Another Try at Scheduling Posts

There is no end to the making of many blogs, and much study is exhausting to the body.
-- Ecclesiastes 12.12 (slightly modified)

The passion of creation

by Leonid Pasternak

So, thanks to the Lord's rather unexpected and bittersweet blessings I will have more time in the future to write in this blog, among other things. I'm thinking of following a schedule of posting here on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. I've tried following blogging schedules before without much success (see here and here for examples), but now it actually seems doable.

The first thing I'm going to do then is break my schedule and post something tomorrow (Wednesday) about dinosaurs and the Book of Job.

The Bible This Year

Jerome Studies Scripture

Art by Lowgan

At the start of each year for the last few of them my wife and I begin using new Bible translations for our daily studies. We do this in hopes that the unfamiliar words will perhaps shake us loose from an unexamined assumption now and then. I also use the translation here as much as possible for the same reason.

Last year we both tried The Voice, a very interesting Bible that uses out-of-the-ordinary wording and page design to force you to think about what you're reading. If you want a translation that's as far from the King James Version as possible, that's the one for you.

The year before that I used the little-known Easy to Read Version (ERV), which became one of my all time favorites.  It can be tricky to extract the meaning from the Bible's foreign languages (hebrew and greek) and put it accurately into english, especially simple, commonplace english. But the ERV translators have a knack for doing just that and are so good at it that I kept finding myself smiling at how well they rendered this or that verse.

For 2016 I wanted to use the New Jerusalem Bible, a translation near and dear to my heart. In fact I actually am using it for my personal studies, but unfortunately it's one of the few Bibles BibleGateway -- to which I link all this blog's scriptures -- doesn't have. In fact nobody online does, with the sole exception of Catholic.org, but theirs is homely, drowning in ads, and very awkward to use.

So this year I finally chose the venerable Good News Bible to be the 2nd translation on Authentic Light. I've used the GNB off and on for years and owned several copies (that fell apart), but I've never really been enthused about it. However it has this one irritating habit: whenever I read a scripture and think, "You know, a better way to translate that verse would be..."  the Good News Bible frequently has already translated it that way. You may have noticed that I quoted it a couple of times on my Wednesday post.

Translating "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil," (Matthew 5.17) as "I have not come to do away with them, but to make their teachings come true" is just exactly right.

Plus it's the script of my all-time favorite Jesus film, The Gospel of John. You can really see what an effective version it is in that movie, with people acting it out.

So for this year, the Good News Bible it is.  Always backed up, as usual, by my primary version, the NET Bible.

A Few ideas

This is the third of four posts that, unlike most articles here, are all about this blog. The others are here and here. Today we'll talk about what we'll be talking about in 2014.

So here's my plan: First, I have one more of these posts to do, that one about what exactly the Authentic Light blog is trying to accomplish.

After that I plan to finish up the series on what the Gospel is that I began all the way back in November. As you probably know, I file most articles in the red 'bins' at the top of the blog, each one of which stands for sections of the Apostles' Creed. This series will be kept in the 'Christ' bin and the 'Christian Movement' bin since it's about Jesus and we're the ones tasked with spreading it.

Once that's done we'll move on other parts of basic Christianity. Its rather shameful that in all this time I haven't written anything substantial about the Holy Spirit, "the forgiveness of sins," and "resurrection and life everlasting," don't you think? I'll start with those first, probably starting with the Spirit just because of who he is.

After there is at least one article in every 'bin' we'll go back to posting on the whole of basic Christianity. I'd particularly like to write a lot more on the Father and really need to finish up my series on the Trinity.

If any of you have something you'd like see covered please drop me a line from the Contact page or leave a comment below. If it's within the bounds of basic Christianity I'd love to talk about it. The final post in this series, which will happen next week, will give a clearer idea of what I mean by "basic Christianity."

Posting Schedule

Since this is the beginning of the secular year I thought I'd start it with a few informative posts about what we do or plan to do on this blog. I put up the first one -- about using the Easy-to-Read Version as my main Bible this year -- earlier this week. Today's will be a short one mainly about my posting schedule, tomorrow I'll let you know what I'm planning to write about in the foreseeable future, and #4 will be a description (other than the 'About Authentic Light' page) of what I'm trying to accomplish here.

So Authentic Light's schedule:

I intend to post articles on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Sunday's will be the regular "Meditation for a Sunday Morning" with a scripture and comment on its subject by a wise follower of Jesus -- usually an ancient follower, but not always.

Tuesday and Thursday will have little articles on some aspect of simple, radical Christianity, the most exciting topic on earth.

The rest of the days may or may not contain other random posts, depending on my opportunities. Feel free to drop by or subscribe and see what's here. And I'm constantly tweeting at @AuthenticLight, so the little scrolling Twitter app over on the right side always has something new.

Reboot

You may have noticed if you pay attention to the dates on my posts, which tend to mean less than on other blogs, that there haven't been any from May til October. Dates mean less because I intend these as fragments of teaching on various aspects of Christianity that (hopefully) will form a coherent whole someday. The posts aren't day by day so much as idea by idea. I write them as they come, then toss them into an appropriate box in the navigation bar near the top of the page, which is arranged to roughly correspond to the articles of the Apostles Creed.

But I noticed I'd wondered away from my purpose and became rather bland and insipid in the process, so I stopped. Now, after trying to discern what Christ wants me to do with this (a question I've also been asking of other aspects of my life), I'm back to try again.

So, taking my cue from the 'Batman' franchise, I've rebooted. For one thing I've thrown out the former gloomy, portentous site design and replaced it with something lighter and fresher. I'm still fixing up a few other things, like writing a new 'About Us' page and deleting a few repetitive posts.

But the main thing is that Authentic Light is now back to being a humble little site where interested parties can learn about, well, the Authentic Light -- simple, radical Christianity.