Bible Study Tools

Logos Makes Sermon File Addin Available for Free

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Logos is making their Sermon File Addin available for free in October, as they celebrate Pastor Appreciation Month. There are also discounts available for other products by using the discount code PAM2008.

The Sermon File Addin is an interesting tool (usually sells for $60, if I remember right) that basically allows the user to make mini Libronix books out of their sermon files, and then tag them for easy and effective cataloging. This is one of the areas where computer-based study systems really outshine paper-based models, and I’m delighted to see Logos making this tool available for free (even temporarily). If you own a Logos package (or another Libronix-based package, such as Nelson’s eBible), by all means grab this while you can.

This module was highly requested by Logos users, and I know people on other Bible Study platforms request similar functionality often. It really is important for these programs to focus on the fact that people generally use them to produce output continually over time, and that the ability to interact with that body of output from within the program as time goes on makes them far more valuable. I think there are some weaknesses in the Logos implementation of this, but I’m not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth; this is a great tool to have integrated into a computer-based Bible Study environment.

Ruminations

The Feast of Saint Jerome

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The feast of Saint Jerome is always a special day for me. Perhaps it is because he was such an unsaintly saint. It’s tough to read much of his writings because of his cantankerous personality, but there have truly been few more brilliant men that have populated the planet. Of course, he’s appreciated most for his work in translating the Scriptures into a single book that could be read by any literate person in the Western world (and understood by all). It’s astonishing, given the frenetic pace of publication of vernacular translations of the Bible over the past 100 years, that Jerome’s Vulgate translation effectively served as the official (de jure, or mostly de facto) version of the Scriptures for roughly 1,500 years. What a great gift this guy was to the Church – and how strangely inspirational to see politeness not overly regarded in the search for truth!

Ruminations

The Great Gig in the Sky

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Pink Floyd keyboardist and co-founder Richard Wright died Monday at his home. He was 65. Rock stars die all the time, and I never really knew anything about this quiet guy, but news of Wright’s death set me to reflecting quite a bit yesterday on my youth, on the role of pop music in the lives of youth, and on the fate of those whose lives turn them into rock stars.

I hope the title of this post isn’t overly corny – and I’m sure I’m not the only one to whom it will occur to use it. It refers, of course, to the title of what is my favorite song from Pink Floyd’s landmark 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon – a song Wright wrote, or possibly co-wrote with Roger Waters. Like all Floyd music, it is tortured to a point that approaches despair. And I had to wonder today if Wright ever found an answer to the angst-ridden but cynical cries for justice, peace –and just plain sanity- that comprised so much of the music that defined his professional life. Even while acknowledging that Roger Waters was the primary architect of the eventual Pink Floyd milieu, both musically and lyrically, it would seem impossible to separate any of the members from the whole.

For that matter, it’s hard to picture Wright (and others like him) apart even from the larger community of commodities we call rock stars. For all the glamour and magnetic appeal these characters have to adolescent minds, it’s not a pretty sight when you peel back the thrill. There is no hope in rock culture: it promises a quick fix in some form of indulgence (for the going price, of course), but it cannot offer hope, because it cannot be open to the future; it cannot be open to life. Hence, the prevalence of drugs, fornication, and contempt for roots (i.e. tradition). Rock culture struggles to build its own tradition – a kind of “history” that spans little more than 50 years – but it doesn’t really know how to grow up, have children, bury parents, nurture wisdom. It’s hard to overstate how important deep roots are to true flowering. Yet rock “culture” encourages kids to envision their roots in rebellion, which is the very death of culture.

I was not a particularly big Pink Floyd fan as a teen (I actually listened to them more later on). Although I was, of course, mesmerized by Dark Side of the Moon – as the whole world seemingly was. I liked the two follow-on albums, Wish You Were Here and Animals, I just wasn’t wild about them, like so many were. I also never liked the early work (although Meddle is OK), and I could never understand the appeal of The Wall – an album that, even from my youth, I’ve always thought was the epitome of whining self-indulgence and overbearing melodrama. There are a few good songs, but they are surrounded by much too much drivel. Dark Side, however, was a piece apart. Just the fact that it spent more than 14 years on the Billboard charts is mind-boggling – occupying, as it does, a world of faddish impatience in which yesterday’s must-have style is today’s trendy object of scorn.

My own engagement with Pink Floyd began in a manner quite befitting the spirit of the psychedelic world the band embodied in 1973. Unlike so many events of that period, I remember this one clearly, as I must have understood at some level, even at the time, what a cad I was.

I was 12 or 13 years old when I decided I wanted a copy of this new album, which had already quickly become a signature of the age, and I was by then fully entrenched in the lawless and immoral underbelly of the so-called counterculture – despite my tender age. My bicycle at the time was a black Schwinn I’d inherited from my older brother, which had an aluminum basket on the handlebars for cargo. I rode the bike to the Natick Mall after dark, and stole a copy of the album from one of the stores. I’d left the bike just outside the door. I slid the album under my coat, headed out the door, hopped on the bike, and started pedaling down Speen Street toward home – even pulling the album out of my coat to admire it along the way.

But something happened during the ride, and when I got back home, I realized that I no longer had the album. It must have bounced out of the basket somewhere on Speen Street. I was furious. I had stolen it fair and square, and considered it cosmically unjust that I now had to go back to the store and steal it again, greatly increasing my risk of getting caught.

So I got on the bike again, and pedaled back up Speen Street – carefully retracing my route in the vain hope of finding “my” album. I never did. Instead, I stole a second copy that night – the same way I had stolen the first – but I held this one in my hand the entire way home, and then played it in my black light illuminated bedroom. Believe it or not, I still felt gypped by fate for losing the first copy.

