Michael Bates: November 2023 Archives
SCHAEFFER COLLECTION | Ideaslibrary
A collection of sermon and lecture audio by Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith Schaeffer.
"Although Francis Schaeffer started out as a Presbyterian pastor in the States, he came to wider attention in the late 1960s through the unusual ministry of L'Abri, which he and his wife, Edith, founded in Switzerland. By then he was in his late 40s and the work was barely 10 years old. Dozens of people visited their home in the Alps: they'd heard it was somewhere they could find 'honest answers to honest questions'. Without publicity of any kind the trickle turned into a stream and the stream into a flood, especially after his first books in 1968 ('Escape from Reason' and 'The God who is There').
"This led to many more books and to an illustrious and much-appreciated international ministry. Many of his readers likened him to C S Lewis, not because of any similarity in style (they couldn't have been more different), but because his ideas were similarly powerful. Each in his own way knew how to expose the weaknesses of the dominant humanistic worldview, indeed, the weaknesses of all other worldviews. Without a doubt, Schaeffer became one of the greatest apologists of the 20th-century.
"However, Schaeffer's central concern was neither philosophy nor culture. His most fundamental concern was always the truth of the Bible. He read it first as a mature teenager - without any outside help, interestingly - and he came to understand that Christianity is more than just a set of superstitious beliefs, rather, an objectively true account of what reality actually is. In fact, nearly two-thirds of his recorded work is a sustained eulogy of the glories of God's written Word!
"Most people associate Dr. Schaeffer with the word 'apologetics', but this is only partially correct. A failure to understand his devotion to the Bible is to miss the whole point of Schaeffer's life and work. The last thing he wanted to do was to establish a 'school of apologetics'. For him, the issue was quite simply this: does what God has said in his (written) Word merit attention, and will we obey it? In short, all that he taught was pointed to this end: that we read the Bible for ourselves, just as he did as a young man, and thus find the only adequate resolution of all our questions and difficulties, just as he did. Jesus called that 'having life and having it more abundantly'."
An early day Rainman, and an interesting look at change in word meanings:
"IDIOT STRONG ON FIGURES"
"Mentally Unbalanced, but Can Outdistance Reliable Calculators."
"Before a Hamburg Medical society a 'perfect idiot' was produced who is able, it is said, to outdistance the most reliable calculator in the world. He is twenty-five years old, of good physique, but mentally unbalanced.... Questioned as to the day of the week in dates during the past year or century, he answered after a few moments' reflection counting in the leap years. As an adding machine he does wonders, but in all other respect he has no sense whatever."
From a front page editorial in a newspaper urging black settlement in and around Boley, Indian Territory. "In the states today where the affairs are controlled by Democratic legislatures the hand of tyranny is felt by the Negro. In the states where the Republicans are in authority the Negro has a full exercise of his political rights. The old Republican party has ever been faithful and true to its principals taught.... The great Republican party, with President Theodore Roosevelt at its head, has ever been for the protection of the Afro-American. There has been no discrimination. They have, when expedient, appointed Negroes to positions of honor and trust."
Related, from the same day's Muskogee Cimeter, a black-owned newspaper:
"Negroes who worked for the democrat ticket are not worth their room in hell and the sooner these cusses get home to their Master, the devil, the better it will be for the race."
And from page 4, "Muskogee is a republican town that elects democrat officials because the republicans are such d--n fools they cannot get together. The Negroes were loyal to the ticket in the main but the great majority of white republicans refused to vote the ticket because there were Negroes on it...."
Zomi USA: How a City in Oklahoma Became Home for an Ethnic Group from Southeast Asia
"The Zomis arrival to Tulsa dates back to the 1970s, and many in the Tulsa Zomi community point to Chin Do Kham as the catalyst. Kham, who died in 2013 from a heart attack..., came to Tulsa to study and graduated from Oral Roberts University.... Over the years, more and more Zomi arrived at Kham's behest and with his help.
"The Zomi population numbered about 50 in the late 1990s in Tulsa, with most studying in the city, according to TaangGo Khup, general secretary for Zomi Innkuan USA, a Tulsa-based organization founded to foster community development and support families and family members still in Myanmar, also known as Burma....
"At Jenks Public Schools, where a large number of Zomi children are enrolled, the focus is on trying to integrate the students and parents into the American education system as best as possible, said Jennifer Daves, coordinator for the district's English language development program. The district started seeing a surge in Zomi and Burmese students around 2009, Daves said.
"The population of Zomi and Burmese students continues to increase each year at Jenks, doubling from 413 in 2013 to 984 currently."
Community colleges and trade schools are largely void of Israel-Hamas protests | Washington Examiner
"'In 2016, I was feeling very proud to have a scholarship fund that was earmarked for trade schools when everywhere I looked, I saw people burning the flag at elite universities,' [Mike] Rowe said, adding, 'Maybe it happened then, or maybe it is happening now, but I looked, and I couldn't find a single incident of a trade school or community college burning the American flag.'...
"'The first protest I saw [at the University of Wisconsin at Madison] was related to some minor military event. ... They were clearly 'finding themselves' on someone else's dime. When you work to pay for your school like most trade and community college students do, you don't see the value. And the faculty and administration seem to share that sentiment at those schools.'"
State-approved University of Austin to start taking applications
"School leaders also said they will offer the inaugural 100-student class full scholarships for the entirety of their four-year undergraduate program....
"'This is an opportunity for students to not only go to a university but help us build the university or build the culture of the university, create the institution with us,' UATX President Pano Kanelos told The Texas Tribune. 'We thought that there would be a wonderful way to reward them for being part of this project by offering these scholarships.'...
"They found a location in the Scarborough building on Sixth Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, with plans to build a larger campus in the outskirts of the city in the future. They are also working to establish student housing in downtown Austin.... Kanelos said the university plans to keep tuition around $32,000 a year." I wish they'd take a page from SCAD's book instead of moving to the outskirts -- renovate scattered old buildings in downtown to add to the campus. More about the University of Austin on its website.
cPanel: Enable domains' DKIM records
If you have a cPanel account and have a DKIM key to validate outgoing email, but none of your email is being signed with the key, here's the shell command to fix the problem.
cPanel: Enable domains' DKIM records
If you have a cPanel account and have a DKIM key to validate outgoing email, but none of your email is being signed with the key, here's the shell command to fix the problem.
