public sphere.

If we are ever to build a more perfect nation, surely this project will begin by opening our hearts to each other, by using our imaginations to understand that there is more than one way of being human, more than one way of being in the world.

The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labor for.

Thomas More

When you realize that you that you can’t have more than a five second conversation with your dad before you’re lost, you find another line of work.

Hugh Dancy

Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.

Gregory of Nyssa

I thought about Pelican, which is similar to Jekyll, but written in Python. I’m more comfortable hacking around in Python than I am in Ruby, but that was the only advantage I could see with Pelican. Hugo has been getting a lot of press lately, and everyone remarked about it’s apparently amazing build speed. It also installs as a single binary, so there is no need to manage dependencies.

Building the Hugo site was relatively simple, and anyone with some experience with any static site generator should have no problem. Hugo has a command to import a Jekyll blog, which worked very well. I had to clean up some meta-data, but after a bit of search and replace magic with regular expressions on the post directory, everything worked.¹

I thought about designing my own theme, but quickly discovered that it would take more time than I need to be spending now, so found this excellent academic oriented theme by George Cushen, cleverly called “Academic.”

The Internet chatter was correct — the site builds very quickly.² I saw soon face, though, with the one disadvantage of Hugo compared to Jekyll, at least for me. As a professor at a small liberal arts college with a primary revenue stream of tuition, I prefer to use free services when possible. Github hosting was ideal. Since a large portion was powered by Jekyll, I could just push the source to Github. Github would build and serve the site automatically. It met two important criteria, simple and free. I was especially happy with that after discovering how to easily post from iOS.

Now, I had to build the Hugo site, then push the source to one repository and the HTML to another. It wasn’t difficult, but it didn’t have the single-step ease that I wanted. I stumbled on Forestry, which is a CMS for Jekyll and Hugo sites. It works amazingly well, and could be a great tool for people who want the benefits of static sites but don’t want to mess with the command line. It can be configured to build and push to the deployment repository when a change is made to the source repository. For me at least, it didn’t work well in conjunction with the command line, though. When it rebuilt the site, it changed a number of source files, and I would forget to pull those changes before working on something. I was soon tired of cleaning up merge conflicts.

Many people use either Travis CI or Wercker for deploying static sites. Both are tools for building and deploying software, but will also build and deploy static sites. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t manage to make either one work. Finally, I stumbled on Netlify. Netlify is a bit different from the others in that it builds and hosts, and, for the service that I need, all for free. It was easy to configure, the build worked perfectly, and I just had to point the domain to Netlify instead of Github. I write using Emacs or Editorial, push the post to Github, Netlify detects the change, then builds and serves the site. For anyone who is interested, the source code for the site is on Github.

God of comfort,

No matter the result,
Half of us will find
That the thing we fear
Will have come true.

Calm our fears,
And restore our faith.

Cleanse our despair,
And give us hope.

Banish our anger,
And renew our love.

Remind us once again
That the Spirit who unites us
Is greater than anything
That could ever divide us.

Amen

Anne Applebaum writing for The Atlantic:

This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.

The country is gathering into large groups — the gullible true believers who believe everything and the cynical skeptics who believe nothing. Those in the former group obviously serve the interests of the powers that be by their unreflective support. Those in the latter also serve the interests of the ruling powers with their despairing malaise. It’s in the interests of the autocrats to ensure that, if you can’t be one of the gullibile, you at least become a nihilist.

Seek the truth, hold on to hope, keep the faith.

The Christian right is dead, but the religious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Another way of putting it is that the religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.

David French

Amen

When a new emperor took the throne in Rome, messengers were sent to the rich and powerful to deliver “glad tidings” of Caesar, who was called “savior and lord” and promised to bring peace to the empire through the power of his vast riches and his mighty armies.

But when the King was born in Bethlehem, messengers from God were sent, not to the rich and powerful, but to those too poor to be noticed by the empire.

And for the first time, they heard glad tidings of good news, that peace would come to the world, not by the power of force, but by the power of love, not through a conquering army, but through the crucified Christ.

The messiah had come, but the city of Bethlehem was unprepared. There was no welcome; there was no room. His birth was largely ignored by the powerful, and noticed only by some shepherds and a few foreigners.

We, like Bethlehem, were also unprepared, but thanks be to God that even in our uncertainty, Christ called to us; even in our hesitation, Christ came to us; even in our sin, Christ died for us.

Christmas reminds us that ready or not, God has come into the world, and we are not alone. By sharing communion together we recognize and remember God’s presence and proclaim the great mystery of the faith:

Christ has died,
Christ has risen,
and Christ will come again.

We stand before the table, surrounded by God’s people, who will soon partake together — powerful symbols of God’s presence and his grace.

