Apparently, 100Mbit Broadband Hits UK.
I'll believe that when I see it, and actually can we have 4Mb broadband, please, instead of the pitiful less-than-modem-speed I get in the evenings with Tiscali?
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
You may have seen that my college, Wycliffe Hall, has been in the press again. Yesterday the college authorities settled with Elaine Storkey, admitting that she had been unfairly dismissed. Astonishingly however, that is not the end of the matter.
Storkey is now suing James Jones, the bishop of Liverpool and chair of Wycliffe's trustees, for religious discrimination! I was quite astonished when I read this:
The case has now been adjourned until June, at which point the three members of an employment tribunal will have to decide whether Storkey's liberal feminist brand of evangelical Anglicanism constitutes a religion, as compared with other evangelicals running Wycliffe Hall.
...
Following the resolution of the unfair dismissal claim, Charles Crow, representing Storkey, turned to the remaining matter.
"Within Christian evangelism there are two determinate strands; conservative evangelism and an open and more liberal evangelism," he said.
"Those are open and definable strands and as an open and clear proponent of one of those strands, she [Storkey] has been discriminated against."
First, I think it's amusing that Storkey's own lawyer doesn't understand the difference between 'evangelism' and 'evangelicalism'. Given that, what understanding can he really have about the theological debate? (Either he got it wrong, or he was misquoted by the Grauniad..)
Second, what does she think she's doing? Does she really want to separate 'open' and 'conservative' evangelicalism legally? Such a result could surely have no effect but to divide further the evangelicals in this country.
Third, my friend Custard asks if there really is such a thing as 'open' or 'liberal' evanglicalism. Certainly 'liberal evanglical' is 'oxymoronic', given that evangelical theology is by nature conservative, and in part a reaction against liberal theology. The question of an 'open' evangelical is perhaps not quite the same. To be sure, some mean 'liberal' by it, but others mean 'not quite as hard-line as some of the conversatives I know, and not quite as whacky as some of the charismatics I know'. This discussion is probably for another blog post.
Finally, I am pleased that the chairman of the tribunal has shown some common sense:
Arranging a preliminary tribunal hearing for June 10 this year, Robin Lewis, chairman of the tribunal, highlighted the difficulties inherent in a theological dispute being thrashed out in a secular forum and urged the two parties to reach an agreement.
"One part of the tribunal's regulations was not to resolve theological disputes within certain colleges at Oxford.
"It was to protect people from discrimination.
"I very much hope that the remaining hearing that has been timetabled won't be necessary. I hope that it can be resolved.
"What I would ask the parties is how useful an adjudication might be by the three of us, sitting in this building, on theological matters?"
Hopefully Storkey can be convinced to drop the case, which is a mis-use of the employment tribunal, potentially very damaging to the church in the UK, and ridiculously unbiblical.
I've just recently added an 'Gallery' section to the site, finally. There used to be one on my old site but I never quite got round to adding it to this one. There are some funny pictures up - hopefully more to come soon.
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
I thought this one particularly deep..!
At the end of last term we had a study week on Church Growth & Church Planting. It was a good week - one of the better study weeks.
One of the points of interest for me was that, although the week was focused primarily on numerical growth and planting, there were a couple of sessions about discipleship. I have often placed more emphasis on discipleship than evangelism, thinking it more important to grow deeper before growing wider.
However, I think that each is equally important, and that each feeds the other. The more people existing Christians see coming to faith, the deeper their own faith becomes. Equally, people with a strong and deep relationship with God become more like him, and therefore more attractive and able to share their faith in a non-threatening and powerful way.
Many Anglican churches are stuck in 'discipleship' mode; and even that has been watered down to little more than maintenance of what is already existing. Without new Christians, a church becomes stagnant, and without depth new and existing Christians wither and die.
The challenge to me, and to the Anglican church, is a renewed focus on evangelism and numerical growth, which is after all a sign of the kingdom throughout the New Testament. God still wants people who know him more and more, and people to know him for the first time.
EDIT 22/04/08:
If you use the latest versions of WordPress, Admin SSL and Simple WYMeditor, then this workaround is no longer necessary.
I currently use WordPress to publish my blog, and I recently discovered that there is a plugin () that lets you use my favourite online text editor - WYMeditor - to write blog posts.
So far so good - but I encountered a problem. I enabled the plugin in WordPress but nothing happened. Then I discovered that another plugin I use - Admin-SSL, which unsurprisingly secures the WordPress admin pages - was not securing pages from the /wp-content/ directory, which is where the plugins are. The page was trying to call the WYMeditor plugin script using an unsecured link, which was causing it to break.
So I added the following code to admin-ssl.php at line 370:
370 $content_url = get_option("siteurl") . "/wp-content";
371 $secure_content_url = $secure_url . "/wp-content";
372 $replace_this[] = $content_url;
373 $with_this[] = $secure_content_url;This fixed the first problem.
However I noticed that the autosave function was not working either. Apparently some people find it annoying, but I find it extremely useful while I'm writing blog posts. After spending ages looking through the code of the WYMeditor plugin, through the WYMeditor documentation, and the autosave() function in WordPress, I found a way to fix it.
There is an HTML textarea element called 'content' which WYMeditor replaces, and which WordPress uses to get what you are writing. When you click the 'Save' button, WYMeditor updates that textarea element with whatever you've written, and WordPress saves it.
However, the WYMeditor plugin only updates the textarea element when you click the save button, so the autosave() function doesn't work - when it looks at the 'content' textarea element, it's empty. What we need to do, then, is automatically update the textarea element when the autosave() function is called. Thankfully, WYMeditor has an inbuilt function to do this, called update().
Two things need to be done. First, open simple-wymeditor.php, which is the main file for the WYMeditor plugin (it's probably in /wp-content/plugins/simple-wymeditor/). Comment out lines 143 and 168, to look like this:
143 //jQuery( function() {
...
168 //});This allows us to access the WYMeditor functions through jQuery. Save the file and close it. Now open the WordPress autosave.js file (in /wp-includes/js/). At line 98 insert the following:
98 if(wym = jQuery.wymeditors(0)) wym.update();
This updates the 'content' textarea element if it can find a WYMeditor object, so the code won't break if you disable the WYMeditor plugin.
So there you have it - my WordPress now works with the WYMeditor plugin, and I'm very happy, and very tired after a couple of hours reading other people's code!
Addendum
In writing this post I used <pre></pre> tags to display the code. Due to a bizarre filter, WordPress doesn't let you do things like have <br/> tags inside <pre></pre> tags (and many more such combinations). So the code above, although one block of it is on four lines, WordPress was displaying it all on one long line, having stripped out the <br/> tags.
Cue much more learning of WordPress and code-reading - I now have two plugins. The first removes the 'wpautop' filter from the 'the_content' and 'the_excerpt' tags. This stops WordPress stripping tags that it shouldn't - now I'm using WYMeditor it is unnecessary anyway, because it creates XHTML.
The second plugin replaces all the curly quotation marks that WordPress 'helpfully' adds in with straight ones. Sigh - at least I'm much more aware of how WordPress works than I was! It's an absolute beast - functions and classes all over the place. I'm sure it isn't necessary for it to be so complicated.
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