Holy Saturday
This morning I read a section of a really old sermon (it's part of the daily office reading for the day) that reminded me of my favorite icon (both the quote and the icon are below). I love the theological reflection through creative narrative in this piece, and I love how the icon focuses that reflection into a kinetic center around Christ. From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday The Lord's descent into the underworld Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The ...
Trip to the Monastery and Fixed Hour Prayer Resources
Each year I take a group of six students up to the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood to spend time in fixed hour prayer, silence, retreat, and service. The monastic community at Holy Cross is always extremely gracious to us and I enjoy the opportunity to expose students to spiritual formation traditions that they probably have only read about and not experienced first hand. Fixed hour prayer (often called The Divine Office or The Liturgy of the Hours) is one of those traditions that the monastic community does extremely well - especially this unique community at Holy ...
Praying Twice Presentation
I had the opportunity to talk to the music ministry volunteers at Eastview this Friday. Below is the manuscript and slides from my talk about the multi-layered worship experience of music. CS Lewis in an Essay called “Meditation in a Toolshed” talks about two different ways to look at things. He tells the story of walking into his toolshed, and the place is pitch-black except for this beam of light that cuts through the darkness of the shed.
I got the greatest Father’s Day gift from Hannah. It’s a wonderfully painted, large coffee mug, complete with travel top. You’ll definitely see this making the rounds on campus this year.
This was the sign I found posted on the doorway to my office. I guess campus really isn’t the same over the summer.
I’ve got an external hard drive attached to my laptop for TimeMachine backups, but every time I need to pick up and go somewhere I need to manually eject the drive or face the dreaded “you didn’t do this like we want you to, and you might have lost data” nag screen. Instead of digging into a Finder window to eject the drive manually, I now use Semulov to eject specific drives or all attached drives right from my menu bar. A handy utility that saves a few mouse moves and a lot of eye rolling.
Continuing on with the Mac Bells and Whistles kick – next up is MenuCalendarClock.
I often need to know the current date (and I can never remember). I know that iCal displays the current date in its dock icon, but I hide my dock, so that requires mouse work. I know the current date is available if I click on the clock in the menu bar, but again, that requires the mouse.
MenuCalendarClock is a fairly robust menu bar extension for iCal, but I use it mainly to display (with a small footprint) the current date in my menu bar (see above). When you click on the icon in the menu bar, you also get a quick mini-month display that’s helpful in quick situations. If you don’t want the fuss of digging into iCal but need a quick glance at dates, MenuCalendarClock does the job. The basic version is free – bells and whistles will cost a little bit.
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This has been an unusually difficult season. Death has been more present over the past year than it ever has been for me – death of a grandfather, death of family members of friends and colleagues, death of marriages, death of jobs, death of comforts. The latest was the death of a friend and colleague’s little girl who struggled with an illness for a long time. In the middle of that struggle, she was such an encouragement and blessing to a great number of people. She will be deeply missed and I am deeply thankful to God for the grace and peace that extended from her through her family to so many of us.
Words for prayer are so hard to find in times like these, and so I rest on the Church to help frame prayer. The following comes from Stanley Hauerwas’ Prayers Plainly Spoken -
“Lord of Life, death scares us. We know we must die, but we have become skilled at living in a manner that ignores that stubborn fact. After all, most of us are not really old enough yet to have to face our deaths. Death happens to the old, not us, who are thus condemned to live as if we are perpetually young. Yet death slinks even into our young lives. We do not like it. We try to hide its presence by not being present to those who are dying and avoiding those who must be present to the dying. We therefore pray for your unfailing and sustaining presence for the Mills family. Give them the same courage that sustained them and Regan through her illness. May that same courage find a home in our lives, that we may come to fear you more than our own deaths and thus be enabled to be present to one another. Amen.”
This will be of no interest to the QuickSilver nerds, but for the rest of us, Spark solves a small annoyance for me. Unless you want to set up hot corners, there’s no quick way to activate the Screen Saver in Mac OS X (and, by extension, lock your computer). Spark lets you assign the launch of an app (or any document) to a specific hot key. Here’s what I did:
- Built a quick “Start Screen Saver” App in Automator (it’s not that scary)
- Use Spark to assign the F6 key to launch the new “Start Screen Saver” app
- Press F6 when I want to lock my screen
- Go get coffee.
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If you’re a slow (or moderately slow) typist like myself, Text Expander is a great utility. I’m in the middle of a doctoral thesis and I find myself typing the same phrases again and again – like “Stone-Campbell Movement” or “Lord’s Supper” or “Independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ.” Text Expander lets me set up a few key strokes, like “SCM,” to trigger a long phrases like “Stone-Campbell Movement.” So every time I enter a the letters “SCM,” Text Expander types the phrase “Stone-Campbell Movement.” My fingers are expansively happy.
You can use it for long phrases as well – like email signatures or typical boiler plates – anything you might use on a regular basis. This is a keyboard-shortcut fiend’s best friend.
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I ran across this a while ago, but was recently reminded at the TUAW blog about Caffeine. If you’re nursing an elderly battery like I am, you’re always looking for ways to save power – and having your screen automatically dim after a few minutes helps out quite a bit. It’s wonderful…until you start to watch a video and the screen dims due to inactivity.
Enter Caffeine. It sits in the menubar (a nice little coffee cup icon) and lets you either immediately override screen dimming or set a short term override countdown (say 20 or 30 minutes). Now you can watch the video and not have to burrow through the System Preferences to disable Screen Dimming…or forget to turn it back on when you leave to get your own caffeinated beverage and end up with a battery depraved MacBook when you return.
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Jott is one of those great little utilities that makes a 30 minute commute more productive than you think. Jott lets you dial your phone and dictate a message that gets transcribed and emailed to anyone on a customized contact list or to web-apps like Evernote. It’s pretty accurate and takes less time than writing something down by hand. I tend to use it for composing short emails and making short to-do lists on the go. It’s in public beta, and of course, it’s free.
Stickies are OK, but when you’re looking for integrated notes management via your computer, handheld, or any browser anywhere; Evernote keeps them all together with an elegant interface and plenty of power under the hood.
I usually collect info in a number of ways:
- copy or paste from a document on a computer
- type something while I’m at my computer
- type something short in on my phone
- write things down on any available piece of paper
- leave a quick voice memo through Jott (more on this later)
- take a picture with my camera phone
What I like about Evernote is the ability to dump all of these collection actions into one place so I can easily find them later. Evernote lets me type something in on my computer, paste something from the web, email a picture from my phone, translate my written notes into searchable text (I’d recommend it for that reason alone), and (with help from Jott) transcribe my voice memos so I can search for them later. AND it keeps all of these things in a synced database between my computer and the web so I can access that content anywhere there’s an internet connection (including my mobile phone).