James's Weblog

I’ve just noticed something that I should have noticed before, and I’m sure is in all the commentaries etc., but somehow I have completely missed.

“On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee.” (John 2:1)

Having enjoyed episodes 2-10 of the BBC podcast presented by Jonny Dymond (“How did we get here?") on the historical background to the conflicts in Israel-Palestine, I look at the claims in episode 1 (featuring Simon Sebag Montefiore and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones) that the Bible is not a trusted historical source.

I’m enjoying reading Peter Leithart’s stimulating commentary (paid link) on 1 and 2 Kings.

He makes the point that, superficially, the book of Kings could reinforce Marcionite assumptions that the God of the Old Testament is harsh and vindictive, while we only meet his love and mercy in the New Testament.

I’m enjoying C S Lewis’ clever book The Screwtape Letters (paid link) again. I last read this as a teenager, and it's extremely smart, really pastorally insightful, and full of wisdom.

Over the past couple of years, I've used quite a few bottom-budget VPS providers (as in a few dollars per month for a completely unmanaged VPS). Some were successful and others not. Read my review of 8 such providers: AlphaVPS, BuyVM, DediRock, Hostbrr, InterServer, RamNode, RareCloud, Servarica

So, I set up a Wireguard server to use as a personal VPN.

I created a client (peer) on my laptop that allowed my laptop (Fedora) to connect to my Wireguard server. All worked fine.

I then installed the Wireguard app on my Android phone, and created a new connection, choosing the “from scratch” option. The fields on the Android screen matched the entries in the configuration file on my Linux laptop, so it seemed intuitive what to put into each box.

Some AlmaLinux systems I run were failing to tell me that a reboot was required (using dnf needs-restarting -r) after a kernel update. This post looks at why that was, and how to solve that particular problem.

Romans 8:31: “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”

At Trinity Church Scarborough, one of my roles is to oversee our Life Groups, and to look after the Life Group leaders. These are our midweek groups. They are much more than just a Bible study group (they’re about doing life together, as the name suggests), but they are certainly not less than that.

Psalm 34 is an acrostic. In Hebrew, the first word of each verse starts with successive letters of the alphabet. So, if this were English, verse 1 would start with A, verse 2 would start with B, and so on.