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

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, we can’t easily comprehend the scale of the mess we’ve made. Looking forward? Perhaps there’s a better way.

But first, let’s discuss a bit of history. For centuries — for millennia — the crime of rape has rightly been defined as one of the worst violations of criminal law. The penalty for this crime, running across cultures and religions, has often been death. Indeed, the death penalty for rape was a hallmark of early-American criminal-justice systems. In short, while nations and regions may have long devalued women and violated the most basic commitments to equality, they have at least understood the basic truth that rape is a heinous, vicious crime.

Crime. Let’s dwell on that word for a minute. In the present era of alleged moral enlightenment, a terrible thing has happened. We stripped away moral prohibitions against extramarital sex, celebrated youthful experimentation, combined it with similar celebrations of drug and alcohol use — even at early ages — and then have been shocked — no, stunned — at the sheer amount of groping, grabbing, coercion, and assault.

French hits on several important points here, and is fundamentally right, but his assessment of American culture trying to cobble together a skeletal version of traditional morality I think overstates the case. This suddenly fashionable reconstruction is a skeletal version of proscriptions against merely a limited subset of the acts associated with modern sexual mores, acts well downstream of the fundamental acts of licentious moral abandonment which constitute the real meaning of the modern project. This “skeletal version” lacks not only fleshing out, it lacks self-reflection, it lacks moral seriousness; it is ultimately a dodge. The so-called #MeToo movement may succeed on its own terms, as in destroying the careers of (hopefully only) genuinely abusive men, and also in stroking the egos of (or “empowering”) women, but it will nonetheless leave society worse off than it was before on account of the acrimony, suspicion and mistrust it generates, primarily because of the sheer hypocrisy of defining sexual misconduct in such narrow and self-serving terms. If committing acts of violence against weak and vulnerable human beings for the sake of securing one’s own selfish sexual gratification is all of a sudden bad again, someone needs to alert the crusading defenders of the “right to abortion”, not to mention others whose violence is less physical than spiritual. It’s not much of a puzzle why #MeToo has become a fashionable moral panic, nor is it surprising that it has been most strongly embraced in the social circles where it has.

Of course, much of French’s point refers to the need to treat criminal acts as criminal acts, and he is hardly wrong about that, but even in regards to accomplishing that, I think society would need to move with caution at a time when incriminating terms are so widely deployed inconsistently and indiscriminately, and false accusations are so easily tossed around with near impunity. And that doesn’t even touch on the matter of the emotional fragility of moderns, and the problems that poses to promoting the discharging of civic duty in the reporting of crimes to the proper authorities.

The article is short, and worth a full read.

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

A-X40

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 like whacking the volume knob or balance slider. No amount of cleaning fluid spray was bringing this guy back. It was, simply put, all but fried.

I try not to get too attached to inanimate objects, but I have to admit to having a soft spot for this amplifier. It has been a really good soldier for me, serving me well, over and over again, for many years. It was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I purchased it from Tech HiFi on Rt 9 in Framingham 35 years ago, for $230, including sales tax. It did become a bit unreliable after a while, and I tried replacing it – more than once. But I was never again able to find an integrated amplifier (pre-amp and amp only, no radio) in a suitable price range. Although I’ve succumbed to radio listening from time to time, for the most part I’ve always despised it, and had no use for one, and so didn’t want a receiver. I also greatly appreciated the graphic equalizer, even just a 5-band one, which was a significant improvement over the typical Treble and Bass controls provided with most receivers. Nonetheless, I eventually tried to replace my A-X40 with at least two different receivers that I can recall. Not only did the old A-X40 sound better, it out-lived both of them. I don’t think devices like this get MTBF ratings, but if it did, I’m sure my A-X40 would have passed its projecting lifetime decades ago. It got many, many hours of use.

But everything has its day, and on a recent steamy Saturday, I loaded it into the Jeep with a pile of other electronics to be dropped off for recycle. It felt good to get rid of the junk, but it felt wrong to be throwing my trusty old A-X40 in the junk pile.

