A little while back, the Church of England's weekday lectionary spent some time in Hebrews 7 and Genesis 14. So it was, that I found myself trying to explain as simply as possible why the hard-to-pronounce character of Melchizedek is such good news to have in the Bible.
Robin Lustig, former journalist at the BBC, most recently as presenter of The World Tonight, has written a superb blog post entitled Will the law stretch from Srebrenica to Saydnaya?. Go read it - it's not long.
He makes a simple point. War crimes from the Balkans conflict are currently catching up with their perpetrators, as has happened with World War II and other conflicts.
Many people today move towards the Christian faith gradually. Maybe they have friends who are Christians, with whom they talk. They start to attend a local church. Maybe they attend a course such as Christianity Explored or Alpha. Gradually, things come alive for them. The God they talk about seems more real; they understand more of the Bible when they read it; the worship is something they're glad to join in with; church is somewhere they belong.
Many readers of this blog will be able to identify with just such a gradual move towards the Christian faith.
The Gossipy Parrot by Shen Roddie, a story that our children used to love: Godfrey, the parrot loved to make trouble. He used to tell tales on the other animals - "Gorrila says that bee has stung his own bottom." "He does, does he?", says bee - and off he goes to get even. One day the lion decided to teach Godfrey a lesson. He fed him all kinds of juicy snippets: "The trouble maker says that crocodile has false teeth", which Godfrey would faithfully relay to crocodile.
This is the third in a series of blog posts looking at the decision faced by that Church of England General Synod this week: do they, or do they not, take note of the report by the House of Bishops (GS2055) on human sexuality.
Yesterday, I wrote about the debate before the Church of England's General stood as to whether to take note of the House of Bishops' report into human sexuality.
I explained that the document, and the process that led to it, was all about "good disagreement" - how can traditionalists and progressives get along together without falling out.
How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him. (1 Kings 18:21)
It is logically impossible to tolerate differences of opinion when it comes to the acceptable boundaries of tolerance.
OK - I'll hold my hands up. The title of this post is misleading. I'm not going to give you an ABC on how to secure a Drupal site (maybe another day). I'm responding to a post on the Reseller Club blog entitled How to Secure Your Client's Drupal Website.
There is some good advice in that article, but it's mixed in with some bad advice, and in other parts it's just plain confused. In the hope that it helps people, I'm going to try and untangle things.
A few days back, I set a maths challenge:
Prove that, for arbitrarily large N, the total number of gifts given up to and including day N is
( N (N+1) (N+2) ) / 6
I hope you enjoyed it. It's time for a solution:
First, we need a lemma. (In mathematics, a lemma is a something we prove as a stepping stone towards our main result).
