The Bible in five statements

My blogging friend Matt Stone of Glocal Christianity tagged me: Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.
Here’s my Bible summary:

Good
Evil enters
God sets bounds
The Kingdom [...]

The Church as the Liberated Zone

Father Daniel Syosyev, the Moscow missionary priest who was murdered last week, said something very interesting in an interview shortly before his death. He was explaining why Christians should go to Church on Sunday, and his explanation reveals something of what the Church is. You Wish to See Many Miracles – You Should Become a [...]

Father Daniel, priest and martyr

The murder of Father Daniel Sysoyev last week has shocked Russia. Father Daniel, aged 34, was shot by a masked gunman at St Thomas’s Church in southern Moscow last week. The parish choir director, Vladimir Strelbitsky, was wounded in the shooting.
Father Daniel worked in a multiethnic suburb of Moscow, where people of many different nationalities [...]

Priest shot in Moscow

I received the following e-mail from Fr Maxim Obukhov of Moscow:
Fr Daniel Sysoev shot in Moscow
Fr Daniel Sysoev was of Tartar origin (ethnic Tartar, turk people in the
east of Russia, mostly muslems) had Muslem background. He knew Islam and
Tartar culture and was active missionary, wrote some Christian polemic books
about Islam. His books were not agressive [...]

What is Google installer, and why is it trying to access the Internet?

I just reinstalled Zonealarm on all our computers. After paying for more bandwidth, we ran out in a day. Either some malware us using one or more of our computers for spam, or Telkom’s meters need need recalibrating. No way are we uploading 50 to 70 Megabytes a DAY!
So I reinstalled ZoneAlarm from scratch, not [...]

Nativity Fast blogging challenge – failed

Observations from an Empty Well: 30 (40) Days of Blogging; Calendars, Old and New:
Some of you may have come across the website for The Preacher’s Institute, started by Arizona’s own Fr. John Peck, the priest serving the Orthodox mission church in Prescott. Fr. John is a genuinely good person, and his ‘challenge’ to blog daily [...]

Vespers and Slava

St Nicholas Church just before the beginning of Vespers
On Saturday evening we celebrated Vespers at the Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton, Johannesburg, followed by our family Slava.
Unfortunately our parish priest, Fr Athanasius Akunda, was not able to be present, as he bhad to attend a meeting in Nigeria, and his connecting flight [...]

Tshwane Peace Group

On Friday evening Val and I went along to a meeting we had been invited to. We had little idea what to expect, except that the speakers would be conscientious objectors from Israel, and someone who had been involved in the civil wars in the DRC.
It was a very informal gathering, and the Congolese speaker [...]

Recent reading: Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is one of the books that appears on lists of “books you ought to read before you die”, and “greatest novels of the 20th century”.
I can’t remember where and how I acquired my copy; I’ve had it for years, and it’s been on my “to [...]

The pitfalls of web mail

Yahoo! seem to have the knack of putting their collective foot in it.
I was checking my Yahoo profile, wondering why the picture had disappeared from it, and why some users of YahooGroups mailing lists I run were being told suddenly that they were not authorised to post.
Then I saw they offered to import addresses from [...]