I guess I can also throw away the receipt now: the warranty expired 34 years ago.

JVC-AX40-Receipt

New Page Published, Listing Bible Study Resources for Catholics

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.bookcorner2009

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

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 any of the others: I’m grieving more deeply, even than I have for uncles I liked better than Gerry – and there were several. Somehow, I was closer to Gerry. It seemed like he was closer to immediate family, probably because he was a good bit younger than the other local uncles, didn’t get married until I was in high school, and never did have any children.

Gerry & Ervene in 1991He met his future wife Ervene while pursuing an MA at Lehigh University between 1965-1967, then went to Syracuse for a few years to earn a PhD, after which he moved to the Bangor area and taught English at the University of Maine at Orono. At Orono, Gerry became immersed in the world of organized competitive chess, writing a weekly chess column for the Bangor Daily News with fellow professor George Cunningham. He stayed at Orono until 1976, the year he and Ervene married, after which he joined her at Bloomsburg (PA) State College.

He only stayed at Bloomsburg for a year, however, before he left teaching, temporarily taking up cabinet making, and then taking on administrative positions with the United States Chess Federation in New Windsor, NY, serving as Executive Director from 1979-1987. It’s not clear to me what he did after that, but he seemingly bounced around in various business consulting roles. Gerry and Ervene kept two residences (Bloomsburg and New Windsor) until Ervene’s death, after which Gerry moved back to Bloomsburg.

Ervene had been a Shakespeare scholar and amateur pianist, and when she died, a “service” – as these things are tritely called – was held at the local Presbyterian church at which she had been a choir member. The service consisted of several hymns, some instrumental musical pieces, and half a dozen readings from Shakespeare.  Afterwards, her “ashes” – as these things are euphemistically called – were spread in her backyard garden. There will be no “service” for Gerry, per his own request, but his remains will likewise be spread in the backyard. There is no indication that any warning will be provided prospective purchasers of the property that a pair of pulverized skeletons occupy the topsoil. I can’t help but brood on the conviction that human beings deserve better than to be treated like so much compost in death, even when the deceased themselves never understood such treatment as a degradation.

Gerry must have been a pretty smart guy. I have no idea what his ranking was among American chess players, but he clearly committed a lot of mental energy attempting to master the game of strategy. But as both of us got older, it became clear to me that he suffered from the chronic hollowness of the modern intellectual elite, especially those in the academy. I’m sure he fancied himself an enthusiast for the life of the mind, but he had no use for, had no patience for, had no clue concerning the life of the spirit, apart from which the “life of the mind” is little more than a hollow triviality. After his passing, one of my cousins remembered him for his “awesome” comic book collection. And he spent his intellectual might wrapped up in the finer points of a board game. All the while, certain members of my family will remember him primarily for his very audible remark during my sister Mary’s funeral Mass, at the conclusion of the deacon’s homily, lamenting what a bag of pointless wind he’d just been subjected to. Gerry was not above playing the grown fool.

Fool is a harsh word, and perhaps one unsuited for attribution to the deceased, or at least to the recently deceased, but it’s not wrong: Scripture tells us, more than once, that “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God'”. I think that proverb has a lot to do with my lingering sadness over Gerry’s death. I don’t buy the popular Disney-esque vision, so prevalent among modern people concerning death and death’s ramifications, that “they all lived happily ever after”. I don’t believe for a minute that death is but a mere trifling, through which everyone passes to reach some utopian soiree. Whatever happens at death, it entails a violence that rips apart the corporeal self from the life – or soul – which animates it. This terminal event cannot possibly be as trivial and inconsequential as so many Disney-fied, sentimental moderns want to believe. Nor do I believe the nihilist materialism embraced by most of the rest of moderns, by guys like Gerry, with its obliviousness to the fundamentally spiritual character of the human person. I believe, rather, in the resurrection prefigured in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, as witnessed to by his earthly disciples from Easter morning down to this day. But that means I believe in a resurrection, before all else, to judgment.

