Author: John W Gillis

Culture & Philosophy

We are now trying to cobble together a zombified version of the old mores

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Quote of the day for Sunday, September 23rd, 2018, from last Tuesday’s column at National Review by David French, Sex Crimes Must Be Criminalized: Sadly, it’s too late for generations of American women. We blew up the culture, replaced it with a form of sexual anarchy, and are now trying to cobble together a zombified version of the old mores, a skeletal version of the traditional morality that our nation’s elites used to scorn so heartily. Looking back, we can hardly imagine the sheer foolishness of our cultural endeavors. Looking at the present, ...

Misc

An Ode to My Old A-X40: Rust in Peace

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One of the things I determined to do after finishing school in the spring was to clean house – literally and figuratively. It’s proven to be a tall order, but the accumulated old stuff just has to go, unless it really serves a purpose. This house-cleaning campaign forced me to admit that it was finally time for my old JVC A-X40 stereo integrated amplifier to go. It had reached the point where it no longer output on the right channel at all, and the left channel was hit or miss, and producing output often required highly-skilled maintenance procedures lik...

Bible Study Tools

New Page Published, Listing Bible Study Resources for Catholics

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I’ve published a new page to my collection of articles on the Bible in English: Catholic Bible Study Resources: The Basics and a Bit Beyond. This is intended as a guide to available Bible study tools, in print and in electronic editions, to help my follow Catholics either get started in studying the Bible, or take a deeper dive into Scripture by employing the scholarship of reliable witnesses and guides.

Religion & Society

Gerry Dullea: May 24, 1943 – July 29, 2018

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My uncle Gerry Dullea died last Sunday night. He was 75. As is too often the case, it didn’t end well for Gerry. Details aside, he was breaking down all over the place. His body just disintegrated – in the literal sense of no longer functioning in an integral and integrated fashion. He’d been living alone since his wife died ten years ago, and had spent much of that time either ill or seriously ill. Gerry was pretty much a mess. I’ve lost ten uncles during my lifetime; Gerry was the last one. I feel differently about losing Gerry than I have about losing...

Ruminations

Mr. Garnett: I’m Sorry, and Thank You.

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My first year at Natick High School was 10th grade, beginning in September, 1975. I had an English teacher that year by the name of Mr. Garnett – Harry Garnett, as I would soon know him as. Not that I ever called Mr. Garnett by his given name; he was always Mr. Garnett in person. He dressed in the modestly dapper style that older public school teachers adopted in those days – the men especially. He wore glasses than sat low on his nose, so he could peer over the top of them out at the class. He was a bit heavy, in the usual spot, and had a full head of v...

Bible Study Tools

Wordsearch 12: Initial Experiences & Thoughts

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Lifeway released version 12 of Wordsearch last month. I had decided after the release of WORDsearch 11 (in 2015) that I had gone as far as I intended to in keeping up with this program, aside from maintaining access to some important resources I have only in CROSS format (most notably the NAC and Lenski Commentary series), but decided today that it was worth it, in the grand scheme of things, to drop another $40 into the investment to keep current with the feature set. I downloaded and installed it early this morning, and these are my initial thoughts. L...

Bible Study Tools

Goodbye to BibleWorks

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BibleWorks announced a couple days ago that they will no longer be selling Bible Study software as of June 15th. I found the news simultaneously surprising and not surprising. It was surprising given both the suddenness of the closure (which was probably wiser than dragging it out), and because of the recent arrangements with WORDsearch, where WORDsearch was producing some of their important resources (e.g. NICOT/NICNT) in a BibleWorks-compatible format and cross-licensing the resources across both platforms. It was not surprising insofar as it seemed in...

Scripture

The Holocaust, “holocausts”, and the NABRE

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Complaints about modern Biblical translations succumbing to “political correctness” are hardly uncommon. Most often, these revolve around the increasingly fraught usage of pronouns. However, sometimes the sentiments that inform the “PC” mindset direct the work of translation down the same path of evacuated meaning and self-defeat in surprising ways. In the “Preface to the Revised New American Old Testament”, the editors of the NABRE

Blogging

MaybeToday.org, 2.0

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After almost ten years of running this site on the original MaybeToday theme, one I cut my teeth on by modifying a free WordPress theme call “Ad Clerum”, MaybeToday.org has finally had a face lift. Working from a premium theme called “Graphy Pro”, I was able to adequately customize it and port the site to the new theme in a little more than a day, which is a far cry from the time and effort it took to bring the site up in 2008. Everything is cleaner and simpler this time, and I’ve jettisoned a lot of the visual noise that oc...