Periodic Table of the Bible

I am excited to be able to launch this graphic! Prominent blogger Tim Challies gave me the idea and asked me to create it for his Visual Theology series. I much prefer these kind of weekend projects instead of snow shoveling or home repair!

Just a bit of background on the graphic. The point was to get as much general information about the books as possible while keeping the format simple. Obviously there are a lot directions that the graphic could take but we choose to keep it limited to a few bits of information. A couple ideas that didn’t make it in were to list the books by relative size as well as chronological order. It’s quite possible those will make it into a future graphic.

My theology is conservative so the authorship and dating of the books will reflect that.

Enjoy!

High Resolution PDF

The pdf is all vector so it should be suitable for scaling up to any size you wish. There are two flavors – one is the standard graphic that would be good to send to a print shop and the other has a white background in case you want to print it yourself.

Standard PDF
PDF with white background

Desktop and Android Wallpapers

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iPhone Wallpaper

iPhone

iPad Wallpaper

iPad

written on February 6, 2012 · 2 Comments

Jesus is Greater

The video Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus has received over 15 million views in the last few days and has generated a lot of conversation and controversy.

The main message of the video is that religion causes me to look at my own pedigree or performance to be accepted spiritually and that religion says my motivation to obey God is based on fear and insecurity. On the flip side Jesus came to completely remove all religion. He died so I wouldn’t have to. I look to His performance and not my own. My motivation to obey God is out of love and grateful joy.

That conversation has inspired the graphic below. Jesus is greater.

Desktop and Android Wallpapers

Small – Medium – Large – Extra Large – XXL

iPhone Wallpaper

iPhone

iPad Wallpaper

iPad

Source Files

Photoshop Large (includes background and distressing)
Photoshop iPhone version (includes background and distressing)
Font – Six Caps – available from Google Fonts

written on January 20, 2012 · no comments

Jesus + Nothing Wallpaper

This past weekend our student ministry had our annual Winter Retreat. It was a blast to put this together with some great friends and other ministries in the area. I designed our t-shirt for the weekend that coincided with our theme of Jesus(period).

There was a lot of positive reaction to the shirt so I’m also releasing a series of wallpapers that feature the design. You can use them on your desktop, iPhone, iPad or Android device.

Desktop and Android Wallpapers

Small – Medium – Large – Extra Large – XXL

iPhone Wallpaper

iPhone

iPad Wallpaper

iPad

Source Files

Illustrator
Photoshop Large (includes background and distressing)
Photoshop iPhone version (includes background and distressing)
Font – Six Caps – available from Google Fonts

written on January 17, 2012 ·

New Year’s Project

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. It always seemed kind of silly to base life change off of a date. But even still one can’t deny that a new year brings the feeling of newness or the desire to elicit change.

In recent days I’ve been influenced and inspired by a couple of sources. First I recently saw some killer posters of tv shows designed in a minimal style. I really liked this project and decided to make my own. I’m almost done with this and will post about the completed set in the near future. Until then if you want, you can see the progress in my dribbble profile.

The other source of inspiration came from a link in a blog post that pointed me to Jim LePage’s Word project. In his project he wanted to read through the Bible and create prints based on themes of books and specific passages. Some of his work is incredible and stirred in me a desire to do something similar.

I love creating one sheet prints and posters and really enjoy working with a minimal set of colors and graphics. Our projects would differ a bit in that I want my set to reflect more on the story of Jesus throughout the Bible. I would love to show through minimal art how the Gospel threads its way through the whole of Scripture.

One of the books we’ve gotten our kids is the Jesus Storybook Bible. Its seriously one of my favorite books because it presents Jesus as the hero of the Bible and shows how His story is written throughout scripture. The art in the book is very cool as well.

So there it is. My project for this next year would be to start with Genesis and as I read through the Bible this next year create some cool art that depicts the Gospel and the story of Jesus maybe in a way not yet expressed.

written on December 26, 2011 · no comments

Fun Game for your NCAA Championship Party

Our youth group had our annual Final Four Frenzy activity this past Saturday. Most of the time the students really don’t care about watching the games, its mostly just a time to hang our with their friends. But this year we introduced a new game that got everyone watching and totally into the game – even the girls.

Its called Scoreboard Bingo and this is how it works. Read More

written on April 6, 2009 · no comments

Women Want to Be Homemakers? Say It Isn’t So!

This post actually started out as a comment response to a blog post but ended up being way too long…

Homemakers are EvilConcerning the recent debacle about Southwestern Seminary offering a homemaking course, the website The View From Her had some interesting things to say. (I found this particular post from my friend Becky Vartabedian on her blog Flip the Pig.)

I think a lot of people have offered knee-jerk reactions to this story. The author of The View From Her is very concerned that this kind of course encourages women to not pursue other academic areas of study and yet if the author would have done a little more research she would have found out that homemaking is only a concentration of a larger Bachelor’s degree in humanities. Only 21 hours of 129 are devoted to the concentration. The other 108 hours are in those other more intellectually stimulating categories like history, philosophy and theology.

The author says “It is so singularly focused on keeping women in their place.” The homemaking course is not about keeping women “in their place” but about broadening their curriculum, bringing in more prospective students and responding to consumer demand. This may come as a shock to some – but there are women out there who actually just want to be housewives. Why shouldn’t these women have the opportunity to take classes that relate and will improve them in the areas in which they spend the majority of their lives? Furthermore if the Seminary had an agenda of keeping women in the home why do they offer multiple masters degrees in areas of missions, teaching and other things which take women from the home? In a recent news release the seminary responded to the question: “Do you believe all women should stay at home and take care of their children?” They were quoted as saying “We believe, as Baptists, that every person is free to do anything they want to do.”

The other item that the author rails on is the fact that the seminary is out to define the “role” of women while completely ignoring the man. That argument is a bit absurd and is like saying the reason the Iraq war is wrong is because we’ve been ignoring North Korea.

The only thing I can really see being concerned with is the fact that the course is only open to women. Why shouldn’t a man be able to take interior design and cooking classes? While this isn’t a big deal, I would assume the reasoning here is one based more on logistics and comfort of the majority of the class who most likely would be women.

I think this is another case of the media and other people making a mountain out of a molehill. We shouldn’t be so quick to make judgments, be offended, and whip out our favorite proof-texts.

written on September 4, 2007 · no comments