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  • Helping family with their computers that do not have ad blockers installed has reacquainted me with the horrors of the modern web.

    → 11:09 AM, Dec 31
  • A collect for the Holy Innocents.

    We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

    → 3:50 PM, Dec 28
  • Current status

    → 11:50 PM, Dec 21
  • Converts and perverts

    What is the reciprocal term for a religious convert? You could use prepositions, as we do now, to distinguish between a convert from a religion and a convert to a religion. But the rather surprising ninteenth-century term was pervert. To cite a few examples, Levi Siliman Ives, the Episcopal bishop who converted to Catholicism, was described as a “pervert to Rome,” and Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf gave a series of lectures on Jewish Converts, Perverts, and Dissenters. The term was analogous to apostate, but an apostate was someone who left your religion and a pervert was someone who left your religion for something else. The term was understood enough that it could be used without explanation, but it was also controversial enough to warrant discussion. Even more surprising, the religious significance of the term overlapped considerably with pervert used in the sense of a sexual deviant, for which the first example given in the OED appeared in 1856.

    → 11:41 AM, Dec 21
  • Thanks, American Academy of Religion. Framing this is not something I would have ever done for myself, but I’ll admit it is nice to have.

    → 9:40 AM, Dec 20
  • Chad Gaffield and Ian Milligan are hosting a workshop on “Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies” at the Fields Institute in Toronto this coming February. I am looking forward to talking about America’s Public Bible and text analysis for religious history, but even more to hearing this lineup of scholars.

    → 2:58 PM, Dec 19
  • My preference for having one obvious, correct way to do things without fuss and working in JavaScript are not really compatible.

    → 1:05 PM, Dec 19
  • There are about 230,000 of these schedules from the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies in the National Archives, one for nearly every congregation in the U.S. Of the four Religious Bodies censuses, only the 1926 schedules are extant.

    → 8:31 PM, Dec 18
  • I learned the word stanine today. Who says standardized testing isn’t educational?

    → 7:25 PM, Dec 18
  • The most surprising thing about being an academic has been how much of the job is evaluating other people’s work. This week’s work has involved

    • grading for an undergraduate class,
    • reading two minor field exams for graduate students,
    • editing/reviewing nine essays for one of our publications,
    • peer reviewing a journal article,
    • evaluating 50+ proposals for a special issue of a journal, and
    • writing a book review.

    An unusual week, to be sure, but I imagine that evaluating other people’s work only takes up more time the longer one stays in the business.

    That sounds like a complaint, but the redeeming feature is helping other people get their work out into the world.

    → 12:08 PM, Dec 18
  • I am unduly excited to be teaching “The Global History of Christianity” again next semester. The course was created by my now retired colleague Mack Holt, who got John Turner and me to team-teach it with him the first time it was offered. Now that the course fills a university gen-ed requirement, it can be offered every spring. Teaching it feels like a gift in perpetuity from my emeritus colleague, who still shows up to give guest lectures on the Reformation.

    → 9:23 AM, Dec 18
  • It seems likely that nothing I will ever create will get more readers or users than this map of slavery which I made on a whim, yet which gets more users every day than the peak days for everything else I’ve ever made or written.

    → 11:39 AM, Dec 17
  • The “Yes, Yes, No" segment in Episode #131 of Reply All is a brilliant example of close reading, which I need to work into a class somehow.

    → 9:40 AM, Dec 17
  • I guess there was twice as much Christianity in the twentieth century.

    → 9:13 PM, Dec 15
  • End of the semester status.

    → 4:29 PM, Dec 15
  • Waiting for DNS to propagate, so the internet is already more fun.

    → 4:10 PM, Dec 15
  • Trying to make the internet fun again. Going to give micro.blog a try, mostly because people whose opinions I respect about the web are here, like @ayjay, @kfitz, and @dancohen.

    → 4:06 PM, Dec 15
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