Introduction

Welcome to Eric Pement's home page. I'm a student at North Park Theological Seminary, at North Park's School of Business and Nonprofit Management, and I also work full-time at Moody Bible Institute. The navigation bar at the left indicates some of my interests and computer-type things I'd like to make available to others.

The picture of myself and my family on the left was taken in November 2005. Seated are myself and my daughter Lorelei. Standing behind us are my oldest daughter Lavinia (now a brilliant sophomore at NIU), my wife of 24 years Barbara, and Lorelei's twin brother John. John and Lorelei are both sophomores at Von Steuben high school.

Besides going to school, working at web stuff, and raising a family, I'm interested in learning more about God's Word and communicating thoughtfully with people who have a different worldview. From time to time, I'll post some musings on two blogs, located at http://unscriptedremarks.blogspot.com and at http://myspace.com/thinkthrough. I also support and work for a couple of ministries I highly respect:

Truly, I give thanks for whatever good I am or have accomplished to Jesus Christ, who saved me from a wasted life of self-absorption and aimlessness. He gave me a new life through the power of His Spirit, and—I firmly believe—He will one day return to claim this world He created and paid for. Like Bob Dylan sang in Slow Train Comin', "He's got plans of His own, to set up His throne, when He returns."

The older I get, the more I realize how transitory this life is, and as much as I love math and tricky little computer programs, I really want you to understand this first and most of all:

There is a living God who loves you, regardless of what you've done or the mess you've made of your life. All of us alike are sinners, and all of us have a Savior, Jesus Christ, who died in your place and rose from the dead, proving that your sin was cancelled by His blood and that He has power over death itself. Through Him we can have a fresh start, a new beginning, a new heart and eternal life with the Father. For more details, you may write me for a longer answer.

My wife's testimony of how she came to know the Lord is here. Check back on this page from time to time, because I plan to add more pages on Christianity, the Bible, the whys of the Christian faith, and more computer-related stuff.

Hebrew Fonts

I took 2 semesters of Hebrew under Dr. James Bruckner, and told my classmates I would locate some free Hebrew fonts for their papers and study. I've also located a page offsite that has the Hebrew verb paradigms in standard and in two-color format. If you have a two-color printer, the prefixes and suffixes are printed in red, which makes recognizing the form of the verb so much easer. And if you ever need to do a finished paper, I have some free Hebrew fonts and Greek fonts, as well.

Link Bible verses

One of my biggest Perl projects recently was the creation of a Perl script to automatically generate links to Bible passages within a file of plaintext or pre-written HTML (or PHP or whatever). Biblical passages can be written or abbreviated in dozens of different ways, such as "1Jn 5:12" or "I John 5:12", and they may take a complex system of references as well: "John 3:3, 5, 7-8, 16; 8:28; 10:8-10" The trick was not only to recognize also when passages stop, but also to describe how to recognize when they may be continued on separate lines. The script also offers to link other formats which people often want hyperlinked, such as "chapter 4", "vv. 7-12", "cf. 14:6" and so forth.

This was originally a script that I designed at Moody Bible Institute, where I am currently employed (besides attending North Park Seminary). However, I think the script deserves a wider audience, so if you have a task of generating hypertext references to biblical passages, this will probably do the trick for you. It's pretty sizable (about 1500 lines), so this isn't a brief script by any means. You may want to read the embedded technical details first, and if you want to download it, here it is . The current version of this script is version 1.27.

Other stuff

You'll find a few pages on software tools, text editing, sed, awk, batch files, 4DOS, HTML, and things related to text editing and word processing because I was sysop of the JPUSA BBS for six years, and was executive editor and general tech support for Cornerstone magazine before coming to North Park.

There is also an obligatory page of miscellaneous links to items or info or programs I find useful and interesting.

If you came here looking for something, I hope you find what you're looking for. If you were just mindlessly surfing (as I tend to do, against my better judgment on occasion), then I hope you stumbled across something new and stimulating. If you have feedback or comments, feel free to e-mail me.

Thanks for visiting. God bless you!

These pages created with HTML Beauty, GNU Emacs, and Servant Salamander. Icons courtesy of Qbullets .
Last modified: Saturday, Dec. 3, 2005