jonathan stegall

Sherman on the Mount says this:

I happen to believe (like a number of other evangelical thinkers) that my tradition has failed to examine itself critically and to reinvent itself … it’s appalling how we readily and conveniently compare other peoples’ worst with our best and thereafter engage in self-congratulatory affirmations, when all along our worst may have been worse than other peoples’ worst.

Powerful thoughts that I’ve been fortunate(?) to learn the truth of, and still struggle with.

In every kind of theology, and for that matter in every part of life, this is true and I’m constantly learning the truth of it.. both in other people and in myself. I met Jesus in a Pentecostal church, and attended a Pentecostal college to study Pentecostal ministry. Pentecostals are incredibly good at this kind of thinking. We at times want to compare Azusa Street to the Dark Ages, and we forget about the things we neglect in our theology and our view of life in the Spirit, and the things we’ve done wrong.

Pentecostals are typically evangelicals. Evangelicals are incredibly good at this, too. We’re very good at comparing our perceived vitality to the death we think is inherent in liberalism. “Liberals believe…” or “Liberals don’t believe…” and therefore they don’t know Jesus. And liberals do the same thing, in different ways.

The list can and does go on and on in this. Recently I was honored to sit and discuss this idea with some youth. One of them, at least, has serious questions about the reliability of the traditional evangelical understanding of Scripture, as it has been taught to this youth. Upon expressing these, youth in our tradition are usually shot down without a lot of dialogue, and unfortunately this is what had happened prior to our discussion.

When I encountered the issue, I felt blessed to be able to present the idea that there’s another way to look at most issues in theology, different from and learning from both sides. Whenever there is a conservative side, and a liberal side, we all know that they’ll argue and usually ignore whatever valid points the other side may have. Politics, theology, ministry, whatever. Usually, they’re both missing something. I’ve been fortunate to learn the truth of this, by having a close friendship with a guy who’s way more liberal than I am, theologically, but seeks and loves the heart of God at least as much as I do. And that’s what it’s about. Seeking and knowing the heart of God.

There are countless Christians who adhere strictly to whatever definition of orthodoxy they think is right, without seeking or knowing the heart of God. I’ve had times where I’ve been like that. I think it’s very easy to be at that place. Much easier than it is to spend time seeking and knowing the heart of God.

Over the weekend, Adobe released the Beta version of AIR, which I think is a worse name than Apollo was. Maybe they’ll rename it before it comes out of Beta. Anyway, they’ve also announced a bus tour across the United States to promote AIR.

This free event will teach developers how to make AIR applications out of existing Flex, presumably Flash, or HTML/JavaScript applications. They’ve got food, drink, and lots of good information about designing applications that are freaking awesome.

I look forward to this event.

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That is absolutely hilarious.

So, I’ve just recently finished a nice freelance project that allowed me to create an admin system from scratch. I used PHP/MySQL, and rather enjoyed myself learning a lot of things I didn’t know about admin systems. I’ve created a couple in the past, but never one this object oriented, or this efficient, or this powerful. So I enjoyed it, and hope it gets approved by the client. Anyway.

As I’ve noted in other posts, I’m fairly close to finishing the Underground Railroad’s redesign, and then I’ll be able to work on other things. The Underground Railroad needs to be done by Cornerstone, at the end of this month. It has a decent amount of work remaining, but I feel pretty confident I can get it done in time. It also is using PHP/MySQL, but is quite a bit more intensive, object oriented, and powerful than the admin system, simply because it’s an entire site from the ground up, rather than just the admin system.

One of the other things I intend to turn to upon finishing this, other than designing a theme for this blog, is learning Ruby/Ruby on Rails. I’ve debated with myself about whether I want to learn Ruby, Python, ColdFusion, or try to learn .net in a better way than I did in college. I feel strongly that I didn’t learn the best way of doing things that .net has to offer… whether that’s wishful thinking or not is yet to be seen. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t feel that it was the fault of the professor so much as the curriculum, as it was evolving after she took it over, and certainly did improve drastically from the point it was before she took it. Anyway. I’m not ready to deal with .net stuff again at the moment, if I ever will be, and ColdFusion is interesting, but I’m not sure where its future will take it. So, my major decision has been between Ruby and Python. I’m still not entirely decided, but I’m leaning toward Ruby.

I’ve found this hilarious guide to Ruby, and it looks like something I could enjoy working through. It has funny language, funny drawings, and appears to be teaching in a way that is easy to follow while actually learning some things about the language. So, I look forward to working through this.