That is to say that I believe in justice, that I believe in the ultimate triumph of the truth: Magna est veritas, et prevalebit. In the 5th chapter of the Gospel of St John, Jesus famously contrasts the resurrection of life with the resurrection of judgment, but this does not imply that the resurrection of life is independent of judgment, for He is contrasting the fates of those who have done good with those who have done evil, deeds which can and must be judged in the pure light of the consuming fire of truth. So, I am not using the term resurrection to judgment as a contrast to the resurrection of life, but as a reference to the judgment that illuminates the character of an individual’s resurrected state in the light of truth, a light which strips away all illusion and deceit, all pretense and conceit. In that light of truth, God will judge the secret thoughts of all (Rom 2:16), and every careless word uttered will be made to be accounted for (Mt 12:36), and at that time, from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required (Lk 12:46). We will all be judged.

But in using the term resurrection to judgment, I also intended to imply that I understand human beings to be corporeal beings, as is clearly implied in the idea of resurrection. We are not spirits trapped in material bodies which we dispense of at death in order to advance to an ethereal utopia. Rather, we are corporeal beings animated by souls belonging not only to the material order, but belonging also to the order of intellection and willing, to the order of meaning and purpose, the spiritual order, the order of truth and love. This belonging is wrought in the imago Dei that differentiates each of us as persons, brought about in the divine act of our creation at the moment of our conception, of our coming into being in the created order as unique beings, belonging to both the material and spiritual orders of creation. Our bodies are very much constituent aspects of our being, and whatever we do with – or to – our bodies, we do to ourselves. Of course, that which we do with or to our minds we likewise do to ourselves, and decisively so, but to speak of a resurrection is to point quite specifically at the unambiguously corporeal.

What the resurrection to life promises is not freedom from the body, but the reintegration of the human being’s corporeal and spiritual natures, as a nullifier of death. In the resurrected Christ, we see attestation to a resurrected body of a new and very different sort, to be sure, but to a body nonetheless: to a body free from the ravishes and even the limitations of the fallen world, not because it is free from matter, but because it is free from sin and the consequences of sin, which is so because the animating soul – the spirit – is, like Christ’s, bound up with God in deep and abiding and transformative communion. The promise of the resurrection is the promise of a fully human life – body and soul – free from the alienation from God wrought by sin – both personal and original – and thus free to be continually, eternally, made perfect in knowledge: the knowledge of truth, and the knowledge of love.

That brings us back to the triumph of truth, to a resurrection to judgment, and to the facile utopianism of modern day Gnostics and Pelagians. Confronted with the idea of a judgmental God, modern re-inventors of ancient heresies recoil in horror, aghast at the thought that anybody – let alone God – might judge them to be anything less than good enough. Yet, this is both to lack proper self-discernment, and to completely misunderstand the judgment of God. Two simple truths need to be elucidated here. The first is that God’s judgment, or justice, is precisely that which sets things right, that which vindicates the oppressed, which establishes righteousness in the glorious freedom of absolute truth, which is indeed righteousness itself. It is that very truth which, in being known, makes us free (Jn 8:32). But God’s justice is not anything other than the consuming fire of truth (Dt 4:24).

The second truth is that the condition of mankind is such that, in the absence of sanctifying grace, the human being is alienated from God. That is a simple and self-evident fact, which death both attests to and punctuates. The true measure of how “good” somebody might be is not a measure to be taken against a scale of human values, or against a laundry list of sanctioned and/or censured moral behaviors – never mind to be measured against the deceptive conceits of self-regard. No, the true measure of one’s goodness is the measure of how godly one is, simply because God alone is good. He is goodness itself. And His goodness, or sanctity, or holiness, is exactly that which accomplishes, in those docile to the prompting of His grace, that very closeness to God in which, through God’s own free gift of Self, the human person transcends the alienation from God inherent in the human situation, and enters into the communion with God which the resurrection of life promises to complete and fulfill. Apart from God, there is no “life after death”, there is only apartness from God, who, Incarnate, declared: “I am the resurrection and the life” (Jn 11:25). Apartness from God, or alienation from God, is not any kind of everlasting soiree, but is ultimately an incomparable – and even incomprehensible – poverty and privation. It is what Scripture calls the second death.