God before you,
God around you,
God within you.

Come to his table.

Taking of the bread.

Christ’s body was broken not just to make a statement, and not merely for the sake of some cause.

Christ’s body was broken for you, and for me.

Eat, and remember.

Taking of the cup.

Just as his body was broken, his blood was shed, and God died, so that we may live.

Drink, and give thanks.

Amen

For those who would like to test their own knowledge, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has provided a short version of the survey that you can take online.

Why do you continue to use me? What good am I to you?

I am a
flawed,
broken,
undependable
tool.

One that makes mistakes,
and asks for second chances.

But I hear a gentle voice
whispering a message of hope,
that my heart longs to hear…

That even a flawed and broken tool
can make something beautiful
when it’s used by the master.

Amen

Now, may the slanting rays of the sun light the path before us, as the love of God surrounds us, to guide us on our journey. May God guard our hearts from anything that might separate us, and shelter us all in his love, forever.

Amen

Ken Huang has a nice function to select a tag from a list of tags used on the site, then insert it into the right place in the front-matter.

(defun hugo-select-tags ()
  "Select tags from the hugo org files in the current dir.

Note that it only extracts tags from lines like the below:
#+tags[]: emacs org"
  (interactive)
  ;; Move to end of tag line.
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char 1)
    (re-search-forward "^#\\+tags")
    (end-of-line)

    (let ((files (directory-files-recursively default-directory "\\.org$")))
      (let ((source (with-temp-buffer
                      (while files
                        (when (file-exists-p (car files))
                          (insert-file-contents (car files)))
                        (pop files))
                      (buffer-string))))
        (save-match-data
          (let ((pos 0)
                matches)
            (while (string-match "^#\\+[Tt]ags\\[\\]: \\(.+?\\)$" source pos)
              (push (match-string 1 source) matches)
              (setq pos (match-end 0)))
            (insert
             (completing-read
              "Insert a tag: "
              (sort
               (delete-dups
                (delete "" (split-string
                            (replace-regexp-in-string "[\"\']" " "
                                                      (replace-regexp-in-string
                                                       "[,()]" ""
                                                       (format "%s" matches)))
                            " ")))
               (lambda (a b)
                 (string< (downcase a) (downcase b))))))))))
    (insert " ")
    )
  )

Look at this post from Peter Prevos, for inserting links to other pages in the site. With it, you’re able to just C-c C-l to bring up a list of link types, select “hugo”, then pick the file name of the page you want to link. This is the code:

;; Follow Hugo links
  (defun org-hugo-follow (link)
    "Follow Hugo link shortcodes"
    (org-link-open-as-file
     (string-trim "{{</* ref test.org */>}}" "{{</* ref " "*/>}}")))

  ;; New link type for Org-Hugo internal links
  (org-link-set-parameters
   "hugo"
   :complete (lambda ()
               (concat "{{</* ref "
                       (file-name-nondirectory
                        (read-file-name "File: "))
                       " */>}}"))
   :follow #'org-hugo-follow)

They both have some other useful things that might also be helpful. I’m grateful to others who solve problems they have and post the code online. I know just enough Emacs-lisp to figure out what is going on, and modify something to my own particular use-case, but not enough to be able to start from scratch.

Words become thoughts,
thoughts, beliefs,
and beliefs, actions;
and that which I
once merely heard
is soon that which I am.

So, help me ignore
the voices that inspire
hatred and misery,
distress and malice,
selfishness and fear,

May I again hear the
words of love and joy,
peace and kindness,
generosity and hope;

And by hearing,
learn to speak,
and by speaking,
learn to sing with the
Father, Son, and Spirit.

Three distinct voices,
in one beautiful song.

Amen

The second story, in the Washington Post, is a harrowing account of an assault conducted by U. S. Special Forces soldiers and Afghan commandos on an insurgent stronghold in Afghanistan. Ten of those soldiers will receive the Silver Star today.

:html-link-home ""
:html-link-up ""

Just make sure to change them wherever they occur in the alist.

A bigger issue was displaying post tags and creating tag pages. Tag and category pages in Hugo were fairly simple. Every time the site was built, Hugo would create the tag pages reflecting any new tags. Unfortunately, I could find no way to automatically do this with org-publish. My first thought was to simply forego tagging since there is a blog archive page with links to every post. A search on that page can find whatever you need, if you happened to know what you needed to search for. It’s not a good way to simply browse an area of interest, however.

On the other hand, making tags manually was never going to work for me either. That would require manually adding tags to the post, being sure to use the same names for tags across posts. Otherwise, I’d end up with some posts tagged “org” and others tagged “org-mode”. Then, I’d have to create a new tag page if needed, make a link from the post to the tag page, then another link from the tag page back to the tagged post. There’s no chance I could, or would, consistently make that happen. Fortunately, though, because this is Emacs, everything is scriptable.

