Monthly Archives: February 2010

Theology of Shinto

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Theology-of-Shinto

I wrote this paper for my Theology class at Every Nation Leadership Intitute during my studies there. I have had several different people tell me that it was helpful in understanding Japanese Shinto. It is a very simple overview of  Shinto and includes some points that I thought were interesting.

Please download and read this paper if you are interested in learning more about the history and context of Shinto in order to reach Japanese people. Although I have found that the average Japanese person does not know a great deal about Shinto, the culture, traditions and daily life of many Japanese are influenced a great deal by it. And it is believed by many, right or wrong, that in order to be Japanese one must also “be” Shinto.

I welcome your additions, corrections and even criticism. I am certainly no expert on this topic, just an interested learner who wants to share. See the links below to share this article or leave a comment.

Podpress (WordPress plugin) once again shows signs of life…

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After months of slow death and then a year of no apparent life except one short blog article by Matt Mullenweg, Podpress is once again under at least maintenance-mode development. Thanks to Tim Berger for coming to the rescue. The latest version as of now is 8.8.5 beta, which I am currently running successfully on yokosukachurch.com and the current stable version is 8.8.4 which is sending podcasts out on a few other church sites that I maintain here in Japan.

Years back podpress was the undisputed best plugin for podcasting in WordPress but then the original author suddenly stopped maintaining the code. He promised to return to the project “soon” but eventually even his most ardent supporters began to disappear from the forums. Finally even the support forum got shut down, ostensibly because of spam, but more likely because the grumbling against this developer was getting pretty loud. I can’t cast stones here because it has been years since I touched my active-x controls on shrinkwrapvb.com and I still get weekly, sometimes daily requests for support on those. Life can make one busy and priorities can change. But in order to keep using Podpress I have had to hack and patch on every install and every upgrade since about WordPress 2.5. This brought me no joy since it seemed I was fighting a losing battle – with the original author being long gone, never to return. I actually almost switched to another plugin or two for the same functionality, but the problem of migrating all the back episodes of my podcasts kept me making small bugfixes to podpress.

Until – now! Once again I am using the official svn repository versions of podpress and the only hacks I need to make are on sites where I want to add Japanese text or custom features/graphics. Podpress lives on to fight another day.

DOWNLOAD LINKS FOR PODPRESS

Official page at WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

SVN repository: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/podpress/