It seems to be true that not everybody wants to be close to God. One might argue that, at some level, the desire to be close to God does indeed exist in all persons, and perhaps it does, but it seems unarguable that a conflicting desire to be far from God, even to be rid of God – even to destroy or overthrow God – sometimes prevails in the wills of men and women. It is not possible to know to what extent these conflicting desires can coexist, or to know what finally constitutes a fundamental disposition for or against God, but it again seems unarguable that it is possible for such a fundamental disposition against God to be made, and it is likewise unarguable that God would respect the freedom of the individual person to make such a choice. God does not force Himself on anyone. He offers Himself in love; He does not coerce. And thus it is possible, in rejecting God, to fundamentally refuse the communion with God which constitutes the resurrection of life, which is ultimately the only true “life after death”. That rejection of the very basis of the resurrection of life necessarily and inescapably leaves the individual to face what Jesus referred to as the resurrection of judgment, or as many English translations have it, the resurrection of condemnation. This is – and should be – a sobering consideration. It is scandalous that so many today belittle the menace of condemnation as being beneath their consideration. That could prove foolish.

I have no way of knowing the state of my uncle Gerry’s soul. It’s entirely possible that praying for him is a complete waste of time as far as it goes for him. I think that haunting possibility is much of the reason for the depth of my continuing sadness at Gerry’s death. Yet, there is no way for me to know, and furthermore, I myself am very much in need of the increase in charity that a commitment to intercede for Gerry entails, so I will certainly continue to pray for him, and will even have a Mass offered for him – as unlikely it might be that he would have sought such a thing in his lifetime. His time is up now, and he is either locked into a permanent alienation from all that is true, good, and beautiful, or he is coming to grips with his failures, great and small, and redressing them. The idea that he might be joining the angels and saints in heaven today, praising and worshipping the thrice-holy God, seems absurd. But nothing permits anyone from declaring that it could never be. That dialog is strictly between God and Gerry. But it sure looks like checkmate for Gerdull, and that is depressing.

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

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 very grey hair, cropped in a typical men’s cut. He struck me as refined, and even perhaps a bit fussy and stuffy, and not particularly intimidating.

I can’t be sure that I had him for English that entire year, but probably did, and I certainly had him during Spring semester. That sophomore year was a brutal year for me, even if it was less gruesome than the preceding one or two had been. I was in school most days, at least physically, but I was seriously alienated from the world around me, and was seemingly incapable of making a good decision. If asked at the time, I would have asserted that I was an atheist. My life reflected an impoverished ignorance of the reality of goodness, of holiness. And I looked the part: attired in boy-sized knockoffs of the uniform garb of post-radical delinquents, while weighing in at no more than 120 lbs., soaking wet, with hair so long I was not infrequently mistaken for a girl.

There wasn’t much of reality that I was open to embracing at that time, but there were two sparks emanating from the realm of beauty that were persistently penetrating my consciousness: an appreciation for literature, which was largely at that time focused on science fiction, and a new-found appreciation for artful music, specifically a budding encounter with the contemporary music of Yes. Mr. Garnett had his students keep journals of their thoughts, which he would periodically review for cogency and literary merit. He was always kind and encouraging in his comments on my journal, and later told me that he was impressed with my writing. I thought my scribblings had been heavily influenced by the literature I was encountering in my reading and listening – to the point of mimesis – but he shrugged that off, and told me that I wrote with a genuine writer’s voice, and strongly encouraged me to pursue writing more broadly. His words were kind and uplifting, providing me a rare glimpse of hope and the possibility of meaning to life, given in an environment where my own insolence put me constantly at odds with authority figures, especially the school administration.