Keep in mind that I’m a philosopher, not a coder. Here are my steps to solving a problem:

1. Figure out what I want.
2. Find someone who has posted something close to what I want.
3. Make changes to their code to make it do what I want.
4. Keep hacking at it until it works.
5. Realize that what I thought I wanted wasn’t really what I wanted, so return to step 1 and repeat until satisfied.

So, the result is likely to be sloppy and inefficient, but it generally works in the end. I started with this post from Christian Tietze, who solved my first problem of consistently using tags across the site. From him, I got these three functions:

(defun orgblog-all-tag-lines ()
  "Get filetag lines from all posts."
  (let ((post-dir orgblog-posts-directory)
            (regex "^#\\+filetags:\\s([a-zA-Z]+)"))
    (shell-command-to-string
     (concat "rg --context 0 --no-filename --no-heading --replace \"\\$1\" -- " (shell-quote-argument regex) " " post-dir))))

(defun orgblog-all-tags ()
  "Return a list of unique tags from all posts."
  (delete-dups
   (split-string (orgblog-all-tag-lines) nil t)))

(defun orgblog-select-tag ()
  "Select and insert a tag from tags in the blog."
  (defvar newtag)
  (setq newtag (completing-read "Tag: " (orgblog-all-tags))))

The first uses ripgrep to get all of the filetag lines from the headers in the posts directory. The second splits those lines into a list of separate words and deletes the duplicates. The third displays the list and allows the user to select a tag to be assigned to a variable. The only things I believe I’ve changed here are variable names. I also explicitly search the posts directory rather than the current directory since I write posts initially in a drafts directory. Since the tags are separated by a space in each filetag line, I can use the default value for split-string. If the desired tag is not on the list, just hit return and the new tag gets assigned to the variable.

At this point, I had to venture on my own into unknown waters. First, I needed to insert the new tag into the post. There’s no real reason to keep the filetag lines, except that I might find a better way to use them in the future. So, I add the new tag to the end of the filetag line. I need to display it in the published post, though, so each post has a line at the end¹ that begins with “Tagged:”. This function handles that:

(defun insert-post-tag ()
  (orgblog-select-tag)
  (beginning-of-buffer)
  (search-forward "#+filetags" nil 1)
  (end-of-line)
  (insert (concat " " newtag))
  (beginning-of-buffer)
  (search-forward "Tagged:")
  (end-of-line)
  (insert (concat " [[file:../tags/" newtag ".org][" (s-titleized-words newtag) "]]")))

Note that I use Sveen Magnars’ s.el library to capitalize the tag names for display. The next thing to do is to add the tagged post to the tag page. To do that, I use this function:

(defun add-post-to-tagfile ()
  (defvar tagfile)
  (defvar post-filename)
  (defvar post-title)
  (setq tagfile (concat "../tags/" newtag ".org"))
  (setq post-filename (f-filename (f-this-file)))
  (progn
    (beginning-of-buffer)
    (search-forward "#+title: " nil 1)
    (setq post-title (buffer-substring (point) (line-end-position))))
  (when
      (not (file-exists-p tagfile))
    (f-append-text (concat "#+title: Tagged: " (s-titleized-words newtag) "\n#+setupfile: ../org-templates/post.org\n") 'utf-8 tagfile))
  (f-append-text (concat "\n- [[file:../posts/" post-filename "][" post-title "]]") 'utf-8 tagfile))

To create the links, we’ll need the filename and title of the post. We’ll also need the filename for the tag page. Note that this function uses both the s.el and Johan Andersson’s f.el libraries. In short, here’s what the function does:

1. Create the filename for the tag page in the tags directory.
2. Get the filename for the post.
3. Extract the post title from header title-line.
4. Create the file for the tag page if necessary.
5. Add a link to the post at the bottom of the tag page.

The final thing is to put all of functions together into one interactive function:

(defun orgblog-add-tag ()
  (interactive)
  (orgblog-select-tag)
  (insert-post-tag)
  (add-post-to-tagfile)
  (save-buffer))

The only thing left to do manually is to add a new tag page to the index page of the tags directory. I’m sure I could automate that with some effort, but at this stage I hardly ever use any new tags, so I’m not convinced that it would be worth the effort.

The only minor glitch in the system is that, for some reason, I have to press return twice to select the tag. I’m not sure why. Eventually it will bother me enough to figure it out.

Lawyer (n.) One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Ambrose Bierce

Master, what is the secret to happiness?

Not to argue with idiots.

Master, I completely disagree that this is the secret.

Yes, you are right.

