The Thinkulum -

90 days through the Bible

Andy — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:27:35 -0700

This past Thursday I finished listening through the Bible using my 90-day reading plan from last year. I began on Saturday, February 12. The audio Bible I listened to was The Bible Experience, which I highly recommend. I don't remember exactly why I began listening when I did, maybe because I felt I needed more spiritual input, but as I progressed I found more reasons to be doing it.

Once in college I tried reading the Bible in large chunks, and it was much easier to observe the large scale themes that way. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far before giving up, probably somewhere in the Kings, which is where I usually stop. This time I knew I could finish the whole Bible, because I'd done it before, and I wanted to see how well the themes emerged at this rapid rate.

I also wanted to see if it was a reasonable reading plan. I found that it was, in the sense that I didn't feel too burdened by it. It helped that I was listening rather than reading. I'm sure I would have gotten behind if I'd had to set aside time to read, but I typically have the listening time I needed, about half an hour per day. I listened at twice the normal speed, since this production was read slowly, at about half the rate of normal speech. I actually could have finished the Bible in fewer than 90 days, because some days I could have listened a lot longer, but I wanted to stick to the schedule to get a true sense of the reading plan.

Another reason for trying out this reading plan is that I wanted to get a better handle on the overall structure and contents of the Bible. I grew up in the church, and so I knew the basics and a lot of the details, but the Bible still had plenty of parts I didn't know well because I hadn't spent much time in them.

The only other time I'd gotten through the whole Bible, I was listening to the NIV Audio Bible Dramatized, which I do not recommend. I had arranged the chapters in roughly chronological order, which I also don't recommend, because it was jarring and confusing to flip between books and time frames without warning or explanation. This time I wanted to listen in plain vanilla canonical order in hopes that it would make more sense, which it did.

When I first created my reading plan, one or two people said they'd rather read the Bible slowly and take time to reflect on it. Normally I would too, and whipping through it definitely had disadvantages to go along with the benefits. The litany of kings got confusing, and I certainly didn't have time to ponder all the proverbs.

Listening to the Bible rather than reading it also gave mixed results. On one hand, hearing each word spoken gives them all an emphasis they don't have when your eyes are flying across them on the page, so I noticed things that had escaped my attention before. For example, I had never noticed Jacob's angel sighting in Genesis 32:1.

On the other hand, if your attention strays during a recording or a public reading and you miss things, it's harder to go back and pick them up than if your eyes can freely wander the passage. People sometimes say the Bible was written to be heard rather than read, and that may be true in some ways, but surely the more intricate parts of the Bible, such as Paul's letters, need to be seen and studied in written form.

Some other random things I noticed:

The OT is even more violent than I remembered. The sound effects helped there. The Bible Experience doesn't hold back.
I had my epistemology glasses on, paying attention to how knowledge happened in the Bible. I was surprised to hear how often God's chosen leaders and prophets turned out to be wrong in their disputes with other people (e.g., Lev. 10:16-20). I always assumed they were supposed to have all the answers.
Isaiah is very confusing because it jumps from topic to topic and doesn't give much context, but the other prophets are much less confusing.
I don't know what it's like for Jewish readers, but to me Isaiah 53 stuck out like a rose bed in a field of grass. My immediate reaction was to ask myself why we needed the NT at all after that. The foreshadowing of Christian theology in that chapter is striking.
Before this run through the Bible, I didn't remember the whole section of Jeremiah devoted to the people who returned from the exile.
I didn't remember just how much measuring Ezekiel's prophecy of the future temple involved.
Among the prophets, I especially liked Daniel because it was directed at Israel's oppressors for a change rather than Israel itself, on top of being interesting, weird, and largely narrative.
I found that I was less familiar with Luke's accounts than with Matthew and Mark's versions of the same events. It was refreshing to hear his "new" take on things.
The epistles really are a different animal from the rest of the Bible. They're more personal and open up a lot of new themes.
Balaam, Cain, and Sodom seem to have been turned into the early church's symbols for everything that's wrong with the world. They show up as warnings in several of the epistles.
Hebrews, James, and 1 John form a nice almost-bookend to the Bible. Hebrews: All those sacrifices in the old covenant? Jesus is better. James: All those things Scripture's been telling you to do? Do them. 1 John: Love--it's what it's all about. And of course, it's hard to imagine a better bookend than Revelation.