I entered the first of my two senior years under an academic repair plan constructed over the previous summer by myself, my parents, and the school principal, Mr. Rosen. It was a two-year plan designed to allow me to make up for the many credits I’d lost due to failing classes – mostly during sophomore year. About half the credits I would earn over the ensuing two years would come from completion of a work-study arrangement that allowed me to get high school course credit for going to work at 1:00 every day. I was excelling at work, unlike at school, and I was happy for the steady paycheck, especially under an arrangement that often left my evenings free. But beyond being deficient in credits, my academic status was also pretty severely deficient in what was called merits, which amounted to a currency measuring behavioral compliance. A student came into the school with 100 merits, and, in order to graduate, needed to either have retained all 100 merits, or have found a way to make up for any that were lost due to the issuance of demerits. I’d had my share of demerits.

Into this void stepped my old sophomore English teacher – now head of the English department – Mr. Garnett. He had approached Mr. Rosen and offered to employ me as an office gopher during a pair of study hall periods every week, in return for granting me sufficient merits to compensate for my earlier transgressions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this simple act of goodwill on Mr. Garnett’s part saved my high school career, and in doing so quite possibly saved my life from serious ruin. There seemed to be no one else at that school offering to help me at that point, not on their own initiative at any rate, and I was far too obstinate to go begging for the help I needed. Had Mr. Garnett not pulled me from the rubble of my foolishness, I would have had no real prospect of graduating, and cannot imagine I would have stayed the course for very long in such a state of futility.

I likely would have fallen away from school, and deeper into the self-destructive, deviant culture I had embraced since early adolescence. I very well could have ended up dead by my early twenties, as several of my teenage acquaintances did. Instead, I graduated high school, a year late, in June of 1979. Eight months later, I married my wife Joyce, whom I’d met in a writing course during my final year of school, which was taught by a teacher Mr. Garnett had arranged for me to study under the year before, confident that Dr. Fred Ganong’s intellectual vitality and no-nonsense demeanor would be a good fit for my needs. Forty years later, those two men remain among the most powerful positive influences in my life, and the gratitude I owe them, especially to Mr. Garnett, is immense.

Over the years, I have often thought of Mr. Garnett, and of how indebted I am to him. On numerous occasions, I contemplated writing him a thank-you letter, and dropping it off with the Natick School Department, which surely would have been able to forward it to him for me. But I never wrote it. The thought crossed my mind again earlier this week, when a colleague at work (half-?) jokingly asked me to go easy on her initial draft of an operating procedure when she circulated it for review, a request which reminded me of comments Dr. Ganong had relayed to me back in 1978, relating to my penchant for double-barrel contributions during peer review exercises in a writing class. Feeling nostalgic, I did a Google search for Harry Garnett, and found his obituary.

For at least the past 25 years, I’ve felt the duty to acknowledge Mr. Garnett’s kindness toward me, and to express my gratitude to him. To my great shame, I never wrote a letter. I guess this is that letter.

Harry Garnett died in a Missouri nursing facility on February 26th, 2015, at age 89. The only surviving family appears to be a brother-in-law and a niece, both in Missouri. Harry’s wife Thelma had died in Framingham in 2008, at age 80. They appear to have had no children. This guy I had considered a little soft in the middle turns out to have been a retired World War II U. S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Aerial Gunner, who’d fought in campaigns at Normandy, northern France, and the Rhineland. So, while he was a prim and proper gentleman on the outside, he was a battle-hardened man on the inside, but one with a soft heart for a needy, struggling kid, who salutes him today, and thanks God for all the good Harry did in the world. And I am so sorry I didn’t tell Mr. Garnett twenty years ago how grateful I am for all the good he did in this kid’s life.

HarryGarnett1979

Eternal rest, grant unto him O Lord
and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May he rest in peace. Amen.

Wordsearch 12: Initial Experiences & Thoughts

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.

