It's been a long journey for me in finding the right mix of tools to aid my study of scripture. It started with Olive Tree's Bible Study app, eventually moved to Ulysses [https://thesweetsetup.com/how-to-use-ulysses-for-long-term-research/], and now, thanks to my exposure to the Zettelkasten system, Obsidian is now the home of my notes. This is one of those topics where each individual could have a slightly different setup than the next person. But tools like Roam Research [https://thesweetset…
All posts in disciplines
If you’ve read any of the newsletters I’ve sent in 2020, you know I have a lot of great things to say about Drew Coffman. He’s an awful smart chap, and seems to have that magical touch with whatever he makes (videos, podcasts, websites…). But he said something a few weeks back [https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1263944528005754881] that sat wrong with me. > A real bummer about not attending a church is that when you tell that to Christians they assume you’re a burnout. > What if you just…d…
I recently shared my system for using Ulysses for Bible study over on The Sweet Setup. It was a longer piece and one I’m happy about. Not because of my writing, but simply because Ulysses works so well for this purpose. I had been looking for a better option for storing my notes, highlights, and related passages for some time and was quite happy when I started considering the option of using a tool that was not a Bible app. I talk about structure, notes, tags, search and a lot more. If you tak…
On the topics of depth and disconnecting from the world (online or off, see more below), a Christian is someone who follows Christ. And further, a Christian is someone who communes with Christ. We do that through prayer.
Kent Hughes puts it well when he says, “You can never have a Christian mind without reading the Scriptures regularly because you cannot be profoundly influenced by that which you do not know.” This gets at the heart of the Christian discipline of study.
Meditation is a crucial tool for the Christian life, giving us time to focus on Christ and his word
As I mentioned in January [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/paradox], a primary focus for my writing this year would be to review some of the answers I've found over the years to the following questions: > So If I’m going to pursue a life of depth, if I’m going to actively pursue God, to seek him and knock on the door, how will I go about it? How can I follow the exhortations I see in Scripture, to be holy as he is holy, without moving my focus from him to my works? The answer is…
Growing up in an agnostic home, I was unfamiliar with the idea of Lent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent]. Of fasting in general. But as I've matured, I've come to appreciate the idea of denying yourself for a period of time. It takes practice, but there is much to be gained by the act of withholding from yourself. In the most recent issue of Offscreen Mag [http://www.offscreenmag.com/issue4/], I was hitting on this idea. > Thanks to the good writing of others, I've been thinking a lot about…