It’s here. Zotero is now available as a public beta. Fore more information about Zotero, read my previous blog entry here. Download zotero here.

It requires Firefox2.0, which as of yesterday is now officially available as a beta release here. Try it out. I am still playing around with Zotero, but when coupled with something like Open Office or Writely it looks to be a good open source alternative to programs I have purchased in the past (i.e., Nota Bene – Ibidem). I will write more on this after I’ve had the chance to become more thoroughly acquainted with it.

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I was recently approached by a student who roasts his own coffee and then sells the beans to raise funds to purchase books for pastors in developing countries. Today I brewed some fresh roasted Costa Rican beans he sold me — to rave reviews among the library staff where I work. [Yes, I allow coffee in the library - just don't tell anyone.]

For more info, go here.

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Download a free pdf of R. Morris’s 1877 Servetus and Calvin: A Study of an Important Epoch in the Early History of the Reformation from Google Books.

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A great read for a rainy Sunday afternoon is The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It chronicles the fascinating genesis of the mammoth OED, and the two unlikely men whose eccentricities made it possible. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Besides, with a title like that how could I not?

Yet another reason to love the OED is today’s word of the day which was waiting for me in my inbox this morning: (Click for a larger image)

You gotta love the OED.  Now I need some coffee.

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Commonplaces were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests. See the wikipedia article.

So it’s about time I begin commonplacing.

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Music:

• This post over at the Colossians Three Sixteen blog proffers some of the musical highlights thus far in 2006.
• Remonstrans has great things to say about the Kyiv Seminary Choir, especially track 21: “O Ye Apostles from All Parts.”  You can listen here.

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Literature: I wait with eager anticipation the arrival of the next issue (20:3) of the Oxford University Press journal Literature and Theology, in which Simon Marsden authored an article entitled “‘Vain are the thousand creeds’: Wuthering Heights, the Bible and Liberal Protestantism.” He abstracts the article:

This essay reconsiders Emily Brontë’s place within the theological history of the early nineteenth century. I argue that there is a complex system of biblical hermeneutics embedded within the narrative of Wuthering Heights. In the first part of the essay, I locate Brontë within the key theological and denominational contexts of her family life. In the second part, I offer a comparative reading of Wuthering Heights and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith and argue that Brontë’s use of the Bible is founded upon a liberal hermeneutic that privileges personal, intuitive experience of the divine over traditional canonical authority.

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Art: September 30 is “Museum Day”, when museums across the United States will open their doors to the public, free of charge. To find free museums in your area, go to the Smithsonian Magazine page here.

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Of the writing of books there is no end, or so said that sagacious King Solomon. But what of their self-syndicating, ego-boosting, and rarely helpful cousins made possible by your friendly neighborhood ISP, aka, blogs? Surely the world doesn’t need yet another blog to read, or perhaps worse, another blogger in the offing.

But this blog will indeed strive to justify its existence by meeting a need, though perhaps it may well be that it will fill my needs rather than yours. You see, as interesting as I am confident this endeavor will be, it is more of an exercise in mental discipline on my part. I need a place where I can record my musings on theology, philosophy, art, life. In short, I need a ‘common place-book.’

We don’t write things down anymore. Even I, a bookbinder and fountain-pen lover, have chosen to adapt a WordPress blog to these ends rather than indulge the enjoyable but time swallowing practice of scribbling.

So, I give you commonplaces. Please feel free to comment, as that is what makes this format more productive that traditional common place-books. If my blog is akin to a common place-book, then your comments are akin to marginalia (not to be confused with scholia).

fyi: below is a copy of the title page from Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Common Places, which was originally published in Latin under the common title Loci Communes in 1576. I doubt that my version will have such staying power. At least I hope not.

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