Blue Cord

A colleague here at Wartburg pointed me to this video on YouTube. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the American Jesus.

This is wrong on sooooooo many levels.

A friend of mine was listening to NPR this morning and heard about a new line of products called “Looking Good for Jesus” being sold by BlueQ. They are marketed with the tag line:

Look your Sunday best! Guaranteed to help you be worthy and get noticed by the King of Kings.

You can get a mirrored compact, sparkling hand cream, and bubble bath, this final one being the most disturbing for some reason. And for those of you wondering whether there is any balm in Gilead (Jeremiah 8:2), you can now purchase the Looking Good for Jesus lip balm. There is also a shopping tote and coin purse to hold your beauty supplies. (I wonder if the coin purse automatically tithes.) Alas, there is no Whore of Babylon nail polish.

This same company also offers a product line called “Wash Away Your Sins.”

These products don’t exactly qualify as kitsch, since they seem to be sold with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but perhaps Tyler Williams might like to add them to his Jesus Junk & Christian Kitsch series.

Those of you who tried to visit Blue Cord this past weekend may have noticed we were having a few problems here. The problems were caused by a chain of events:

1. My domain got hacked.
2. The server at my hosting company crashed.
3. My plane from Minneapolis to Waterloo had mechanical problems.

O.K., technically this third problem didn’t affect my site, but it did mean I had to spend the night in Minneapolis where I was unable to correct the first two problems. I had been in Massachusetts for the weekend to visit my kids.

The hack occurred on Saturday night. It was not a malicious attack. They did not destroy any of my data. Instead, they merely left web pages that bragged about how they were able to hack into any site. (It’s a shame they aren’t able to brag about making a positive contribution to society, but that is a different matter.) So, I spent Saturday night trying to track down all the files they had installed and reinstalling the files they had deleted. I wasn’t able to finish the job before taking off Sunday afternoon to fly back to Iowa.

Sunday evening, however, that whole problem became moot, because the server at my hosting company crashed. It was apparently unrelated to the hacking of my site, as the company said the kernel on this particular machine had become corrupted. It took them until late this afternoon to get the server restored. Fortunately for me, their last backup was done sometime between my last blog post on Friday and the hack on Saturday. So, I am now back up and running with no loss of data, and I didn ‘t need to hassle with my own backup files.

I apologize to those of you who have had to go for two days without Blue Cord. I know how rough that can be. Fortunately, the hosting company I use is a good one. This is the first time anything like this has happened to my site in the two years I have been with them, and they had the problem resolved quickly. If anyone is looking for a good hosting company, I can recommend these guys (www.bluehost.com).

John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has a post in which he discusses the issue of interpretation I raised in my post “Dust Eating Serpents.” I hope to respond to what he has to say about Isaiah. For now, I wanted to address another topic he mentioned.

John likes the fact that I hyperlink biblical references to an on-line version of the Bible. He asked for a how-to lesson for non-geeks, so here it is. And it couldn’t be simpler. I don’t do the hyperlinks myself. Instead, I use a plugin for WordPress called Scripturizer. I downloaded the plugin into the appropriate directory, activiated it, tweaked a few settings, and haven’t worried about it since. It automatically finds references to biblical passages in my posts and inserts the links.

It keeps me from having to worry about quoting verses sometimes, since readers who don’t know the passage can just follow the link.

While many people have seen the news about the tornadoes that swept through Tennessee and neighboring states last night, I thought I would point out that Union University was hit pretty badly. Fifty–one students were injured and nine hospitalized, though fortunately the injuries were not life-threatening. Forty percent of the dorms were destroyed, while another forty percent of the dorms received damage. Several academic buildings were also damaged. Classes have been suspended until February 18.

Union used a blog — Union University Emergency on Blogger — to provide news and information while their servers on campus were out. The Baptist Press is also running a blog with updates.

Union University is one of the three Baptist colleges in Tennessee that are or have been associated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention. The other two are Bethel College and Carson–Newman College. I graduated from Carson–Newman, as did Jim West.

(When went to Jim’s blog just now to copy the address for the link above, I noticed he has a post about the tornado as well. It contains some links to news sites and a video showing the damage.)

The Memphis Commercial Appeal has an article about the disaster. According to the article, tornado preparedness drills the university runs regularly helped prevent fatalities. The university alert system had gone into effect, so many students had taken shelter. The article contains some first–hand accounts from some students trapped in the rubble.