10 famous watch makes

1. Rolex
2. Omega
3. Tag heuer
4. Longines
5. Patek Philippe
6. Tissot
7. Breitling
8. Blancpain
9. Hublot
10. Seiko

Ayreon - Valley Of The Queens

This is good (Dutch band, of course)

10 Retronyms

Retronyms are new names given to things after something similar but newer has come into being.

1. Steam train (after diesel train)
2. Black and white television (after colour tv)
3. Corn on the cob (after canned corn became popular)
4. Hot chocolate (after chocolate in bars came in)
5. Live music (after recorded music became popular)
6. Hardback book (after paperback books came in)
7. Silent films (after talking films began to appear)
8. Asia Minor (after we began to call the continent Asia)
9. Acoustic guitar (after the electric guitar)
10. Handwritten (after typewritten became possible)

In Writing 132 New edition of IW now available

I should have mentioned before that the new edition of In Writing is now out. I haven't actually seen a  copy as I left London just before it arrived. It is around though I assure you and well worth reading. it cost £1.50 from the Library but is "free" for members.

Poor taste humour

I did mean to show you what they have done in the parish church St Peter's in Coggeshall. When I got to the church the other day I looked around for evidence of Owen and Sedgwick's time at the church there seemed to be none but then I went into the extension on the side of the church and there were several portraits including the two above on a staircase. I can't quite show you properly but what they had done (as a sort of joke I guess) was to place the two Puritans between a crucifix and a statue of Mary. I see the humour but it's in poor taste really, especially when you think of the way nonconformists suffered from 1662 on.

Napoleon and St Luke

de Tolly
(копия Serge Lachinov (обработка для wiki), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

In J G Lockhart's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte there is a reference to Marshal M A Barclay de Tolly and in a footnote Lockhart, a Scotsman, says "This officer had been born and educated in Germany. He was descended from an ancient Scottish family, exiled for adherence to the Stuarts, in 1715." I remember someone remarking that it was only Lockhart who mentions the Scots connection few other historians finding it worth remarking on. Lockhart was interested because of his own Scots; blood.
It is an interesting observation in light of Acts 6:5 where Luke tells us, with no comment on most of the others, that the last of the seven appointed, Nicolas, was a Gentile convert to Judaism from Antioch. Does that suggest that, as tradition maintains, Luke himself was from Antioch? The Expositors Greek Testament certainly says that "It was a notice of special interest to St. Luke if his own home was at Antioch".

Deja vu all over again

Cartoon found here https://xkcd.com/703/

I was thinking about the fact that sharia means law and then I added these other fairly well known tautological phrases. (Some of them may actually be redundancies but I'm not getting into that - Tautology all the way forever!).

1. Sharia Law

2. Pita bread
3. Advanced warning
4. Tiny speck

5. HIV virus

6. PIN number

7. Close proximity

8. Forward planning

9. Free gift

10. Added bonus

Uxorious and diegetic

(This is from another blog of mine that I recently posted. See here.)
I learned two new words recently. First, uxorious which means having or showing a great or excessive fondness for one's wife. "He had always impressed me as home-loving and uxorious". It is something that Obadiah Sedgwick's enemies accused him of. The word is from the Latin for wife. Can't see anything wrong with being excessively fond of your wife, myself.

Then there was diegesis which I learned through my son who is studying film and TV. The word means a narrative or plot, typically in a film and is lumped over straight from Greek. The word my son actually used was diegetic sound (in connection with Ingmar Bergman). Diegetic sound is any sound presented as originated from a source within the film's world. Diegetic sound can be either on screen or off screen depending on whatever its source is within the frame or outside the frame. Another term for diegetic sound is actual sound.

Lord's Day October 28 2018

This last Lord's Day was rather unusual in that I am currently in Lebanon. I am here to lecture on Old Testament but on this last Lord's Day morning I was preaching at an evangelical church in Zouk Mosbeh, near Beirut in Lebanon, a 'Christian' area of Lebanon. About fifty of all ages gathered, including Syrian refugees. The same building houses a school for refugees during the week. I am sharing a flat with a retired Canadian pastor who is here to teach in the school while someone is away on maternity leave. See here. The service in the local Arabic was typical of our day in that we were led in singing for about half an hour with keyboards, drums, guitar and lead singer. Done very well as far as I could see. I was then welcomed and preached. I decided to go for that message I preached the other week on Lot and his daughters. It is a strange choice but I wanted them to see that the Old testament has things to say to us today and to show them Christ from what is a most unpromising story on the face of it. A young man translated for me. He did it very well. We had Turkish coffee to follow and I was able to speak with some. It is encouraging to see that here too God's kingdom is advancing. I am very thankful to Roger Lindie and Keith Berry who filled in for me back at home.