Same Old Story

And in a new century,
and under a new empire,
the people once again
wave the palm branches
and cheer for a new hero.

Jesus rode into Jerusalem
and the people cheered,
but Jesus wept,
for they could not see
that the Jesus for whom we cheer
is not the same Jesus
that we behold upon the cross
in silence, and in awe.

Father, forgive us
for seeing only
the messiah that we want,
and not the messiah that we need.

Amen

• In April, Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed in Birmingham.
• In May, “Bull” Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham used police dogs and fire hoses on a demonstration in Birmingham.
• In June, Medgar Evers, the NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, was murdered outside his home.
• In August, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
• In September, four young girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Tuesday, an African-American man was elected President of the United States.

The country has certainly come far. European countries are generally viewed as far more progressive than the United States, but, as far as I can tell, no European country is even remotely close to being able to select a member of a minority racial group as head of government.

That said, we still have a long ways to go before we can claim to have achieved racial reconciliation. On November 5, David Garland, President of Baylor University, issued a statement concerning recent incidents of racial conflict on Baylor’s campus. We cannot hope to achieve reconciliation in this country if we are not even able to achieve it in the Church. It is time for the Church to not only ask forgiveness for our past sins regarding slavery, but to recognize that failing to take action to create a better future is itself a sin.

If nothing else, this week’s election is a sign of hope.

but as our eyes
are opened in worship
we see that this darkness
is but a shadow that flees
as the light of Christ
comes into the world.

May your light shine upon us,
may it shine in us,
may it shine through us.

Amen

Amen

And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “We break the sword,” and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth, too.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 284.

Remember the definition of conditional probability: $\Pr(A\mid B)=\frac{\Pr(A\&B)}{\Pr(B)}$

Let’s assume that 90% of driving is close to home and 10% is not. Let’s also assume that the probability of having a car accident is 0.1 (that’s high, but it will keep the math easy). Then, the probability of being near home given that you had an accident is equal to the probability of the conjunction of being near home and having an accident divided by the probability of having an accident, or $\Pr(H\mid A)=\frac{\Pr(H\&A)}{\Pr(A)}$ .

On the assumptions I made above concerning the relative frequencies of trips and accidents, out of 110 total trips, 11 are away from home and 99 are near home. Out of those 11 trips away from home, 1 is an accident. Out of the 99 near home, 10 are accidents. So, $\Pr(H\mid A)=\frac{.1}{.11}=.90$ , but $\Pr(\neg H\mid A)=\frac{.01}{.11}=.09$ .

Another way to look at it is to use Bayes’ Theorem, but we’ll save that for another time.

What has given the South her identity are those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation: a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.

Flannery O’Connor¹

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    font-size: 1.5rem;
    line-height: 1.8rem;
    font-style: italic;
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	quotes: "\201C""\201D""\2018""\2019";
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I just learned that Kramdown makes it easy to specify classes and attributes. So, this produces the pull quote:

> This is some quoted text.
{:.pquote}

It is easy to add quotation marks automatically, using the “before” and “after” class selectors. I decided not to do this for the sake of flexibility.

Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.

Pascal

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.

Frederick Buechner

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.

John Maynard Keynes

Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

1. E. Housman¹

What’s important is that the host knows where the prize is. If he doesn’t know, then the probability is 1/2. You can calculate this using Bayes’ Theorem. Try it out!

By the way, if you can remember “1/2” then you should be able to get some extra-credit points on tomorrow’s exam. Even more points if you can do the calculation….

You invite us
to lay down our
burdens, cares, concerns,
fears, and anxieties,
and give them all to you.

Then, wrapped in the
sweet warmth of your grace,
we can dance in joy
before the throne,
as beloved children
of the Father
who have finally
found their way home.

Amen

The ethical and moral issues that face people in the U.S. have a great deal to do with how we see the world, whether we see it as interconnected or not, our responsibility for our neighbors nearby and far away, how we’re going to use the resources and the gifts we have to the benefit of somebody beyond our own selves

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori¹

Am I an angel, bringing good news to those who yearn to hear it?

Am I a shepherd, who runs to see what God has done?

Am I a Magi, willing to give any gift to the King?

Am I Joseph, listening to any way that God might speak?

Am I Mary, saying yes when others would jeer?

In the moments of stillness,
when all pretensions are dropped,
I fear that I may be Herod,
safe and comfortable,
but afraid of what might change.

Lord, you know my true self,
both what I am
and what I can be,
by your grace.

Amen

I resolve
to laugh,
to listen,
and to love
like one whose
eyes have just
been opened in
joy and wonder.

In the name of
the one who
makes wine from water
and beauty from ashes,

Amen

• There is widespread disagreement about ethical claims.
• There is no rational way to settle this disagreement.
• If there is no rational way to settle a disagreement concerning a claim, then we should deny that such claims are objectively true.
• Therefore, ethical claims are not objectively true.

