Did the Emerging Church Fail?Richard Beck has a series going right now in which he asserts that the Emerging Church movement failed. I’m usually pretty aligned with Beck but I’m not so sure this time.Read more...11 Mar 2024 • 3 min read
Donald "Don" Bruce Hubbs, 1949-2024Donald Bruce “Don” Hubbs, 74, died Saturday at his home in rural Richland County after a nearly two year battle with brain cancer. Don was born November 15, 1949 in Ellsworth, Kansas, to Lloyd and Marge (Stepp) Hubbs. He grew up in small towns in Kansas and Nebraska before attending Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Nebraska, where he received a MA in Music Education. In college he met his future wife, Marjorie Jones, and as school teachers making the most of Christmas break, they were married the day after Christmas, 1971. Don taught high school music for several years before eventually taking up piano tuning and repair, the career he would maintain until his retirement. Later in life he accepted a role in public service as the town clerk for the tiny township he called home, taking up the thankless responsibilities of budget and elections because they needed doing, and needed doing well.Read more...24 Feb 2024 • 3 min read
The State of my Task Management, 2024As a new year begins and I settle into a new-ish position at work, it has been time to again rethink my task management strategy.Read more...16 Jan 2024 • 4 min read
Recommended Reading: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim AlbertaMy first completed book of the year is one I can wholeheartedly recommend: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta. Subtitled “American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism”, journalist Alberta’s book details his many interviews with American Evangelical leaders since the rise of Trump in 2016. He interrogates their motivations, how their words align with their actions, and how those words and actions comport with the teachings of Jesus.Read more...7 Jan 2024 • 4 min read
A short note on Travel PlanningI have found myself, since returning home from Washington, DC in mid-December, without any travel on my calendar. Normally I travel a half-dozen times per year for work, meaning usually at any given point I’ve got something at least on the calendar. But right now? Nope.Read more...4 Jan 2024 • 1 min read
My 2023 Reading in ReviewAnother year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…Read more...3 Jan 2024 • 5 min read
Chopin Being MeanI have hacked through the Chopin Ballades for years now. I started learning the first one in high school, and in adulthood I played through #3 and #4 often enough that I can, well, hack through them. I never spent the time working everything out and polishing; I just kept sight reading until I could blaze through it.Read more...7 Dec 2023 • 2 min read
Reviewing Two Decades of My ThoughtsA big chunk of effort in migrating the blog was going through each post to review and clean up content. On the technical side, I started by using a conversion tool that took the Wordpress data dump and transformed it into Markdown files. It was good as far as it went. But it was only so good. I ended up touching every post back to 2004, tagging, cleaning up formatting, improving links when possible, removing them when they were super-dead, etc. It took a while. But it gave me the opportunity to review my own progression of thought and growth in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, and that made it well worth it. Today I want to review some impressions this review left on me.Read more...4 Dec 2023 • 6 min read
Migrating to EleventyIf you’re reading this post, you’re seeing the updated ChrisHubbs.com as generated by Eleventy, a static site generator. After being on Wordpress for nearly twenty years, this was a significant change!Read more...1 Dec 2023 • 2 min read
Closing down iowadon.orgA year ago I set up my own Mastodon server at iowadon.org. Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and was quite obviously going to ruin it, Bluesky was still a very small beta test, and I thought hey, why not, I would enjoy the project and could try my hand at administrating a social media instance. So I dropped $15 for the domain name and $50 for a year of a cheap VPS and gave it a shot.Read more...6 Nov 2023 • 2 min read