Webwatch is a column published in the Covenant Companion Magazine every month. It is written by Heidi Griepp, manager of Covenant Internet Services and an avid web wanderer. This month's topic: C. John Web.org. A festschrift of websites in honor of a beloved seminary professor.During the Covenant Midwinter Conference, a group of colleagues, friends, and former students gathered to honor C. John Weborg, longtime Companion columnist and retired North Park Theological Seminary professor. During a dinner, his colleagues announced that they had put together a festschrift—a collection of essays in his honor, to be published this spring.
The event sparked an idea; to create a digital festschrift for Professor Weborg in this month’s Webwatch. It’s an ironic idea, because he is known for his aversion to computers, preferring pen and paper to keyboard and screen. So in John’s honor (and on the off-chance that he might someday visit the Internet), here are some sites—from trains and virtual cow tipping to theologians online—that he, and hopefully many Companion readers, might enjoy. www.trains.com An entryway to many train-related resources, you can check out train magazines like Model Railroader, Trains, Classic Trains, Garden Railways, and Classic Toy Trains. There are train resources and forums, a schedule of train and toy train related events, and lists of associations, clubs, and train historical societies. If you want to go train watching, visit the list of train-watching hot spots or view photos and video online.
Possible Uses: Are you a beginner model train fan? Read “10 tips for beginners; getting from a train set to a model railroad.” Rating: There is much more information online about trains and in this website than I ever realized. ★★★★ This link no longer exists
Most anyone who grew up on a farm (as John did) or lives near a farm has heard people joking about cow tipping. The idea is this: teenagers or over-enthusiastic college students walk up to a sleeping, standing cow, tip them over, and then run for their lives. There is much debate online whether people actually tip cows or just talk about doing it. And there is some debate over whether cows actually sleep standing up and if it is even possible to push a cow over. One website I found calculated how many people you need to push a cow over; a minimum of two people, if you are interested. This website allows you to push over a virtual cow with the click of a mouse and save some poor cow the pain of being tipped. Plus you don’t have to get muddy. Possible Uses: Join the large group of people who say they’ve gone cow tipping. Rating: The best cow tipping website out there. ★★★★★ www.cyberhymnal.org This online hymnal has lyrics and music files for more than 5,500 hymns. Although this site isn’t very pretty, it does have the most extensive collection of hymn lyrics that I’ve found online. So if you’ve ever noticed yourself humming a hymn and wondered, “Now, what are the words for that third verse?” you can find the answer here. Search for tunes by title, Scripture allusions, meter, name, or topic. You can also access hymn trivia and pictures as well as find hymns in foreign languages from Arabic to Zulu.
Possible Uses: Which hymns have been in movies that won or were nominated for Academy Awards? Find out here. Rating: A packed website with an average design. ★★★★ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Albrecht_Bengel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietism Some theological resources from Wikipedia on two topic of interest to John—Pietists and Johann Albrecht Bengel (a Lutheran theologian who was the subject of John’s disseration.) Here you will find basic overview of both, with links to find out more about specific aspects of both Pietism and Bengel. Since Wikipedia is community edited, if you find something missing from these entries, you can add new material. What I like most about Wikipedia is that I could read along and if a topic came up that I didn’t know about, I could click on it to learn more. Possible Uses: Learn something new. One thing I didn’t know was that the name “Pietist” was meant as an insult. Rating: A great resource and if you don’t like something you can make it better. ★★★★★ www.gutenberg.org There are 17,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog, all of which can be accessed online or downloaded (legally) to your computer. For example, if you want, you could download the entire Old and New Testaments, Luther’s Large Catechism, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, The Practice the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, The Confessions of St. Augustine, along with the Augsburg Confession in Latin, German, and English—and you would just be getting started! This site has books in forty-one languages and is growing every day. Possible Uses: When you don’t have the office space for 17,000 books, this site can help you out. And it’s highly searchable. Rating: A searchable, large, and fantastic online resource. ★★★★★ www.bookofconcord.org/smallcatechism.html This is one of the websites that has the text of Luther’s Small Catechism. Contents of the catechism, if you aren’t familiar with it, are: Luther’s Preface, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, Confession, the Sacrament of the Altar, Daily Prayers, Table of Duties, and Christian questions with their answers. Possible Uses: A place to reference the catechism. This could also be seen as a devotional and historical resource. Rating: A good, if plain, website for reference to Luther’s Small Catechism. ★★★ All Webwatch reviews are for informational and resource purposes
only. The Evangelical Covenant Church does not endorse any
website, organization, or content. From time to time some of these
links will go dead or they will be sold. When we learn about this we
will take the link off. If you see a dead link please let us know. Copyright The Covenant Companion.
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