So, for any moral claim, that claim then there is at least one conceptual scheme in which that claim is true and at least one in which that claim is false. If this argument for moral relativism is convincing, then one should be equally convinced of this argument against moral relativism:

• There is widespread disagreement about moral relativism.
• There is no rational way to settle this disagreement.
• If there is no rational way to settle a disagreement concerning a claim, then we should deny that such claims are objectively true.
• Therefore, moral relativism is not objectively true.

Why should a claim that something is not objectively true bother someone who rejects objective truth?

Moral relativists are committed to the claim that moral truths are dependent on conceptual schemes, but if that claim is itself dependent on one’s conceptual scheme, then there is a conceptual scheme in which moral relativism is false. So, there is at least one conceptual scheme in which it is true that moral claims are true in every conceptual scheme. The only way that can be true is if moral truths are in fact true in every conceptual scheme. So, moral relativism is false.

We live in a word of concrete barricades, wooden fences, and stone walls that we have built to protect, separate, control, and hide; some hastily thrown up in hours, others carefully built in weeks or months.

Other walls, though, are constructed over a lifetime, and are just as real and just as effective—downcast eyes, hostile stares, and stony silence—walls constructed to prevent the pain of rejection, or to keep others out of our comfortable lives.

Yet we dream of a place where the barricades can be taken down, a place without fear, hunger, want, or need; a place with neither revenge nor retribution, for there are no wrongs to made right; a world filled with peace, justice, love, and grace—not another world, but this world, transformed and redeemed.

How can we build such a world when we only know how to build walls?

Lord have mercy on us.

Amen

Hauerwas points out the presumptuousness of this: “Our attempt to speak confidently of God in the face of modern skepticism, a skepticism we suspect also grips our lives as Christians, betrays a certainty inappropriate for a people who worship a crucified God.”

One thing that I love about my job is the significant conversations that I have with colleagues and students. At lunch yesterday, I felt the discomfort of having no answer when asked about how to respond to particularly difficult questions asked by sincere followers of other religions.

It’s not that I have nothing to say, it’s rather that what I have to say seems insufficient for the task at hand. All of my clear and concise explanations suddenly seem incomplete and inadequate in the shadow the Cross of the Crucified One.

My faith doesn’t give me all the answers; it gives me a way to ask the questions.

Marion Pritchard

“Yes, justice,”
comes the reply,
“But first,
we must have peace.
Peace today,
maybe justice tomorrow.”

But a peace without justice,
is not the Shalom of God.
It is a peace that serves
the status quo,
the interests of the powerful,
and the coffers of the wealthy.

The prophets tell us that
your justice is measured
not by its effect
on the privileged,
but by its effect
on those who have
been denied
privilege and power.

The day is coming when
God’s justice will reign,
when the low are lifted up
and the mighty fall,
and woe unto us
who have stood in the way
because of our silence.

Amen

You see, when you learn to read you will be born again into another world and it is a pity to be born again so young. I should put off reading, if I were you. As soon as you learn to read you will not see anything again quite as it is. It will all the time be altered by what you have read and you will never be quite alone again. I should stay by yourself a bit longer if I were you.

Rume Godden, Rungli-Rungliot (1943)

Before we used Canvas, we used Moodle. One of the features that I really liked about Moodle was the ability to write tests in a simple format (GIFT) using a text editor that could be imported into the LMS. Canvas, on the other hand, can import QTI files, which can be created with a text editor, but, unfortunately, QTI is not a simple format. QTI files are fairly complex XML files. One of my projects this January was to write something to convert a simple text file to the QTI format needed for Canvas. Since I use Emacs, Org mode is the natural file type to use. The more that I looked into the QTI format, the more I realized that this is a project best left to the summer, not the short time between the Fall and Spring semesters. Still, my research revealed some other options:

• Geoffrey Poore’s text2qti converts Markdown files into QTI format quizzes. This would probably be the smart thing to use. I’ll experiment with it over the next few weeks.
• The Classic to Canvas Converter provided by Kansas State. This inputs a CSV file created with a spreadsheet, and outputs a QTI file that can imported into Canvas. It works well, using these instructions provided by the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies.
• The Canvas Exam Converter provided by the New York Institute of Technology. This has a text field in which can be pasted simply formatted text for the following question types: multiple choice, multiple answers, short answer, essay, and file upload. The tool checks for syntax errors, then converts the text to a QTI file and automatically downloads it.