I found the prophets depressing, because Israel and Judah were so stubborn and because I felt the prophets' threats of doom overwhelmed any hope they offered. I worried that God might not have really been just and that he had no qualms about sweeping away the righteous with the wicked. Thank goodness for Malachi 3:16-18, where God specifically addresses this question. Still, I struggled. This is one place where reading more slowly might have served me better, because I could have lingered on the prophecies of restoration.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the Gospels. I breathed a bigger one when I got to the epistles. They encouraged me. The prophets were writing to stiff-necked people who were headed for judgment. But with the Gospels at last I was back to a message written for people who actually wanted to follow God. Jesus had plenty of harsh things to say, but the balance between that and the messages of restoration was greater. And the epistles were even more encouraging, because more than any other books, they dealt with how to handle suffering, and they injected it with hope and dignity.

90-Day Whole-Bible Reading Plan

Andy — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:49:48 -0800

It's the start of a new year, and you may be thinking about reading through the Bible. If you'd like a more vigorous reading plan than usual, try this one. It'll take you through the whole Bible in 90 days. If you want to do a "quick" overview study of the Bible, this is one way to make your way through it. If you are creating a long Bible-related work, such as a commentary, this list may also be suitable for dividing your work into more manageable volumes.

Each day's reading is not of equal length. I tried to avoid ending a day's reading in the middle of a narrative or discourse or starting it in the middle of one book and ending in the middle of another, which meant stretching some readings and shrinking others. I also used whole chapters throughout the plan so it could easily be used with audio Bibles, which are often divided by chapter. The days cover about 5,000 to 10,000 words each, with most in the 7,000- to 8,000-word range. For most people 5,000 to 10,000 words translates into about 30 minutes to an hour of reading.

Day	Text
1	Genesis 1-16
2	Genesis 17-28
3	Genesis 29-39
4	Genesis 40-50
5	Exodus 1-13
6	Exodus 14-27
7	Exodus 28-40
8	Leviticus 1-15
9	Leviticus 16-27
10	Numbers 1-10
11	Numbers 11-24
12	Numbers 25-36
13	Deuteronomy 1-11
14	Deuteronomy 12-26
15	Deuteronomy 27-34
16	Joshua 1-12
17	Joshua 13-24
18	Judges 1-12
19	Judges 13-Ruth 4
20	1 Samuel 1-15
21	1 Samuel 16-31
22	2 Samuel 1-12
23	2 Samuel 13-24
24	1 Kings 1-7
25	1 Kings 8-14
26	1 Kings 15-22
27	2 Kings 1-13
28	2 Kings 14-25
29	1 Chronicles 1-9
30	1 Chronicles 10-20
31	1 Chronicles 21-29
32	2 Chronicles 1-16
33	2 Chronicles 17-32
34	2 Chronicles 33-Ezra 10
35	Nehemiah
36	Esther
37	Job 1-21
38	Job 22-42
39	Psalms 1-22
40	Psalms 23-41
41	Psalms 42-72
42	Psalms 73-89
43	Psalms 90-106
44	Psalms 107-125
45	Psalms 126-150
46	Proverbs 1-16
47	Proverbs 17-31
48	Ecclesiastes-Song of Songs
49	Isaiah 1-12
50	Isaiah 13-27
51	Isaiah 28-39
52	Isaiah 40-53
53	Isaiah 54-66
54	Jeremiah 1-10
55	Jeremiah 11-23
56	Jeremiah 24-31
57	Jeremiah 32-39
58	Jeremiah 40-49
59	Jeremiah 50-Lamentations 5
60	Ezekiel 1-15
61	Ezekiel 16-24
62	Ezekiel 25-36
63	Ezekiel 37-48
64	Daniel 1-6
65	Daniel 7-12
66	Hosea
67	Joel-Obadiah
68	Jonah-Zephaniah
69	Haggai-Malachi
70	Matthew 1-16
71	Matthew 17-28
72	Mark 1-7
73	Mark 8-16
74	Luke 1-8
75	Luke 9-18
76	Luke 19-24
77	John 1-10
78	John 11-21
79	Acts 1-14
80	Acts 15-28
81	Romans
82	1 Corinthians
83	2 Corinthians
84	Galatians-Ephesians
85	Philippians-2 Thessalonians
86	1 Timothy-Philemon
87	Hebrews-James
88	1 Peter-Jude
89	Revelation 1-11
90	Revelation 12-22