Like the previous release, the new engine is available only at a cost, marketed at a $50 “regular price”, but available for $40 as a “sale price”. It is being marketed as a “base package”, bundled with 50 books, many (but not all) of which are counted among the 200+ books already available for $0. Perhaps over-optimistically billed as “The premier biblical study tool for preachers and teachers”, this release lists five “New!” features or enhancements:

  • Lexicon Explorer
  • OneDrive integration
  • Sermon Building enhancements
  • Cloud Backup enhancement (scheduling)
  • “Customizable Toolbar”

After completing the online purchase, I was provided a link to download either a Mac or Windows version, and the Windows link downloaded version 12.0.0.38 (5/23/2018), which installed without incident on my Win10 laptop, on which I was logged on with elevated privileges. The installer subsequently kicked off an upgrade module, which found my WS11 installation, and offered to import its settings for a smooth transition to the new version. However, the imported choked on an open file, because I had version 11 running at the time. Perhaps characteristically, the importer just threw an error message on the screen and appeared to stop processing. It gave no status indication, and did not restart when I eventually closed it.

There was no apparent option to run it again from inside the WS12 application, so I closed it out and found the necessary executable (UpgradeToWS12.exe) in C:\Program Files (x86)\Wordsearch 12. The PC-savvy reader will notice that this installed as a 32-bit application (x86), which is rather surprising at this point, since 64-bit architecture has been thoroughly mainstream for a decade now, and OS support for 32-bit apps is starting to decay (e.g. iOS 11 does not support 32-bit apps). ws12stop1With my older version now properly closed out, the UpgradetoWS12 program completed successfully. However, another error was encountered while setting the Text Size in the Settings Helper Wizard – an error I could reproduce at will by attempting to increase the text size setting until I started using a new Desktop.

That the marketing team could only find five things to boast about as “New!” in this release suggests that not much has changed since version 11, and that is a pretty accurate assessment, as far as I have been able to discern during several hours of testing.

The “New!” Customizable Toolbar is virtually identical to the Toolbar in version 11, which was also touted as a “New!” enhancement at its release. Customizations are still limited to enabling/disabling display of the various buttons. They cannot be re-arranged, nor can you define a button for a function not listed among the default buttons. The Notestacks and the  Sermons & Illustrations buttons are now side-by-side – instead of being buried behind each other, as they bizarrely were in WS11 – but that seems more like a correction than an improvement. The ordering of the buttons makes a little more sense in this version, but counting this as “New!” in the marketing material seems overstated at best.

The backup enhancements include the ability to schedule regular, automatic backups of User Data (to either your local PC or to Wordsearch cloud storage), as well as the ability to view a list of cloud backups, and to delete unwanted ones. This is a useful addition to the function, but there are other vendors out there that just automatically replicate User Data to their cloud, and make it available across not just devices but platforms – a notorious limitation of Wordsearch that does not appear mitigated in this latest version.

The Sermons & Illustrations tool in version 12 has been tweaked in several ways to make it more useful. Several templates have been created to pre-populate a document with a basic sermon outline following one of eight rather standard formats. It’s debatable how much value that provides your average preacher, but some may find if helpful, and it seems like a nice enough touch. More importantly, several other document “Types” or classifications have been added to the available type index, inviting users to use the tool’s organizing metadata functionality for documents beyond sermons and illustrations (other selectable categories now include Papers, Lessons, and Other). While the change is actually little more than cosmetic, it’s a great idea for encouraging users to get more value out of one the the application’s better features. Entries in the tool’s main window can now also be sorted by Date Used. Most importantly, the Tags from the earlier versions of this tool have been replaced by the Categories mechanism in the Notestacks tool, and the usage is integrated between the two tools (even though they are still called Tags instead of Categories in the Sermons & Illustrations window, for some reason. This makes documents a bit kludgier to tag with categories than they were in this tool before, but the benefits of having a system both more orderly than before and integrated with Notestacks notes will easily outweigh the slight inconvenience.