In the end, I’ll probably use text2qti, but for now, I’ve opted for the Canvas Exam Converter. I mostly use multiple choice and essay questions on my Canvas quizzes, but have occasionally also used multiple answer questions. So. the Canvas Exam Converter is more than enough for my needs. Here is an example using each of the five question types that the converter allows:

1. Multiple choice question (single correct answer)
a) Wrong
b) Wrong
*c) Right
d) Wrong

2. Multiple choice question (several correct answers)
[*] Right
[ ] Wrong
[*] Right
[ ] Wrong

3. Short answer question
* Acceptable answer
* Another acceptable answer

4. Essay question
####

5. File upload question
^^^^

Now, this would be very simple to just type from scratch. Note that it is just a list with different styles of bullets for different kinds of questions, and Org mode is a very good tool for quickly creating lists. Org mode offers different options for the list indicators, and for each list type that converter requires, there is something very close to it in Org mode. To cycle through all of the options, put the point on a list item and enter C-c <right>. So, here’s the Org text that I decided to use:

1. Multiple choice question (single correct answer)
   a) Wrong
   b) Wrong
   c) Right*
   d) Wrong
2. Multiple answer question (several correct answers)
   - [X] Right
   - [ ] Wrong
   - [X] Right
   - [ ] Wrong
3. Short answer question
   + Acceptable answer
   + Another acceptable answer
4. Essay question
   - ####
5. File upload question
   - ^^^^

The first thing to do is to allow letters for numbered lists in Org mode.¹ This is done by adding this to the init file:

(setq org-list-allow-alphabetical t)

Note that the correct answer to a multiple choice question is marked with an asterisk at the end of the option. Now, I just needed to do a few things, each accomplished easily with a regex search and replace:

1. Remove the hyphens.
2. Move the asterisk from the end of the correct multiple choice answer to the before the list item letter.
3. Change each short answer “+” bullet to an asterisk.
4. Change the multiple answer correct answer indicator to an asterisk.
5. Remove the whitespace from the beginning of each line
6. Add a blank line between each question.

I’m sure that the third and fourth steps can be combined. For various reasons the converter didn’t like the blank lines at the beginning and the end, so I added a couple of steps to delete those. Initially, I had all of these replacements done on the text in the original buffer, requiring me to undo everything if I wanted to add something to the quiz. So, I decided it would be best to copy the Org text to a temp buffer, perform the replacements in the temp buffer, and copy the result to the clipboard ready to paste into the converter. To make things even easier, I have the function open the converter page in my default browser. In the end, the conversion function looks like this:

  (defun convert-qti-nyit ()
    (interactive)
    ;; Copy all to a temp buffer and set to text mode.
    (let ((old-buffer (current-buffer)))
      (with-temp-buffer
          (insert-buffer-substring old-buffer)
          (text-mode)
          ;; convert multiple correct answer and essay questions
          (beginning-of-buffer)
          (while (re-search-forward "-" nil t)
            (replace-match ""))
          ;; Change correct multiple answer options to "*"
          (beginning-of-buffer)
(let ((case-fold-search nil))
          (while (re-search-forward "\[X\]" nil t)
            (replace-match "*")))
          ;; Mark short answer responses with "**"
          (beginning-of-buffer)
          (while (re-search-forward "+" nil t)
            (replace-match "*"))
          ;; remove whitespace at beginning of lines
          (beginning-of-buffer)
          (while (re-search-forward "^\s-*" nil t)
            (replace-match ""))
          (beginning-of-buffer)
          (while (re-search-forward "\\([0-9]\\)" nil t)
            (replace-match "\n\\1"))
          ;; move correct answer symbol to beginning of line
          (beginning-of-buffer)
          (while (re-search-forward "\\(^.*\\)\\(\*$\\)" nil t)
            (replace-match "\*\\1"))
          (delete-trailing-whitespace)
          ;; delete empty line at end and beginning
          (end-of-buffer)
          (delete-char -1)
          (beginning-of-buffer)
          (kill-line)
          ;; Copy result to clipboard
          (clipboard-kill-ring-save (point-min) (point-max))
          )
      )
    (browse-url "https://www.nyit.edu/its/canvas_exam_converter")
    )

The file generated by the converter has to be compressed to a zip file before uploading the Canvas. In Mac OS, that’s done with a right-click on the file in the Finder and choosing the compress option. An advantage to using text2qti is that the conversion and compression could be automated using a shell script. Maybe that will be tomorrow’s project.

Amen

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we as Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.

S‌øren Kierkegaard

but as our eyes
are opened in worship
we see that this darkness
is but a shadow that flees
as the light of Christ
comes into the world.

May your light shine upon us,
may it shine in us,
may it shine through us.

Amen

<small> (Photograph: Weeping Mary by Martin Gommel)¹ </small>

“Who is it you are looking for?”
is a question for me,
not just for Mary.

