A Friend on the Trail, and other links

The posting of links does not constitute an endorsement of the sites linked, and not necessarily even agreement with the specific posts linked.

• A Friend on the Trail of Tears: How a Baptist Missionary Became a Cherokee -- “Evan Jones...Though largely forgotten today, the legacy of his labors through incredible turmoil and danger deserves a place among the annals of Baptist missionaries.”
• Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College -- “Today the average total cost of attending a private college, including living expenses, is about $58,000 a year...at the University of Michigan (a public university), tuition, fees, and expenses for out-of-state juniors and seniors total more than $80,000 a year.”
• Do the Bible’s Critics Use a Double Standard? -- “Comparing trends in Homeric and biblical studies, a historian asserts that critics of the Bible apply artificial criteria that Homeric scholars have long since repudiated.”
• Hand Carved Slate -- “An inanimate antique object of cold stone suddenly had a voice, and connections between mourning, monuments, and music were forged in this instant.”
• Gravestone Symbols from A to Z -- “When you were learning to read as a child, you probably learned the alphabet from A to Z. Likewise, learning gravestone symbols from A to Z will help you learn to ‘read’ a cemetery.”
• “How do I . . . ?” 10 Answers to Your BillionGraves Questions -- “Have you ever tried to find a gravestone in a large cemetery? One with tens of thousands of gravestones? If so, you know how time-consuming, and even frustrating, it can be.”
• It Still Reigns -- “To see oneself and one’s landscape so accurately and aesthetically rendered was life-changing—as it remains today: a book of the heart.”
• It’s Rocket Science (And So Much More) -- “In the predawn hours one Friday in May, a yellow school bus hurtles down U.S. Highway 281 with 19 students, one teacher and a lot of uncertainty.”
• Mississippi Baptist ministers to the Confederate Army during the Civil War -- “Like many of his neighbors in northeast Mississippi, he did not believe in slavery, yet he went to Corinth and enlisted in the Confederate Army.”
• Stone-carved graves are going extinct. A Somerville artist is bringing them back to life. -- “There are only a handful of stone carvers left in this country doing the work by hand in the traditional manner. The trade might not be completely ‘dead,’ but it’s certainly on life support.”
• Stones Over Bones: Carving a Deathshead -- “After a full year of approvals, sourcing the slate, tracing the photos, cutting the shapes, and transferring the design, I can't tell you how good it felt to finally cut into these.”
• Theology and the Great Tradition of English Bibles, by Cameron A. MacKenzie -- “When I was a young man, on two separate occasions my father surprised me with gifts. On the first occasion, he presented me with a copy of the Concordia Triglotta and on the second, with a facsimile of the first edition of the King James Bible (1611).”
• The Particular Baptists in Australia -- “Originally contrived as a place of convict settlement with little attention initially paid to its development, the established church never really was to occupy a position in the colony akin to that which it had enjoyed in England.”
• Why some retired clergy lose faith and leave church -- “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
• 95 Theses Against Modern Translations -- “One cannot overstate the importance of the translation and preservation of God’s Word, because God has placed His Word above His own name.”