90-Day Whole-Bible Reading Plan by Andy Culbertson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The philosophic turn

Andy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:48:18 -0700

I have four main projects on the front burner at the moment: studying the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, creating a flowchart of the Theophostic process, helping with my church's demographic research, and assembling a rough systematic spirituality of the NT. On the side I'm reading about quantum mechanics and various apologetical topics. I'm developing an itch to get moving on my rule-based algorithmic tonal music composition program, but I'm being good and limiting my projects to those four. If it develops into a rash, however, I may have to do something about it.

I'm studying the OCP to introduce myself to the discipline of philosophy, because I'm aiming to enter the field, but I only know bits and pieces from a few corners of it. To accomplish this, I'm planning to read the whole thing, take notes in the form of an outline, and transform the outline into a set of flashcards for use in jMemorize, using a script that I will write. It's a large project (2,176 entries; 1002 pages, if you include the appendices), the kind I usually give up on or drop, out of distraction by other projects, but I feel pretty dedicated to this one because it is serving a larger, somewhat specific goal.

I'm actually kind of proud of my progress lately. I've become much more focused. The past week has been spent scanning and proofreading the list of entry titles and writing a script to put the person entries in chronological order. Today I began putting the entry titles into an outline to give my reading a somewhat sensible order. I consider myself to be past the boring part. Proofreading is tedious, but organizing concepts is fun! Once I finish the reading outline, I'll post it and shift my attention to one of the other projects, which I'll write about another time.

On the side I'm reading Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, a book I've owned for about 15 years but have never read much of. It shares that in common with most of my other books. But a few weeks ago my web wandering led me into a number of QM-related articles, so I finally decided to dig into it. The reason I chose this book over others is that it covers eight different interpretations of quantum theory, rather than simply assuming one of them as given. That's the whole purpose of the book, in fact: to explain and evaluate physicists' competing understandings of the quantum world. Very interesting. Whatever's going on down there, it's weird. Which, of course, is exactly why I like it. :)

Once I'm done, I may post a summary of the book, if I don't find another satisfactory explanation of QM online. I need a quick way to introduce people to it, though summarizing such complicated ideas is a recipe for misunderstanding. I don't feel that I adequately understand quantum theory myself.

Lately I have also wandered back into apologetics, which I've been away from for a long time. It used to be one of my major obsessions. This time it was my penchant for reading about strange things that drew me back. It went from mysteries like the Voynich manuscript and the Shroud of Turin to the accounts of near-death experiences in Beyond Death by Moreland and Habermas. I was led to this book a while back by a video of Habermas describing some of these experiences. After picking up that book, I was reminded that I wanted to learn more about Reformed epistemology, so I put that on my mental "to read soon" list. Then I ran across the modern Ebionite movement via several Amazon reviews and became intrigued, in an appalled sort of way. And this weekend I began watching Aaron Shafovaloff's videos on Mormonism. I suspect this interest in apologetics will snowball. Which is fine. Since one of my philosophical interests is philosophy of religion, it's right on time.

That's it for today's semi-annual blog update! Tune in next time for more riveting accounts of my latest projects!

Twitter

Andy — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:42:45 -0700

Most of my posting activity is happening on Twitter at the moment, so I've added the Twitter widget to my sidebar here.

At long last, a care receiver!

Andy — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:01:00 -0800

After almost a year of officially being a Stephen Minister, tonight I finally got a care receiver! One of the Stephen Leaders called me tonight to tell me about him. I'll call him tomorrow to set up our first meeting. And that's all I can say about it. :o) Stephen Ministry is really big on confidentiality, which is one of its many good qualities.

Tonight I'm rereading the chapter in the training manual on how to conduct the first meeting. I'm kind of glad it took so long. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with everything at the end of the training last year. Now that all the details have had time to settle into the back corners of my mind, I feel only slightly intimidated.