Mary looked at Jesus, and saw the gardener.

I look at my
neighbor, and see a stranger;
a stranger, an see an antagonist;
an antagonist, and see an enemy.

Help me, Lord, to see you,
wherever, and whoever, you are.

Amen

Gracious God,

In the events of this year,
we see how fragile our lives truly are.

Daily, we are faced with a choice
to be people who live in cynicism and despair,
or people who live in gratitude and thanksgiving.

On this day, we choose gratitude over despair,
and lift our hearts in thanksgiving to you,
the one who is the source of all good things.

Thank you
for family and friends,
for life and for love,
and for the beauty that we would see
if we would just open our eyes to you.

Amen

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Samuel Butler

Peace is not merely the absence of war; it is also the overcoming of injustice and oppression. In positive terms, it is life that is blessed, affirmed, loved and successful–life as shalom. Anyone who wants to serve peace must serve life. He must therefore resist war, because this is the deadliest form of discord. But this resistance against war is only one part of a much wider devotion to life. The service of peace is the whole task of life.

Jürgen Moltmann, The Power of the Powerless

Examine my heart,
show me my deepest desire.

Is it to be great,
safe,
secure,
invincible,
and strong?

Or is it to follow Jesus?

To build my protective fortress,
or to risk loving my neighbor?

To demand my rights,
or to take up the cross?

Not my will, but yours be done.

Amen

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart Udall

Second, I see in my students a level of spiritual depth that I certainly did not have in my 20’s and may not yet have in my 50’s — one that moves beyond the superficial trivialities that pass for spirituality in much of American religion, but instead shows a deep understanding of the message of Jesus.

Gracious and Loving God,

Thank you for those moments
when grace breaks in
to interrupt our lives
in surprising ways,
and unexpected voices
teach us once again
what it means
to follow Jesus.

Amen

Lord,

I feel the weight of my choices,
bearing down upon my conscience,
each one a testimony to the truth
that those who do evil
have their greatest allies
in those who do nothing.

The burden of freedom is this,
though only some are guilty,
we are all surely responsible.

We ask not that this burden
be taken from us, but instead,
that we bear it with more
than the empty thoughts and prayers
of those who just pass by,
but with the grace and love
of the Samaritan
that leads to action.

Amen

You warned us of a broad path
that leads to destruction,
a path that so many seem to be walking.

It is an easy path
that calls us to
give in to our temptations
to hate, despise, and fear,
to become something less
than what you have created us to be.

You have called us to a higher path,

to renounce fear,
and proclaim faith,

to cast off hatred,
and put on love,

to reject exclusion,
and embrace the world
with open arms as wide
as those that stretched out
upon the cross for us,

but not just for us.

Amen

When a new emperor
took the throne,
messengers were sent
to the rich and powerful
to deliver “glad tidings”
of Caesar, who was called
“savior and lord” and
promised to bring
peace to the empire
through the power
of his vast riches
and his mighty armies.

But when the King was born,
messengers from God were sent,
not to the rich and powerful,
but to those too poor
to be noticed by the empire.

And for the first time,
they heard glad tidings
of good news, that peace
would come to the world,
not by the power of force
but through the power of love.

Look within my heart, Lord,
this Christmas season.

May what you find there
reflect the humility
of the ones to whom
your messengers
were first sent.

And forgive me for when
I’ve turned the celebration
of your birth into something
that served the empire
more than it did your Kingdom.

Amen

Right is open to dispute, might is easily recognized and beyond dispute. Therefore right could not be made mighty because might challenged right, calling it unjust and itself claiming to be just. Being thus unable to make right into might, we have made might into right. (L 103)

This past week reminded me of how fortunate I am to be able to share my time with both students and colleagues. May their time away from campus this week be filled with rest, joy, and a renewed sense of God’s gracious love.

In a moment, I will try to push the new file to the repository, and hope that a new post shortly appears.

UPDATE: Success! I like writing with Editorial, but it can’t use the document picker. There is an Editorial workflow for Working Copy, but I haven’t tried it yet. Byword is working perfectly.

The site is still found at randyridenour.net.

