This year, I was asked to give a Wednesday night teaching related to Christmas. I was struck by how churches will mention how there were prophecies about Jesus, but don't often speak much about those prophecies. I took the opportunity to give a Christmas message from the Book of Micah and gave a survey of the history and literary structure of the book and how it points to the coming hope in Jesus. The message concludes with a question--do we who have witnessed this fulfilled prophecy have the hope that Micah had, even in his troubled time? The handout for this lesson is available here and the link for the recording of the lesson is available here. If you would rather stream the audio than download it, click here to be taken to YouTube. There is no video of the message, but rather a picture as a background for the audio recording.
Please feel free to leave comments below or tweet at me @krkurian. Merry Christmas! He will be our peace!
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Saturday, July 28, 2012
EndNote APA 6th Corrected Citation File
And now for something different for my graduate school
colleagues (and undergrads if you use this
too): a corrected APA 6th
Citation File for EndNote. If you’re unfamiliar with EndNote, it’s program
that’s rather helpful in keeping your sources organized. If you use EBSCOhost,
EndNote can save you the extra step of having to type in your references
manually. This feature is improved with the use of EndNote Web. When you put
this together with their Cite While You Write feature, you have a pretty
powerful application that will save you time and keep you organized all the way
to the point of submitting your paper. Discussing these features is beyond the
scope of this blogpost, but if you want to learn how to use them, I refer you
to EndNote’s YouTube page. It can take some time to learn, so I’d recommend
learning some of these features before your due date is the next morning.
For my Ph.D. program, I use APA 6th Edition
citations for my papers and research in worship and psychology. I’ve noticed that EndNote was making mistakes in its
citations such as putting an issue number in the citation, putting references
in all caps, and not capitalizing the first word of a subtitle after a colon.
These might seem little, but they add up and can become especially annoying
when you consider that this program is supposed to save you time.
I scoured the Internet trying to find corrected files, but
with no success. I resolved to make my own and it is now ready for consumption.
My file is primarily focused on correcting issues with journal article
citations. If you find other issues, please let me know and I’ll do my best to
correct them. I hope that this file will be of use to you. Click the link at
the bottom of this post to download the citation file, compatible with Mac
and PC. I use it on EndNote X5 and haven’t tested its compatibility with other
versions of EndNote. If you use the file, I would really appreciate a
comment below to let me know you used it and so I know my efforts in making
this file were not in vain!
When you download this file, go to your Program Files (PC)
or Applications (Mac) folder, look for EndNote, and add this file to the Styles
folder. Then open EndNote, go to the drop menu above for citation styles, and
click Select Another Style. Then search for APA 6th Revised Copy.
You’re ready to go. If you use Cite While You Write, you’re going to want to
check your settings in Word to make sure that the citation is in the APA 6th
Revised Copy format. (If all else fails, and you need to ditch EndNote and just need your citations to look right, check out some online sources that will help you manually write citations such as Purdue OWL's webpage.)
Enjoy! And please leave a comment on how the file is for to
you!
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Word and the Mirror
Hi all,
I've posted a sermon I preached back at New Horizon Christian Fellowship in Hillsborough, NJ last September. The theme for this message is "The Word and the Mirror". This message takes a study of James 1:22-27 and examines the relationship between the Christian believer and the Bible. Later on, I ran into For Self-Examination by Søren Kierkegaard that covered a similar concept, but in more existential terms. I can't say I've read the whole book, but the portions I did read were very interesting. If this concept of the Word-as-Mirror interests you, I recommend you check out that book. Please leave comments below, I'd love to hear from you.
Embedded video not working? Click this link to view or share: http://bit.ly/SerWandM
I've posted a sermon I preached back at New Horizon Christian Fellowship in Hillsborough, NJ last September. The theme for this message is "The Word and the Mirror". This message takes a study of James 1:22-27 and examines the relationship between the Christian believer and the Bible. Later on, I ran into For Self-Examination by Søren Kierkegaard that covered a similar concept, but in more existential terms. I can't say I've read the whole book, but the portions I did read were very interesting. If this concept of the Word-as-Mirror interests you, I recommend you check out that book. Please leave comments below, I'd love to hear from you.
Embedded video not working? Click this link to view or share: http://bit.ly/SerWandM
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Bind us together, Lord
So there's a lot of buzz over the terms "religion" and "spirituality". It's not necessarily a new social conversation. It's at least 40-50 years old with the Jesus People movement and it's been going on ever since. I believe this has been going on as a correction to what many have experienced as "dead religion".
Let me qualify that.
Yes, religion has Latin roots in legare which means "to bind," but this doesn't carry the terrible connotation that many unfairly give it. The word "religion" starts with re having the connotation of "again". So what I believe to be a more proper interpretation of religion's etymological roots is that religion serves to bind us together as a community (horizontally) and to bind us together with God (vertically). If I say something like "I am bound to the Kurians" or "I belong to the Kurians" I don't speak as a slave. I say that something connects me to my family, I am responsible to them, and they are responsible to me. They care for me and I care for them. Something connects us.