Wha? What's this blog doing here?

Andy — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:26:45 -0800

It's time for my semiannual post. I have many things swimming through my head these days. I mean I always do, but the conceptual fish seem to congregate and multiply when their river is dammed, and right now the blockage is the need to get my finances up to date and to clear out some of the junk in my little apartment and get it organized so I have space to live. I'm procrastinating on these but also not working on anything else really, so my brain is getting a little antsy (fishy?) to get back to the fun stuff—all my many personal projects. Since this site is mostly about my projects, let me tell you about the ones that have been on my mind.

First, a side note. As an experiment, I am embedding the song from IMEEM that I am listening to while writing this so you can experience the same musical environment, if you wish. Just scroll to the bottom of the entry and click the start button. You might also want to click the loop icon in the upper right corner of the player. Isn't it nice of me not to have it play automatically?

Second, a housekeeping note. I am planning to switch my site back to WordPress. Drupal is flexible, but WordPress seems better coordinated, and I don't need all that flexibility for this site at the moment. Plus WordPress now does the things I switched to Drupal for (versioning, autosave, tags). Also we use WordPress for our website at work, and I suspect I'll build other sites in the future, and I'd rather spend my time getting to know one tool well than to try to learn WordPress plus Drupal plus whatever else.

With that out of the way, my main project at the moment is giving myself a fake computer science degree. This project started about a year ago when I got frustrated with my inadequate and disorganized coding practices and set out to improve them. I began by learning about software development techniques and methodologies, and that, as usual, has expanded into something much more comprehensive.

The problem with programming is that everything you learn about has prerequisites you have to know about to really understand what you're doing. My programming knowledge is pretty much all self-taught, and I've acquired it in a random fashion, so I often feel like I'm missing a lot. It's certainly humbling to read programming blogs and realize how much I don't know, but it also gives me something to reach for.

So to help myself feel like more of a real programmer, I'm collecting introductory books on the major topics I would study if I were getting an undergrad computer science degree, plus any other programming topics that are relevant to my areas of interest, and reading them. I'll post a list of them soon.

I need to go to bed, so I will leave you with a list of some other things that have been pooling in my mind: graphic design, algorithmic music composition, The Shack, Theophostic prayer. I will try to go into more depth in the next few days.

I see right through you - Angelina

Surprise! I'm posting. Also, Lovecraft.

Andy — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:30:36 -0700

Why hello! I bet you thought I was dead. Well, I'm not.

Various things have happened since I last posted, but today I'm going to talk about my latest literary adventures.

I've been watching Alias lately, and that has gotten me interested in fantasy related to conspiracies and secret histories of the world, and that has led me, among other things, to Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. It's something I've been wanting to get a handle on for a while. So last week I went to the library, made a quick reading list, and got started.

I tried reading some Lovecraft a while back—"Under the Pyramids" and maybe one or two others—but it didn't really grab me. I heard "horror" and was hoping for maybe Stephen King, but horror seems to have meant something different back then, something closer to Edgar Allen Poe. I could see he had a certain appeal, but I was disappointed.

Well, I must have read the wrong stories, because what I'm reading now is great! I can see why so many people have written stories set in his universe. He's detailed enough to give you a lot to work with and vague enough to leave a lot to the imagination, and his language and settings are evocative enough to keep you motivated.

My goal was to read all the main Cthulhu stories written by Lovecraft himself, in chronological order of writing. Phillip Schreffler wrote a short book called The H. P. Lovecraft Companion that has a chart of Lovecraft's major gods (see here) and a glossary of a lot of his characters, with references. So I looked up the gods from the chart in the glossary, collected the references, and put them in chronological order according to this Wikipedia article. Here's the list:

Dagon (1917)
Nyarlathotep (1920)
The Rats in the Walls (1923)
The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926)
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
The Dunwich Horror (1928)
The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931)
Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1932)
The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
The Shadow Out of Time (1934)
The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

I'm already noticing some problems with this list and making edits, so it will probably change a lot by the time I'm done, but if this subject interests you and you want a simple place to start, try that. You can read these online at dagonbytes.com. If you want some maps, try here. Here are a couple of other, longer reading lists. And here's some sinister music for you to listen to while reading.