Obadiah Sedgwick

 

Thomas Athow, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday evening in London you have heard Shai Lynne in ELT or Tim Keller in All Souls. or you coudl have heard me and others at the Strangers Rest Mission, East London. I spoke on  Puritan and Westminster Divine Obadiah Sedgwick at The Essex Conference. I was preceded by Norman Hopkins giving a presentation on the Huegenots and our host David Min on John Owen (Sedgwick's successor).  In the afternoon several had gone ona  walking tour. I started later then intended so had to be brief but that was probably for the best. The conference is new and probably needs better publicity and some streamlining. The whole thing is a three day event! I'll try adn out my paper online.

Midweek Meeting October 24 2018

There were twelve of us on Wednesday eventually, which is great. I did the last of this failry long series on Sodom adn Gomorrah - on Sodom in the New Testament. As is usual, we talked about what to pray and then prayed for twenty minutes or so. Then people chatted for a while. Back home at ten.

Day Off Week 43

On my day off this week I got into the car and travelled about an hour and a half east to the little town of Coggeshall in Essex. I am going to give a paper on Friday at the Essex Conference on Obadiah Sedgwick, one of the former incumbents there. It was good to see the parish church and the place itself. I discovered that next door to the church is an inn (the Woolpack) that was once a nonconformist church. I was also unaware of the martyrdom of Thomas Hawkes that took place in 1555. It was worth the visit, especially as the little library there put me on to a book I had missed. I also discovered another good connection. It beats me how a little place like that can have a proper little library while here in Childs Hill we struggle on with a voluntary arrangement where the Library is not open very much. I managed to fit in a spot of Leez Priory, open these days chiefly for private functions, where Sedgwick was sometimes entertained. En route I played some Focus albums from the box set I purchased a short while ago. Got through the first three albums. Back here I bought a new light fitting for the downstairs loo and started putting it in and watched some TV. Only the smallest bit of reading.

Calvin's Company of Pastors

On Monday I was at the Pastors Academy once again. Rather busy there as the Lloyd-Jones Library is being refurbished following a flood and the ThM  students were there for a module so the reading group ended up in the chapel. Seven of us, led by Brad Franklin, discussed Scott Manetsch's Calvin and the company of pastors. The book is absolutely brilliant and well worth getting hold of. See here. It is well written and yet scholarly with a large chunk of endnotes. It teaches you more about Calvin, which we need to know but going from 1536-1609 it partly fills in that haziness that takes us from Calvin to the Puritans. It scotches the Calvin and the Calvinist idea and is also full of nice anecdotes, which always helps. (eg Claude Griffat suspended for calling his dog Calvin; Calvin seizing a man who had pocketed communion bread during the Lord's supper, Jean Saddo who gave his minister his cow;s eyeball for soem reason, etc). It is very useful for thinking through pastoral work too. Geneva was sadly wedded to the church state ideas of the past but if you can see beyond that there is a lot to learn. Next time we plan to look at Archibald Alexander's Thoughts on religious experience, January 21, 2019.

Lord's Day October 21 2018

About 30 present in the morning as we carried on with Acts 15 and coming into Acts 16. A nice six point sermon disguised as a three pointer. No children's talk as there was only one child present. We sang happy birthday over coffee as we did last week too. In the evening we had communion. Only six present. Perhaps I should have flagged it up more boldly. There were 13 of us at the main meeting. I preached on the final verses of Matthew 21 enlisting the help of Kevin Keegan, Vincent van Gogh and a man in Sweden some years ago who found he had a masterpiece on his front room wall.

Day Off Week 42

My day off this week fell on a Friday as I was busy all day Tuesday at a committee and began with me putting on my old blue jeans, which helps set the mood. My main thing was to read a large chunk of Scott Manesch's Calvin's company of pastors for the Pastors' Academy reading group. I could do this any day but I was happy to do it on my day off as it is such an enjoyable book, full of brilliant anecdotes and so very well written. I also had to fit in a pastoral visit and complete my editorial work on the next In Writing magazine - again not ideal but you have to work around things sometimes. here was also dog walking, some lounging in front of the TV with Eleri and a nice chicken tikka masala take away style from Sainsbury's.