The new OneDrive integration is a bit of an odd duck. It sounds like a great idea, but is implemented weirdly. The New Features Overview on the Wordsearch Bible website claims that you can publish your documents to OneDrive, but this is clearly not the case. wsODAlthough you can use the tool to move files around within your OneDrive folder, there is no way to save, move, or copy Wordsearch files into or out of OneDrive using the tool featured on the new WS12 toolbar. The closest you can get is to create a 0-byte file using the dialog box’s “New…” button (which would be similar to creating a file on a Unix system by “touch”ing it, something likely pretty foreign to your average Bible Study software user), and then opening the file in Wordsearch’s Word Processor, and editing it by adding your content. HTML files that are already in your OneDrive can be opened, edited, and saved (with the same name, only) from within Wordsearch, but that is the extent of available functionality. Another oddity is that you have to explicitly re-establish the connection to OneDrive every time you restart the application, despite the fact that it recognizes your current logon status and authenticates without asking for credentials. What is perhaps even more mystifying about this new feature is that genuine OneDrive integration for WS documents has been available all along as an option, achieved by defining the local OneDrive folder as the location “My Documents are loaded from:” in the “Startup and Paths” tab in Program Settings – doing this would be an all-or-nothing proposition in terms of where your Wordsearch documents lived, but your OneDrive files (or a subdirectory of OneDrive files) would be fully integrated into Wordsearch (including Search), which the new WS12 solution does not do.

The final new feature is the brand new Lexicon Explorer, which is a pretty useful if limited tool. It is instantiated by double-clicking a Greek or Hebrew word in a text, which triggers the Explorer window to launch, displaying copies of the relevant content of all the assigned lexicons with entries for the word you double-clicked (I really think a right-click option would have been better, but that would be a minor quibble if it weren’t for the general under-use of right-click context menus in Wordsearch). When I first fired it up, the default settings had all my resources with Greek or Hebrew word indexes assigned to the Explorer window. The dialog for tweaking and ordering the list to taste is simple and well-placed. Depending on the word looked up and the resources assigned to the window, the results can be a bit overwhelming for a window which is effectively just an HTML copy of all the combined pages from the various lexical resources. Some lexical resources, such as Barclay Newman’s Lexicon, are not good fits for this tool. The Lexicon Explorer window would be more effective if the entries were separated from each other by collapsible header bars, preferable containing links to the original resources. Nonetheless, this window is a nice addition, and serves well enough as a poor man’s rendition of the word study tools provided by the premier Bible study tool software vendors.

One final and perhaps trivial change I noted: Lifeway seems to have dropped the long-standing (and to me annoying) product name/logo capitalization practice (WORDsearch) in favor of a cleaner looking name using only an initial capital, followed by either lowercase or small-cap letters (Wordsearch). It’s about time. Now if they can just work on dotting their interface i’s and crossing their technical t’s: As I was trying to clarify some intended functionality, I went to the Help menu and selected Wordsearch Help, which unfortunately – but not entirely surprisingly, gave me this:

WS12-Helpless

Update: Two days later, the Wordsearch 12 Help page is still AWOL. How do you let that happen?

Goodbye to BibleWorks

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 inevitable that the company was not going to be sustainable, in the face of high-quality competition from Logos and Accordance, without being able to offer significant secondary resources (e.g. commentaries) to integrate into the study platform. Not every Bible Study software user is a translator, and despite the renowned superiority of their primary search & exegetical tools, the population of their ideal customer profile is just too small – and the other platforms have largely caught up anyway. Hence, their stated warnings about the inevitable obsolescence of proprietary ebook formats has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I was very much attracted to Hermeneutica, as it was called at the time, when I first started looking to get into computer-based Bible Study back in the early 1990s. It was just too expensive for me at the time. I passed on purchasing from Logos Research Systems for the same reason, and ended up buying a DOS-based package from WORDsearch that I found marked down at a CBD warehouse sale.

Over the ensuing quarter-century, I have often been tempted to switch to the BibleWorks platform, but have always resisted the relatively high entry price. I ended up spending as much money on the inferior WORDsearch platform, and much more money than that on the comparable Logos platform, so at this point BibleWorks looks to me like it would have been a bargain. Oh, well. Until the 15th, BibleWorks 10 is being sold at effectively half-price. Then you’re on your own with it.

The Holocaust, “holocausts”, and the NABRE

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 make their apology for producing yet another Bible translation/revision following the usual reasoning: new manuscript discovery, linguistic advances in the study of ancient tongues, and changes in modern vocabulary. As an example of cultural changes bearing upon modern vocabulary usage, they observe that: “the term ‘holocaust’ is now normally reserved for the sacrilegious attempt to destroy the Jewish people by the Third Reich.”

