Wednesday, February 21, 2007 AD
Cross-posted, with comments enabled, at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.
Our church is, once again, marking Lent by publishing devotions written by members and friends of our congregation.
This year, I've got these onto our church website by setting up a dedicated Wordpress blog. This provides an easy way to enable each day's posts to appear automatically on the site each day (without the painful Drupal hacking that was required last year), and means we can also make an RSS feed available.
Anyroad up, the first devotion, reflecting on what it means to say "I have been crucified with Christ", should now have appeared on the site. If you do follow this year's devotions, you'll find some real gems in there. And on some other days, you will be blessed with a delightful opportunity to practice the Christian virtues of patience and forbearance. Either way, you win. ;-)
Our church is, once again, marking Lent by publishing devotions written by members and friends of our congregation.
This year, I've got these onto our church website by setting up a dedicated Wordpress blog. This provides an easy way to enable each day's posts to appear automatically on the site each day (without the painful Drupal hacking that was required last year), and means we can also make an RSS feed available.
Anyroad up, the first devotion, reflecting on what it means to say "I have been crucified with Christ", should now have appeared on the site. If you do follow this year's devotions, you'll find some real gems in there. And on some other days, you will be blessed with a delightful opportunity to practice the Christian virtues of patience and forbearance. Either way, you win. ;-)
Labels: church year, devotion, lent
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 AD
An intriguing suggestion for a Bible-reading programme from Cerulean Sanctum, involving reading entire books at a single sitting and spending a month reading only that book. I think I'll pass, myself, but it's still an interesting approach.
Over the past few years, I've used (intermittently) a slight variant on the M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan that is aimed at reading the OT over two years and the NT in one year. I find this a less frenetic approach than trying to read the whole of the Bible in a single year.
But I've come to the conclusion that, as Dan Edelen puts it, while M'Cheyne is a great saint, "this doesn't change the fact that his Bible-reading program's not all that good". If you do the whole thing (OT in a year, NT twice each year) then you'll either collapse under the strain or else read in a very superficial manner. Plus, with my own "50%" approach, the strictly sequential approach meant reading all four gospels in the first three months or so, then the psalms for another three or four months, and then clattering through the rest of the NT in the remainder of the year. Not ideal: the months spent in the psalms become a bit of a slog, and by December I've almost forgotten what the Jesus of the gospels is like.
And then there's its complete detachment from the rhythms of the church year. For example, the readings for 25 December are 2 Chronicles 30, Revelation 16, Zechariah 12:1-13:1 and John 15, none of which is what you'd call particularly "Christmassy".
A number of Lutheran bloggers have been commending Pr Weedon's plan for using the Lutheran Service Book's assigned readings and psalms, together with a daily reading from the Book of Concord. The problem with the LSB's plan, however, is that it doesn't cover the whole Bible (unless you read the optional "fill-in" readings, which can mean reading several chapters at a single sitting).
So the plan I'm currently using is the St James Daily Devotional Guide published by Touchstone Magazine. For each day there is assigned:
The overall aim of the plan is to read the OT over the course of two years, and the NT in a single year, which is the sort of rhythm I was aiming for anyway. I tend to read the NT and gospel in the morning, and the OT reading at night, but the notes suggest other approaches.
Some "pros" of the St James plan:
On the other hand, that approach does allow for some helpful pairings of passages (e.g. pairing Genesis 22 with Hebrews 11:13-22). I'm also hoping this will help achieve what would be a very useful aim for me: to maintain a habit of regular, systematic Bible reading, without getting constantly hung up over "how far through" I am, how long it is since I read this or that book.
Overall, I'd say if you're looking for a plan that covers the whole Bible without turning into a gallop, that takes account of the church year, and that keeps you in daily contact with all the main parts of the Bible (not least the psalms and the gospels), then this is well worth a look. The annual subscription is $14 for the US/Canada, $20 for the rest of us.
Over the past few years, I've used (intermittently) a slight variant on the M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan that is aimed at reading the OT over two years and the NT in one year. I find this a less frenetic approach than trying to read the whole of the Bible in a single year.
But I've come to the conclusion that, as Dan Edelen puts it, while M'Cheyne is a great saint, "this doesn't change the fact that his Bible-reading program's not all that good". If you do the whole thing (OT in a year, NT twice each year) then you'll either collapse under the strain or else read in a very superficial manner. Plus, with my own "50%" approach, the strictly sequential approach meant reading all four gospels in the first three months or so, then the psalms for another three or four months, and then clattering through the rest of the NT in the remainder of the year. Not ideal: the months spent in the psalms become a bit of a slog, and by December I've almost forgotten what the Jesus of the gospels is like.
