James's Weblog

Assisted dying and controlling death

Tue, 12/11/2024 - 10:11 -- James Oakley
The palace of Westminster
Image Credit: Naveem Annam

As a bill comes before parliament to legalise assisted dying, James argues that the real issues going on here are to do with mortality and the desire to be in control. To think clearly, we need to recover confidence in the sovereignty of God, our own mortality, and God's judgement and grace.

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Afterlife in Genesis

Fri, 08/11/2024 - 10:09 -- James Oakley

Is the idea of an afterlife new to the New Testament? In fact, there is hope of life after death even as far back as the Joseph narratives in the book of Genesis.

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Note to self: NanaZip not 7-Zip

Fri, 01/11/2024 - 11:31 -- James Oakley

This is a note to self, where I'll find it, to switch from using 7-Zip to using NanaZip for Windows. WinZip became redundant when Windows integrated archive files into Explorer, but 7-Zip has good right click integration. For Windows 11, that doesn't work as well, so use a fork called NanaZip.

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Some jottings on reading Proverbs as Christians

Fri, 13/09/2024 - 14:32 -- James Oakley

At Trinity Church Scarborough, we're preaching through Proverbs throughout the autumn.It's not a book I've ever studied in any detail, so I've taken a step back, read a few things others have written, and collected thoughts I've had over the years as I've read through Proverbs as part of my own personal Bible reading. I wanted somewhere to jot down the things I've learnt, so I can refer to it later, and thought this public space would be good as it may help others too.

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The shepherd's hand

Mon, 05/08/2024 - 12:29 -- James Oakley
Image Credit: The shepherd's hand

Here's a detail I've just noticed, and rather love.

Psalm 95:7 in the NIV reads as follows:

"For he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture
and the flock under his care."

Take that phrase "flock under his care" and look more closely.

וְצֹ֣אן יָד֑וֹ

Literally "the flock of his hand".

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Can't log in to Linux with correct password, error "POWER FAILURE"?

Thu, 08/02/2024 - 11:26 -- James Oakley

Today, I had a very annoying problem that I managed to fix. It's a couple of hours of my life that I won't get back, and I found very little online to help me.

So, to help anyone else with the same problem, here's the problem and the solution.

For what it's worth, this is with Fedora 39, KDE Plasma spin. But I honestly suspect that makes little difference. Other distros (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) are probably just the same.

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The message of the so-called Joseph Narratives

Wed, 24/01/2024 - 17:41 -- James Oakley
Cover of Bruce Waltke's commentary on Genesis

I'm a big fan of Bruce Waltke's commentary on Genesis. He does a great job at holding together two tasks that are vital. It's easy to lose one whilst trying to do the other. He both pays attention to the narrative craft of Genesis, and at the same time tracks the overall storyline of Genesis and what the book as a whole is communicating.

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The storyline of Revelation 4-22

Tue, 09/01/2024 - 19:44 -- James Oakley

In November, I ran a series of blog posts on the book of Revelation. Preparing to preach it, some day, I've been trying to get to know the book, to work out how it functions, how it communicates, and so on. I've wanted to do this deductively at first, which means reading the text lots and lots of times, and noticing things.

So far, I've had 3 posts:

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