I have begun to publish my new series of programming chops, what follows is from the readme file in the root branch of the dedicated GitHub repository for the project. Keep an eye here for updates to the links!
Category: Teaching
I was quite happy with how this course turned out, lots of really great student engagement as we looked at the history and current state of evangelicalism in North America. Wanting to reach a broader audience, OSTS has invited me to run this lecture series online in the second half of their winter semester (Feb. 3 to Mar. 20). You can read my blog post describing this series here. This course is great for evangelicals, post-evangelicals, and those just interested in influential forms of Christianity. My students last semester told me that they gained a new awareness of the breadth and depth of this diverse movement, and many were surprised at which traditions have evangelical roots. In North America it is easy to see that most, if not all, Christian traditions (and even some world religions) are either reactionary to evangelicalism or currently engaging with evangelicalism in constructive ways. Evangelicals are everywhere. Come join with us as we explore where they come from, how they have evolved, and where they might be heading.
Procrastination is the mother of invention. When I am swamped with work, like in these scant post-exam days as I prepare for the inevitable E&P meetings to discuss how my students did. Sure enough, I have this brainstorm of an idea for a series that I think would be really helpful for my students. In many of my programming classes I find that there are always students who are lacking small fundamental ideas that would save them so much time and pain. And this problem is across the board – low level to high level. It basically comes down to knowing how to deconstruct a problem into small enough chunks that can be translated into a programming language in such a way that it is easy to follow as well as easy to debug. This in a sense is the fundamental art of programming.
Southminster is an amazing church in the Glebe (right close to Lansdowne Park). I will be preaching there on the following dates:
Jan. 15th, 29th. Feb 26th.
This coming semester at the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality I will be delivering a course introducing North American Evangelicalism. I am hoping to do this through historical moments and stories, looking at the formative American evangelical identity that grew out of the revivalism of the Great Awakenings and following the windy tale to the religious nones and dones of our day. The interesting part, for me, is that no matter where we find ourselves in Christian (and sometimes even secular) spaces the shadow of this evangelicalism is not hard to find.
Yesterday I had my last meeting of the semester, the end of term meeting for my Web Design students. I have to say that when the students showed up for their final demos there was a lot of feedback to be given. But boy did they work hard to take that to heart. Even though it is exclusively a front end course (I taught a full stack course also this semester) the students were using LocalStorage, Cookies, Canvas animations, and even parsing JSON responses from AJAX requests. I am quite happy with the results as well, a couple of them I had to pull myself away from the web app to write up my evaluation, because it was so good. But now that I am done it is time to get some of the long awaited Spring projects done.
Last year I had the opportunity to deliver a series of lectures and conversations about the diversity of expressions of worship in the Christian Church. I wanted to create a space where we could reflect on our own experiences of liturgy and worship as well as explore a few different approaches and practices that would challenge us to learn from each other. I had a great and engaged group of learners for the journey with the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality – and now I’m preparing to offer this teaching through the Atlantic School of Theology‘s continuing education series in May-June 2022. I am pretty excited.
I am preparing to deliver a course through the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality in September (2022) on Evangelicalism. This is the abstract I submitted for their pamphlet:
Who are the Evangelicals? Together we will explore the story of Evangelicalism in North America. Our focus is on those traditions who have identified with Evangelicalism in Canada and the United States. We will look at evangelicals through the lenses of the Fundamentalist movement, post-war neo-evangelicalism, and evangelicals today.
Sorry for dropping off the planet just as things were getting started. I had a good reason, let me tell you the story.
As I was prepping for running my new Christology course I ended up having a conversation with my friend Michael at church. I had been chatting with him about doing some teaching for a lay school of theology that he works with and I was completely unaware that he taught at Algonquin’s School of Advanced Technology up the street from my home. My teaching background and former career are both in IT, which he did not know. So when that came out in a conversation he strongly urged me to apply for a couple permanent positions there as well as for sessional teaching. So I did.