Is my family perfect? No. I love them though. I wouldn't give up on them because they may have done this or that, just as I would hope that they wouldn't give up on me. There is unity there. Just because we see something bad doesn't mean we jump ship. We're bound through thick and thin. So this discussion that Jesus didn't come for religion (which apparently is characterized by only bad things) doesn't make sense. Jesus built a church after his resurrection (Matthew 16:18). That church is expressed through binding individuals to one another, with a focus on Christ. Call it want you want, but the unity found there is ontologically a religion.
Jesus didn't come to build a church that hurts people or for a church that disregards its commission to care for the poor. That would be a religion deviating from its intended design. These are our mistakes and we need to own up to them. So we continually work on them. But to say that Jesus didn't come to make a religion misses the point of what a religion is supposed to do--bind people in unity to one another and to God. And that's a bad thing?
Shouting about a new Christian spirituality like it's something new doesn't fix anything (Ecclesiastes 1:9). It divides. It spits on the tradition of 2000 years of Christians who have lived and died following Christ. What kind of hotshot are you to not listen to those that came before and might have an idea of what it's like to serve God in a world where people don't want to hear about Him? Are the rest of us in our churches completely missing what it's like to serve God? If the Church has been twiddling its thumbs for two millenia, then yeah, you might have a point.
But I'm going to venture that most churches are sincerely doing their best to follow Christ. Albeit imperfectly, but still trying. A church is supposed to be open to correction by Scripture and by those bound together as brothers and sisters. I'd be so bold to say that multiple denominations are helpful in this way by correcting one another from becoming too myopic and by being diverse enough to reach diverse populations. By removing yourself from religion, you've removed yourself from even wanting to be united in this conversation. And that helps who?
I follow Paul. I follow Apollos. I follow Cephas. I follow Christ. We were warned about this sort of division all throughout 1 Corinthians. This would be one of those times. We're not helping ourselves out by ragging on religion. We're shooting ourselves in the foot so we can make a loud noise for attention and we need to put the gun down. We're bleeding all over the place.
Let me qualify that.
Yes, religion has Latin roots in legare which means "to bind," but this doesn't carry the terrible connotation that many unfairly give it. The word "religion" starts with re having the connotation of "again". So what I believe to be a more proper interpretation of religion's etymological roots is that religion serves to bind us together as a community (horizontally) and to bind us together with God (vertically). If I say something like "I am bound to the Kurians" or "I belong to the Kurians" I don't speak as a slave. I say that something connects me to my family, I am responsible to them, and they are responsible to me. They care for me and I care for them. Something connects us.
Is my family perfect? No. I love them though. I wouldn't give up on them because they may have done this or that, just as I would hope that they wouldn't give up on me. There is unity there. Just because we see something bad doesn't mean we jump ship. We're bound through thick and thin. So this discussion that Jesus didn't come for religion (which apparently is characterized by only bad things) doesn't make sense. Jesus built a church after his resurrection (Matthew 16:18). That church is expressed through binding individuals to one another, with a focus on Christ. Call it want you want, but the unity found there is ontologically a religion.
Jesus didn't come to build a church that hurts people or for a church that disregards its commission to care for the poor. That would be a religion deviating from its intended design. These are our mistakes and we need to own up to them. So we continually work on them. But to say that Jesus didn't come to make a religion misses the point of what a religion is supposed to do--bind people in unity to one another and to God. And that's a bad thing?
Shouting about a new Christian spirituality like it's something new doesn't fix anything (Ecclesiastes 1:9). It divides. It spits on the tradition of 2000 years of Christians who have lived and died following Christ. What kind of hotshot are you to not listen to those that came before and might have an idea of what it's like to serve God in a world where people don't want to hear about Him? Are the rest of us in our churches completely missing what it's like to serve God? If the Church has been twiddling its thumbs for two millenia, then yeah, you might have a point.
But I'm going to venture that most churches are sincerely doing their best to follow Christ. Albeit imperfectly, but still trying. A church is supposed to be open to correction by Scripture and by those bound together as brothers and sisters. I'd be so bold to say that multiple denominations are helpful in this way by correcting one another from becoming too myopic and by being diverse enough to reach diverse populations. By removing yourself from religion, you've removed yourself from even wanting to be united in this conversation. And that helps who?
I follow Paul. I follow Apollos. I follow Cephas. I follow Christ. We were warned about this sort of division all throughout 1 Corinthians. This would be one of those times. We're not helping ourselves out by ragging on religion. We're shooting ourselves in the foot so we can make a loud noise for attention and we need to put the gun down. We're bleeding all over the place.
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