As a new year begins and I settle into a new-ish position at work, it has been time to again rethink my task management strategy.
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My first completed book of the year is one I can wholeheartedly recommend: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta. Subtitled “American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism”, journalist Alberta’s book details his many interviews with American Evangelical leaders since the rise of Trump in 2016. He interrogates their motivations, how their words align with their actions, and how those words and actions comport with the teachings of Jesus.
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I have found myself, since returning home from Washington, DC in mid-December, without any travel on my calendar. Normally I travel a half-dozen times per year for work, meaning usually at any given point I’ve got something at least on the calendar. But right now? Nope.
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Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…
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I have hacked through the Chopin Ballades for years now. I started learning the first one in high school, and in adulthood I played through #3 and #4 often enough that I can, well, hack through them. I never spent the time working everything out and polishing; I just kept sight reading until I could blaze through it.
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A big chunk of effort in migrating the blog was going through each post to review and clean up content. On the technical side, I started by using a conversion tool that took the Wordpress data dump and transformed it into Markdown files. It was good as far as it went. But it was only so good. I ended up touching every post back to 2004, tagging, cleaning up formatting, improving links when possible, removing them when they were super-dead, etc. It took a while. But it gave me the opportunity to review my own progression of thought and growth in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, and that made it well worth it. Today I want to review some impressions this review left on me.
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If you’re reading this post, you’re seeing the updated ChrisHubbs.com as generated by Eleventy, a static site generator. After being on Wordpress for nearly twenty years, this was a significant change!
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A year ago I set up my own Mastodon server at iowadon.org. Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and was quite obviously going to ruin it, Bluesky was still a very small beta test, and I thought hey, why not, I would enjoy the project and could try my hand at administrating a social media instance. So I dropped $15 for the domain name and $50 for a year of a cheap VPS and gave it a shot.
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This morning a headline came across my social media feed, with a link to a remarkable interview with actor Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for playing Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation for seven seasons. In this interview with NPR reporter Rachel Martin, Stewart describes his time playing Picard with strong religious tones. When Martin noted that many Star Trek fans treat the show with almost a religious reverence, Stewart said this:
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This old concert recording of Rich Mullins at a Wheaton College chapel service in 1997 is an internet classic, but listening through it again today I was struck by his wisdom about the love of God:
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