Collecting and organising Christian resources

i’ve got a lot of talks, articles, sermons, etc. that i’ve been collecting over the past few years.  i’m trying to put together a good resource library to share with others — all stuff that’s freely available on the Internet, but sometimes hard to find, and expensive to download here in South Africa — and starting to review and promote some of it here on my blog (see, for example, the recent post on Gordon Fee’s excellent series of talks on Reading and studying the Bible for life).  i’m hoping to dedicate some time in December/January to cataloguing it a bit better, but basically at this stage i’ve got the following major collections:

Reading and studying the Bible for life

The past couple days i’ve redeemed the time listening to a series of three talks Gordon Fee presented on how to read the Bible.  Fee, who is professor of New Testament at Regent College, Vancouver, is widely known for two books he co-authored with Douglas Stuart, How to read the Bible for all its worth and How to read the Bible book by book.  These two are excellent books for anyone who desires to read and understand the Bible better, and i heartily recommend them.

Redeeming the time

My friend Bradley keeps exhorting me to “redeem the time” (echoing Ephesians 5:16) — something i’m trying to take to heart.  Some years back, when i first started exploring Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and playing with text-to-speech synthesis, i discovered that i could “read” some of the classics, or articles and lecture transcripts while messing about the house or waiting for sleep to come.  i managed to “read” through Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and many other great books in the public domain like this.  Now, as broadband has become cheaper, i’ve been able to collect some fantastic audio resources over the past few years.  i always keep a few series of lectures or sermons on my phone, ready to listen to while washing dishes, walking to places, or waiting for trains.  i intend to highlight some of these here over the next while.

When i’m at my computer, i use VLC Media Player for playing media files.  One of the benefits of VLC is that it allows one to speed up playback without affecting the pitch.  i find that i can generally increase the playback speed by 40-50% or more and thus listen to an hour-long lecture in only 40 minutes.

i seldom go anywhere without a book and Bible in my bag, but i have still found it useful to keep an electronic Bible on my phone.  i’ve downloaded a couple of free ones from GoBible (KJV) and BiblePhone (various translations in several languages available).  From the latter site i’ve also downloaded a Greek New Testament (Westcott-Hort text) and Hebrew Old Testament for my phone — so now i can continue my attempt at learning Greek wherever i am.  These are all Java MIDP 1.0 or MIDP 2.0 applications, so they should work on most recent Java-capable cellphones (mine is about three years old).