How to manually clean up weird punctuation, and scrambled non-English characters on WordPress

Oh, WordPress. This was not how I had intended to work on paratext over the summer! It seems like our 10+ years hosting platform stored years and years worth of blog posts on this website using some kind of non-UTF-8 character set. However, after our hosting provider moved this website’s backend to a new server …

Job 23-24: Looking for God

Here’s a translation of Job 23-24 from Hebrew, with sporadic comments. Previously: 1:1-5 | 1:6-12 | 1:13-22 | 2:1-6 | 2:7-13 | 3:1-10 | 3:11-26 | 4 | 5:1-7 | 5:8-27 | 6 | 7 | 8:1-7 | 8:8-22 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13:1-16 | 13:17-14:22 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | Translation: 23:1 And Job answered, saying:2 “Surely today bitter [is] my complaint,My hand [is] heavy from my groaning.3 O that I knew [where] I would find him (God), and come to His seat.4 I would lay before Him judgement,And my …

Five laments your church could sing this week

“What can miserable Christians sing?” A couple of years ago, pastor and church historian Carl Trueman posed this question in an article. He was reflecting on contemporary worship music and its limited ability to lament. Cries of pain are largely absent from our gathered worship vocabulary, and so in the wake of a terror attack, …