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Tuesday 17 March 2009

Blog E-books: Evangelicals, Evolution,and Academics series now available as PDF

For the record my blogging break is not really over (although I am taking a week off work during the March break). While I haven’t determined if, when, or how I will return to blogging, I have decided to make the best content from this blog available via thematic PDF files that can be shared with others (I have had requests for this in the past). I am not sure if my approach qualifies for the term E-book, but until someone corrects me, that is the term I’ll use. And since the best content on the blog may very well be the articles contributed by various guest posters, these guest contributions will be published first. The first E-book “Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics” is now available as a PDF. This is simply a compilation of the 13 posts in the series of the same name published in the spring of 2008.

The E-book can be copied freely (within the limitations stated on the title page); in fact, I’m hoping that this will happen and that it will be helpful to Evangelicals in academia (or those just entering post-secondary education) who are surprised that the acceptance of biological evolution is even an option given their faith commitment. No, the series won’t provide a lot of the answers to the very difficult faith-science questions. However, it will provide pointers to other material that can provide those answers. And maybe most importantly, it will show that there are many Evangelicals who have reconciled their faith with biological evolution, and that academics can be an exciting, fulfilling, and faith-building enterprise.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve, the PDF is incredible! I edit, format, etc. academic journal articles and such at my job and I have to say that you have outdone yourself. Please keep this up. It's work like this that I would be more than happy to give to others.

Steve Martin said...

Thanks T'sinadree. That actually took a little more effort than I originally anticipated. I thought there should be a nice tool that you could a) tag a bunch of blog articles and b) define a template and c) generate the final document (with ability to customize it a bit). No such luck - lots of stuff out there that seemed to do this but either didn't fulfill the promise or was quite expensive.

In the end I manually cut each article from google Reader (pretty good formatting here - google docs though is not ready for prime-time IMHO), pasted into a Word template I use at work, did some minor fiddling, & then generated the PDF with Acrobat Pro. In the end I'm happy with the end product (Ok, not really top quality but good enough for my purposes) but not so happy with the time it took to get there.

Paul Bruggink said...

A double thank you to you, Steve: one for putting this series together in the first place and a second for putting in the effort to make the whole series available in a convenient electronic form that can be passed on to other Christians who are still struggling with integrating evolution into their theology.

Kurt Willems said...

Steve, thanks for another great resource! Great to see another post on this blog! Blessings!