Month: January 2009

Politics & Economics

Is It Enough Yet?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

I suppose there are crazy things going on all the time, but there seems to be a concentration of them happening all at once. Every day brings news of more layoffs, and I wonder how many people will be unemployed before the spiral stops – and of course, I wonder if I will be among them. Meanwhile, more and more Ponzi schemes and other financial wrongdoing is being unearthed daily. Stewards of funds are being revealed as thieves, and countless reckless investors are finding out that the investments they gleefully thought were too good to be true, actually ...

Politics & Economics

Most Private Family Matters

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

Being not only the day after the day after President Obama’s inauguration, but also the anniversary of the dreadful Roe v. Wade decision, I was thinking quite a bit today about the abortion problem. Being well aware of his earlier statement to Planned Parenthood that could be interpreted to mean that the first thing he would do after obtaining the Presidential office would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, I’ve been warily eyeballing some news sources for the past couple days, waiting to see if the President picks up on the theme. Not that I think it...

Politics & Economics

Inaugural Symbolism & Real Power

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All the fawning that’s fit to publish… It’s been a rather surreal two days, focused around the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of these United States. The people around me all seemed to be grounded rather normally, but every time I’ve braved the elements and exposed myself to the mainstream media, it’s as if somebody (me? them?) has entered another world. I’ve stayed far away from TV for the most part, but I was walking through the living room last night while my wife had MSNBC playing, and I heard popular historian Ken Burns tell Keit...

Bible Study Tools

QuickVerse Bible Software Review: Searching

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This is the first installment in a series I plan to write, performing a side-by-side assessment of WORDsearch, Logos, QuickVerse, and Pradis. QuickVerse has two tools for searching Biblical text: an Analytical Greek search tool designed to work with a morphologically tagged Greek NT module, and a general search tool used for searching English language Bible, as well as all other books – including user-created books. The most recent versions of QV introduce a couple other specialized searching tools I’ll discuss below. The Search Dialog: The g...

Bible Study Tools

Reviewing Bible Study Software

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One of my main goals for this site when I launched it last year was to provide assessments and comparisons of some of the Bible Study programs on the market – assessments based on what the various programs allow users to do, and how well they support those things, rather than focusing on the books available in different libraries. I haven’t gotten very far to date, having started and stopped several times, and with course work looming on the horizon for me, my schedule is not going to be getting any looser. Given that, it seems like it’s now or never to ...

Church

More on Richard John Neuhaus

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I don’t often post just to provide links to content elsewhere on the web, but I’ll make an exception for this. The good folks over at First Things yesterday reposted a remarkable personal essay Fr. Richard John Neuhaus had published in the April 2002 edition of the magazine, on the matter of his conversion to Catholicism. It’s a powerful piece made all the more poignant by his recent passing – in fact, the hovering presence of his death really hammers home just how sound his thinking was. I had all I could do yesterday to resist spamming all my friends w...

Church

RJN: R.I.P.

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

The Catholic Church in America lost another of her intellectual giants today. The Rev. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus died this morning, at age 72. Of course, I never met the man, and I’m not sure I would have known what to say to him had I met him, but I feel as if I have lost a friend. An old acquaintance from my adolescence was buried this morning, and perhaps that makes me think a bit about mortality, yet this priest and writer whom I never met dies, and I feel a piece of me torn away. Surely, it is vain of me to cultivate these feelings – who ...

Blogging

Why MaybeToday?

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I was listening to a lecture by Peter Kreeft a while back, and he observed that time is the stuff of which life is made – time is life. People often say that time is money, but that’s an understatement. Kreeft is right: time is life. This isn’t meant to suggest that time is a metaphysical necessity, or that there can be no such thing as eternal life. Rather, it means that the life we each possess – our life – is ultimately a very precise allotment of time, and that each sunrise brings us one day closer to death. Time is really all we have, and the ...

Scripture

Magi From the East

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Being Epiphany, it’s time for my annual consideration of the story of the Magi. About 15 years ago, I was engaged in a series of discussions on various Biblical readings, and I came to see this story in a somewhat unusual light. Tradition takes this story as a harbinger of the universality of the salvation offered in Christ, seeing the magi as the first gentiles to come to Christ. It’s a powerful interpretation, and I certainly accept that it is how the Church reads the story, but I haven’t always been convinced that was Matthew’s original in...

Bible Study Tools

The HCSB 2nd Edition and the Tetragrammaton

Posted on by John W Gillis / 9 Comments

In between disasters and duties, I’ve been spending a bit more time looking at the new 2nd edition HCSB this week. Perhaps the most significant change from the first version is the greatly increased tendency to transliterate the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh), instead of following the standard practice among English translations of rendering it as LORD in small caps. Among major English translations, only the ASV (“Jehovah”) and the JB/NJB (“Yahweh”) have used a transliteration more than occasionally. Curiously, the HCSB does not transliterate consistently, as ...