Right now I'm in the middle of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which is just what it sounds like—a quest in a dream world for a city called Kadath. I was surprised and pleased by this, because I wasn't expecting such a traditional type of plot, and not all of it is creepy. In fact, a lot of it is kind of nice. The Myst and Riven soundtracks work well for this one.

Project: Reading strategies

Andy — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:14:56 -0700

Most of my projects involve a lot of reading, and for various reasons, that ends up taking way more time than I feel it should. When it comes to the actual reading, I'm not slow at it. It's other factors that get in the way—taking notes, lack of concentration, losing interest, processing the information.

So to balance these factors and become a more efficient and productive researcher, I have started a project on reading strategies. This will be a lighter weight project than my others because I won't be doing a lot of book research, just thinking about the problem, experimenting as I do my other projects, and writing about my findings. I've already done some work on it that I will post later.

Some observations on painting and sculpture

Andy — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:58:44 -0700

I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for abstract expressionism, and it led me to a discovery about my psychology of art.

While looking at their examples of the genre, I learned that there is abstract expressionist sculpture as well as painting, and I immediately concluded that I didn't mind its sculpture, because that at least has to look like real objects, because they are real objects. Objects in paintings can have all kinds of unrealistic boundaries and can generally not look like anything. I prefer paintings that look like something.

Then I thought, well, the objects in these sculptures aren't anything you'd find in the real world, so they're not "real" objects, but what I mean is that the sculptures themselves are something real that I could walk around and touch (if that were encouraged). Of course, the paintings are real objects too. The canvas is real. The paint is real. It's just that what they're depicting doesn't look like anything that could really exist.

So I realized that I automatically think of paintings as depicting three-dimensional objects. I always think of them as a window onto a scene. I even think of color fields that way. I think of the color as being projected onto some kind of cloth or screen. Since this style is called abstract expressionism, I wonder if the artists are trying to get away from that way of looking at things. Well, at least the ones like Jackson Pollock.

I think I like the three-dimensionality of sculpture because it allows me to look at it from different angles, which gives me a sense of discovery. And I like paintings that act like windows for a similar reason—I can imagine that something is happening or at least that I'm there interacting what whatever I'm being shown, which again delivers a sense of discovery. Discovery, and newness in general, is one of my major motivating values.

I don't usually read about art. A couple of days ago I found an iGoogle artist theme by Reg Mombassa, and his style reminded me of a painting I had seen at the Dallas Museum of Art in high school. I had stuck in my mind, but I couldn't remember the artist, which had always bugged me. It was next to Edward Hopper's Lighthouse Hill, which I had reproduced in colored pencil for an art history project. So after finding Reg Mombassa, I searched for 20th-century American painters, found a list of them on Artcyclopedia, and started clicking. Finally I just scrolled through the thumbnails and found one that sort of reminded me of the painting, and by chance it was the guy I was looking for: Thomas Hart Benton. The painting was Prodigal Son. From the Wikipedia article on Benton I ended up in the one on abstract expressionism. For some reason I have a compulsion to trace my trains of thought like that, probably because I like to know that my ideas are grounded in something.

A full week

Andy — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:56:55 -0700

This week has been rather busy!

Last weekend we finally switched to our new server at work. We got Exchange running and copied all our files over to the new machine, and I stayed up very late Sunday night finishing it. Since then I've been fixing things that got broken in the move.

On another front, one of our project managers has left, so now I am mostly managing one of his projects because I was pretty involved in it anyway, preparing the manuscripts for typesetting. So that is challenging, but it's also kind of fun, coordinating all those pieces, keeping people informed. :) But don't tell my bosses that; they'll give me more. o.o;;

The guy they're bringing in to replace him is interesting. He's a marketing consultant and also a pastor, and he has many ideas for helping us brand our company and take ourselves in new directions. I was a little nervous at first because I didn't know how it would all affect my job, and more specifically my pet projects, but I've relaxed since then. I'm glad he's here.

At home I've been defining my next project (yes, another one)—going to various libraries, checking out books, reading bits of them, writing. I thought I had the topic down and was going to blog about it, but then my ideas for it expanded. But now they've narrowed again, so I will write about it soon.