Please try to play nicely without us.

Any urgent blog or moderation issues should be referred to our host churchWEB.

Those we have chosen to add to our team should bring some variety to our pages and help us to contribute better towards an online “community where in we build upon the things we have in common and explore the things that make us different.”¹

Our new contributors are:

André Z is a student in the final year of undergraduate degrees in arts (philosophy) and science at the University of Auckland. André is particularly interested in the relationship between science and Christian faith and the challenges which the scientific project and our intuitive understanding of persons pose for naturalism. He intends to undertake post-graduate studies in science.

Theologically André would describe himself as an evangelical Anglican. He is active in his local church and the wider Diocese. He is involved in a number of student clubs including leadership of a Tertiary Student Christian Fellowship-affiliated group. He has been known to occasionally contribute to ‘The Anglican’ magazine as well as his personal blog MetaEquilibrium and Thinking Matters.

Andrew is a philosophy major at Auckland University with a particular interest in philosophical theology. His present study focuses around various cosmological and meta-ethical arguments for theism.

Theologically, he’d describe himself as Evangelical but agnostic as to the question of Reformed or Arminian soteriology. A few of the thinkers who influence Andrew are: John Calvin, William Lane Craig, Paul Copan, Alvin Plantinga and Chris Tucker.

Andrew’s other interests other interests include sailing, hiking and socializing and he too has been an occasional contributor to  Thinking Matters.

Machine Philosophy was first recognized in a graduate philosophy of religion textbook when he was a freshman in college, for being as familiar with the thought of a leading philosopher of religion, “as any living person”. He earned a BA in Philosophy and is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy.

Machine Philosophy has edited textbooks in the philosophy of logic and classical Indian metaphysics. This year, he published a book of redacted quotations and is now working on a book on how the criterial assumptions of atheism imply a theistic God.

His interests include atheism, theism, philosophy of mind, self-reference, naturalistic ethics, materialism, epistemology, a priori knowledge and artificial intelligence.

________________________________

Please join us in welcoming our friends to MandM and keep an eye out for their blog posts.

UPDATE:
We have also added John Tertullian to the team:

John Tertullian (JT) posts regularly at the blog Contra Celsum. “John Tertullian” is a pseudonym, inspired by the Church Father, Tertullian who trenchantly emphasized the conflict between the Christian faith and all forms of unbelief. Unbelief was always religious; it was always idolatrous. So, Tertullian famously declaimed, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens!”

JT has a couple of post-grad degrees, for which he is thankful.  But, in truth, he finds the Scriptures to be more profound and instructive than a million books. And our Lord is peerless and His Kingdom has been found to be a pearl of great price.

[1] Joel Watts The Future of Bibilo/Theoblogging? The Community Blog

We added a new page and suddenly the site developed a redirect loop to the new page – all you got when you clicked on Home or tried to load our domain was the new page. Deleting the new page caused an error message “This Web Page has a Redirect Loop.” We installed a plugin to break it which at least permits the home page to load but nothing will load when clicked on.

We are working on it, please bear with us.

If anyone with any tech skills has any ideas we’d love to hear from you: m_flannagan at clear dot net dot nz.

UPDATE:
While the problem is not fixed, I have managed to get a work-around solution in place.

I noticed that we can get the site to load if I use a page specific url (just not the www.mandm.org.nz url) and I can comment and I can navigate to all the pages in the nav bar and in the recent comments and trackback widgets but if I try to load the home page it goes straight into crazy loop mode and tries to bring up the new page (which I deleted last night).

So, I tried changing the site address url to point to another page – I chose the archives page http://www.mandm.org.nz/archives and the site seems to be working now.

The problem remains that we still cannot use the home page url by itself but at least we appear functional while we are trying to fix that.

So, as you were

UPDATE:
Problem solved. A plugin broke. Disabling it got rid of the problem.

Whilst away at Mt Maunganui this weekend, Sid has vanished. He was last seen flying off the top of the 6 storey apartment building we are staying in but mysteriously he has not appeared in the landing area as he was expected to.

Noah has Autistic Spectrum Disorder and his McDonalds Happy Meal Sid toy is his favourite toy so you can imagine how upset he is for Sid to be missing, let alone at the prospect of us driving back to Auckland tomorrow without Sid…

Does anyone have a spare Sid toy they would be willing to part with? We are happy to pay for it, to pay for postage. Please email us if you can help.

UPDATE:

Sid is now found!

We will try to clear and release comments a few times a day. I am working through my Certificate in Professional Legal Studies online at the moment so I am online a fair bit and it only takes a minute to log in here.

UPDATE:
Well we’re here! We’ve just got some unpacking to do and we’re surrounded by boxes, packing tape and bubblewrap. Won’t be too much longer before all our side-widgets are back and the spam blocker is back online…  (apologies for the viagra, porn and other spam flooding into various threads right now).

UPDATE:
We’re done! Transmission as normal.

The first hurdle was to get his paper accepted, which is no small feat but one that Glenn has pulled off – well done Glenn!

The second hurdle is to raise the funds to get there, which is a work in progress…

Glenn’s situation is much like Matt’s. Glenn holds a PhD in Philosophy and a Masters in Theology (the opposite way around to Matt). He is a very good Christian philosopher; I referenced him in my own philosophy of law paper on the subject, Matt has cited from him also  in several works (see our Glenn Peoples tag) and we both view Glenn’s blog to be MandM’s toughest competition in the NZ blog rankings for our niche .  Like Matt,  since graduating, Glenn has struggled to find work in his field. He currently works for the IRD and earns a very modest wage. Glenn is trying to find a position using his skills, if not in New Zealand, anywhere in the world so this conference is not only an opportunity for him to meet one of the world’s best living philosophers in Glenn’s field, it is not just an opportunity to have New Zealand Christian philosophy showcased at Oxford but it is a chance to help someone with a gift take another step towards using that gift to provide for his family and to support the broader church. Donations are currently being gathered and more information is available here if you would like to help and/or follow his progress.

Matt

Matt is working full-time teaching and I have a really full-on study load at the moment.

I am Mooting this semester and have mooting deadlines coming at me head on along with insane quantities of Opinion readings  – over 30 cases! are on the recommended reading list and then there are the articles and commentary. Over the semester break I will be working full-time for the Police Prosecutions team for one of the weeks as part of the community placement component for my LLB. So for me the busy-ness is not going to let up anytime soon.

Matt will have the school holidays free at least though he has managed to write a few pieces for the blog but I am not free to edit them just yet – we may just have to put them up as is or else nothing is going to come through.

Anyhow, off to class…

Matt has written a lengthy followup post which will probably be two follow up posts on inerrancy as soon as I can get them edited and tomorrow the Christian Blog Carnival will be up at some point as we are the hosts for this round.