Amen

Coming up with good questions is still a challenge, though. It turns out that Claude is very effective at writing good multiple choice questions from a document. The questions are formatted like this:

**Question 1:** According to Aristotle, which of the following best describes distributive justice?

- A) Restoring equality after a wrong has been committed
- B) Equality of ratios based on factors like merit, need, or virtue
- C) Following the laws of society without exception
- D) Maximizing overall welfare for the greatest number of people

---

**Question 2:** Which of the following is a criticism of the Utilitarian approach to punishment?

- A) It fails to consider the consequences of punishment
- B) It relies too heavily on retribution
- C) It can justify punishing the innocent if doing so maximizes good outcomes
- D) It requires the punishment to exactly fit the crime

To run my conversion function for sending to NYIT, I first need it in this form:

1. According to Aristotle, which of the following best describes distributive justice?
     a) Restoring equality after a wrong has been committed
     b) Equality of ratios based on factors like merit, need, or virtue
     c) Following the laws of society without exception
     d) Maximizing overall welfare for the greatest number of people
2. Which of the following is a criticism of the Utilitarian approach to punishment?
     a) It fails to consider the consequences of punishment
     b) It relies too heavily on retribution
     c) It can justify punishing the innocent if doing so maximizes good outcomes
     d) It requires the punishment to exactly fit the crime

For weeks, I’ve been converting them a series of regex search and replace operations, but why do that every time? One of the main reasons I use Emacs is to avoid repetitive, tedious tasks. Here’s the function:

(defun convert-quiz-claude-to-org ()
  "Convert markdown-style quiz questions from Claude to Org mode format. Operates on the current buffer or active region."
  (interactive)
  (let ((start (if (use-region-p) (region-beginning) (point-min)))
          (end   (if (use-region-p) (region-end)       (point-max)))
          (question-num 0))
    (save-excursion
      ;; Remove '---' separator lines
      (goto-char start)
      (while (re-search-forward "^---\n?" end t)
          (replace-match ""))

      ;; Convert **Question N:** to "N."
      (goto-char start)
      (while (re-search-forward "^\\*\\*Question [0-9]+:\\*\\* " end t)
          (setq question-num (1+ question-num))
          (replace-match (format "%d. " question-num)))

      ;; Convert "- A)" "- B)" etc. to "     a)"  "     b)" etc.
      (goto-char start)
      (while (re-search-forward "^- \\([A-D]\\))" end t)
          (replace-match (format "     %s)" (downcase (match-string 1)))))

      ;; Remove blank lines
      (goto-char start)
      (while (re-search-forward "^[[:blank:]]*\n" end t)
          (replace-match "")))))

Lord Jesus,

We move from
church to church,
searching for one
that meets our needs,
one that is perfect
for people like us.

But what do we hope to find?
A church filled
with perfect people?
People who have no faults,
who speak no unkind words,
who never hurt one another,
and never have regrets?

A perfect church, indeed,
but a church with no place
for one like me,
a broken spirit
who needs
grace,
love,
healing,
and mercy.

And so, I bow in prayer,
to ask for a church
filled with those
who are broken and flawed,
hurting and in sorrow,
who are there because
they know that together,
with you,
they can find
grace and mercy,
healing, and hope
in that place
they call their church.

Then I open my eyes
to find that my prayer
has already been answered.

Thank you, Lord,
for leading me home.

Amen

If there is to be a winner,
there must be a loser.
or so it goes in the games we play,
in games of sport,
and in games of life.

The clever person ensures success
by eliminating the competition.

Guns and knives are too crude
for our sophisticated times,
instead we use words
to harm reputations
and rumors to destroy characters.

And then, in the end,
we can rest content
in victory,
isolated and alone.

Lord,

Bid us again
to play in your fields,
where contact is
not hand-to-hand,
but hand-in-hand.

Amen

Mary represents the ’rebel consciousness’ that is essential to Jesus’ gospel. Wherever the gospel is preached, we must remember that its good news will make you crazy. Jesus will put you at odds with the economic and political systems of our world. This gospel will force you to act, interrupting the world as it is in ways that make even pious people indignant.

Emmanuel Katongole, Associate Professor of Theology and World Christianity at Duke University Divinity School

There are times when
we just have no words,
times of great beauty,
or times of great suffering.

But our silence
makes us uncomfortable,
and we feel that
we must say something,
so we fill the silence
with meaningless noise
and empty chatter.

So, when we feel the urge
to trivialize the sublime
with our vain babbling,
give us the strength
to cover our mouths
and stand before
your holiness
in silence
and in awe.

Amen

This week’s prayer:

You know my heart, O Lord.
The things that are hidden
from me are laid bare
before your eyes.

What are the reasons
for proclaiming my faith?

Is it for your glory,
or for my own?

Is it to welcome
others into your kingdom,
or to exclude them
from mine?

We have turned faith
into a commodity,
something to buy and sell
in the marketplace,
and used your holy name
as an instrument of
worldly power.

Open my grasping hands,
help me to raise them
in service to others
and in worship to you.

Amen

Kind words remind us
that there is no distance,
neither time, nor space,
neither this life, nor the next,
that cannot be crossed.

For nothing can separate us
from the love of God,
and by that same love,
we are connected to each other.

Amen

As I find myself
grasping for more,
even though I
surely have enough,