And then there's its complete detachment from the rhythms of the church year. For example, the readings for 25 December are 2 Chronicles 30, Revelation 16, Zechariah 12:1-13:1 and John 15, none of which is what you'd call particularly "Christmassy".
A number of Lutheran bloggers have been commending Pr Weedon's plan for using the Lutheran Service Book's assigned readings and psalms, together with a daily reading from the Book of Concord. The problem with the LSB's plan, however, is that it doesn't cover the whole Bible (unless you read the optional "fill-in" readings, which can mean reading several chapters at a single sitting).
So the plan I'm currently using is the St James Daily Devotional Guide published by Touchstone Magazine. For each day there is assigned:
- an OT reading (normally a full chapter);
- an NT reading;
- a reading from one of the four gospels; and
- psalms for morning and evening.
The overall aim of the plan is to read the OT over the course of two years, and the NT in a single year, which is the sort of rhythm I was aiming for anyway. I tend to read the NT and gospel in the morning, and the OT reading at night, but the notes suggest other approaches.
Some "pros" of the St James plan:
- the readings are a good length, and I've found it particularly helpful to read the gospels in shorter, more concentrated chunks rather than racing through a chapter at a time;
- the plan means you read from the OT, NT, gospels and psalms every day, which I think is a very healthy approach; and
- the plan provides a devotional framework in which to use the readings, with suggested forms of intercession and other prayers. Hence it can function as a "mini office".
On the other hand, that approach does allow for some helpful pairings of passages (e.g. pairing Genesis 22 with Hebrews 11:13-22). I'm also hoping this will help achieve what would be a very useful aim for me: to maintain a habit of regular, systematic Bible reading, without getting constantly hung up over "how far through" I am, how long it is since I read this or that book.
Overall, I'd say if you're looking for a plan that covers the whole Bible without turning into a gallop, that takes account of the church year, and that keeps you in daily contact with all the main parts of the Bible (not least the psalms and the gospels), then this is well worth a look. The annual subscription is $14 for the US/Canada, $20 for the rest of us.
Labels: bible reading, devotion
Wednesday, December 27, 2006 AD
Today was devoted, as is traditional for the feast of St John in this realm of England, to post-Christmas sales shopping, in our case in Leeds.It was a successful trip, and part of my haul included Eamon Duffy's book Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570" (which neatly used up the book tokens I'd been given for Christmas). I greatly enjoyed Prof Duffy's classic book on pre-Reformation English Christianity, The Stripping of the Altars (even if I think Duffy's thesis in that book involves a degree of straw-manning in his depiction of the "common-accepted view" of late medieval Christianity), and this looks like being another treat.
It's a gorgeous book, full of reproductions of beautiful medieval Books of Hours. However, Prof Duffy's subject in this book is not a conventional study of Books of Hours. Rather, his focus is on the handwritten amendments made to these books by their medieval owners, and by later protestant censors (and just plain vandals - one Book of Hours that Duffy came across in his research had been signed in biro!). As Prof Duffy writes in his preface:
[T]he additions were very varied: portraits of the owners, or customised prayers into which their names had been inserted: extra prayers in Latin, French or English...: detailed information about times of birth for use in the casting of horoscopes: charms and cures and recipes: notes on financial transactions...Prof Duffy goes on to point out that the history of prayer "is as difficult to write as the history of sex, and for some of the same reasons":
Here was an extraordinary archive, a series of unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray.
Both activities are intensely personal and in the nature of things not readily accessible to objective analysis. As a consequence, the history of prayer, like that of sex, is prone to elicit from historians a good deal of slack thought and overheated comment.Hence Prof Duffy's concentration on "a very concrete body of evidence", the marginalia of Books of Hours, "beyond all question the most intimate and important book of the late Middle Ages".
This did cause some confusion among the librarians who assisted Prof Duffy in his research, however. One librarian emailed Prof Duffy to say that:
...she felt sure some mistake had been made. The order I had placed for photographs ... listed pages on which the pictures had unfortunately been scraped or blotted or cut out completely, and some had no pictures at all, only ugly scribblings. So she wondered if I had inadvertently written down the wrong folio numbers, and suggested that I might prefer pictures of some of the more handsome adjacent pages.Another librarian's reaction to being told of Books of Hours being defaced by Tudor protestants was to exclaim, "Well, I only hope they were they own, and not borrowed from a library!"
So I'm now looking forward to embarking with Prof Duffy on what he describes as:
...a journey through the odd but revealing things that people write in, on or outsider their books, hoping, in the process, to catch a glimpse of the inner lives of people who lived in an even more turbulent age than our own.But I'll try to resist the temptation to add bizarre and inconsequential notes in the margin for the purpose of confusing future historians...
Labels: book of hours, devotion, eamon duffy, history, liturgy