As a result, comparison of the 2010 NABRE Old Testament text with the 1970 original NAB Old Testament shows that the while the 1970 translation used the English word “holocaust” 295 times, the 2010 OT revision uses it exactly once – in Psalm 40:7, in a passage quoted twice in chapter 10 of Hebrews, where both the 1970 NAB and 1986 revised NAB New Testament translations had rendered the Greek term ???????????? (holokautomata) as “holocausts”.

There is clearly a kind of well-meaning neurosis behind this idea to suppress the term “holocaust”, out of deference to the “PC” impulse and its characteristic fear of offending somebody’s sensitive feelings, or even of illegitimately “appropriating” some concept which allegedly “belongs” to a different group’s “experience”. But well-meaning or not, this verbal evasion by the NABRE translators actually works to conceal the very meaning of the allegedly “reserved” usage of the term, obscuring the sacrilegious aspect which the term had specifically been chosen to invoke, and thus rendering their verbal deference vain and self-defeating.

While it may be commendable, in respect to the singularity of the event, to avoid copy-cat usage of the term “holocaust” in reference to other trials or catastrophes, removing the original referent connotation from public usage just facilitates ignorance – which is about the last the last thing we need. However, removing it from the Bible just misses the point altogether.

Precisely in order to place the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in the resulting context, the 20th century use of the term “holocaust” to refer to what the Jews call the Shoah was very clearly intended to invoke the Biblical meaning of the word “holocaust”: a complete sacrifice of the victim by fire on the altar. Thus, ironically, removing the word from the English Bible de-contextualizes the word in its reference and application to the Shoah, stripping it of the very meaning intended, breaking the word’s linking of the modern atrocity to the word’s Biblical roots.

What will surely happen, once nobody knows this word as a Biblical term referring to sacrifice, is that the term will inevitably come to be understood by rising generations as something akin to a brand name for an event, a name that will eventually carry no more internal meaning than the gibberish neologisms that pollute the letterheads of modern corporations. The NABRE translators fancy themselves treating the word with some kind of reverently unique sacrality, but in alienating it from the English Bible, they end up historically and theologically alienating it from the history of the Jews, and of salvation history as a whole.

Ironically, the 1970 New American Bible was the only major modern English translation that used the word. It had been used in the Douay-Challoner tradition to translate the cognate term in the Latin Vulgate (holocaustum), which itself had a cognate in Greek that had been used in the LXX (holokautoma). But, as far as I can discern, none of the many Bibles based on the Masoretic text for the Old Testament used the word.

In other words, it was precisely the Catholic Biblical tradition that provided the word “holocaust” to the English language to begin with, and which provided the context for the word’s meaning in relation to the Shoah. That heritage has been abandoned by the Catholic Biblical Association in the NABRE. In its place, they have substituted the expression “burnt offering,” a perfectly good one, even if lacking somewhat in intensity. That rendering mimics scores of Protestant translations over the centuries, and even Orthodox translations from the LXX, but is otherwise not particularly compelling.

If the word had never been used last century to relate the Nazi savagery toward the Jews to the history of Biblical sacrifice, there would be no particular reason not to drop the Latinism from current usage. But precisely because that link now exists in the modern cultural context, it seems an affront to good translation to intentionally obscure that link. How are future generations supposed to remember the meaning of “the Holocaust” if the word itself is reduced in its signification to a kind of culturally disconnected label or “brand name”? Nominalism wins again.

MaybeToday.org, 2.0

MaybeToday.org 1.0 Theme
MaybeToday.org 1.0 Theme

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 occupied the sidebars in the earlier rendition. I don’t think I’ll miss much of it.

Although the blog has been largely dormant for about four years, the reference material relating to Catholic Bibles has been updated and somewhat fleshed out, and as I find myself (hopefully) only about six months from finishing my graduate work at Franciscan University, I have some realistic confidence that the site might soon begin to flourish a bit. It feels great to get the presentation cleaned up and modernized.