I share this story not to make it sound funny, but because it calls for a certain grieving in my heart, more than the passing of Richard Wright does. The memory – not so much of my actions, as of my unfathomable self-righteousness – stands as a sentinel in my conscience, always ready to mock any attempts to justify myself, while also providing a quiet witness to the danger of being glib or forgetful about the human potential for being blinded to truth by some kind of perverse and self-serving ethics.

I bought that album eventually – some years later – and I played it a couple times yesterday, raising a mental toast to Rick Wright as I listened. Now he really gets to play The Great Gig in the Sky – though what that means to him, I surely cannot say. I can say that he surely drank deeply from a poison cup I know all too well, and that the darkness which streams forth from it is a formidable enemy for any man. The end can come so quickly, and so easily find us hiding from the light, even searching the lonely road for the ill-gotten fruits of our violence and shame.

I hope you embraced the light, Richard, for we all move into the consuming fire in the end. Sorry about the thievery.

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Scripture

Watchman for the House of Israel

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There is a common thread of real, and very serious, responsibility for neighbor running across all three of this week’s readings.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Ezek 33:7-9; Rom 13:8-10; Mt 18:15-20

It’s not that common for the second reading to dovetail this nicely with the first reading and the Gospel reading. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but perhaps it bears repeating (even in somewhat oversimplified form). . .

The lectionary cycle for Sunday readings consists of two independent threads of content: the primary thread being a sequential reading of one of the Gospels, and the secondary thread being a sequential reading of one of the New Testament letters – this second thread being what is proclaimed in the second reading. The first reading is not independent, but is chosen specifically to provide Biblical context (from the Old Testament, as a rule) for the Gospel reading. So the first reading and Gospel reading always dovetail, while the second reading is usually pretty tangential to the others. A tangent, however, always has some point of contact, and sometimes, like today, it seems to complete the circle remarkably.

As I get older, I find it harder and harder to reconcile modernity’s obsessive individualism with the worldview of the Bible. The Ezekiel reading is quite straightforward in assigning the prophet responsibility – not for the fate of his people, but for their knowledge of God’s Word. The watchman will have on his hands the blood of those whom he fails to warn of their danger. This could not have been a particularly comforting message to Ezekiel. Yes, they are responsible for themselves, but so is Ezekiel. It’s hard not to think of Jonah here, and his attempt to flee rather than proclaim God’s Word – which the Lord would have none of. It also recalls, at least obliquely, that marvelous cry of Jeremiah’s pathos from last Sunday’s first reading:

I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more.

But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones;

I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it. (Jer 20:9, NAB)

Looking strictly at the Gospel passage as it stands, it may not be immediately evident how the Ezekiel reading provides Old Testament context for understanding it – the Gospel message almost seems to be about church discipline, and the “proper” means of correcting the wayward. Yet the simple fact that the liturgy directs us to view the passage through the lens of the demands placed on Ezekiel calls for a closer look.

Seen within the context of the entirety of Matthew 18, it becomes a bit clearer how the Gospel passage relates to the Watchman passage. The chapter begins with the disciples asking Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom, which Jesus answers by holding a humble child. But then Jesus warns of the terrors awaiting any who would cause such a child to sin, and then reasserts, in the parable of the lost sheep, how the Father desires not one of the little ones to be lost. This is the preceding context for our passage, and it could not be clearer that the Lord is reiterating the idea from our Ezekiel passage that the blood of sinners can be – and will be – judged to be on the hands of others.

Then our own passage speaks of how to deal with a brother who sins. Seen in the light of the preceding verses’ focus on the responsibility of some for the spiritual well-being of others – as well as on God’s salvific desire for all – the “process” of correcting the brother begins to look like an actual burden upon the Church, for the sake of reconciling the sinner. Where this differs from the instructions to Ezekiel is in the fact that Christ, as is typical, expands upon the requirements laid out in the Old Testament. No longer is it sufficient for the “watchman” to witness God’s Word to the sinner; he must now be persistent, imploring the help of others in the congregation – even the entire Church.

Implicit in this “correction” is the readiness to forgive – to be reconciled. For what else could it mean to “win over your brother” except to bring him to repentance, and how else could he be brought to repentance by “listening to you” except through an offer of forgiveness? A cynic might counter that he could possibly be shamed, exposed, or verbally beaten into repentance, but how would bringing along “one or two others,” after the fact, make them witnesses of some wrong done in the past? They could only serve as witnesses to your offer of reconciliation, and the repentance – or lack thereof – of the guilty party. The Lord is stressing here the power of Christian community to make Christ present to the world, especially Christ’s forgiveness.

That this is indeed what the Lord is pointing to is, I believe, made clear in next set of verses (closing out chapter 18), which show Peter asking how many times he must forgive his brother, and the Lord responding with the parable of the unforgiving servant – someone blessed with the gift of forgiveness who was severely punished when he did not use his opportunity to extend that gift to another in need of it.

So, having seen how the Gospel passage does, in fact, recapitulate the message of the Ezekiel reading – and even magnify it – we turn finally to the reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

“Love is the fulfillment of the law,” Paul tells us, because “love does no evil to the neighbor.” But as we have seen, for those who possess God’s Word (and His forgiveness) the law calls for us to share such gifts with those in need of them, and so doing “evil to the neighbor” must be seen not only as committing sins against them, but sinning against them by omission: failing to warn them of danger, and failing to offer them the freedom of forgiveness. Loving others – even as ourselves – requires putting in the effort to make God present to them in humility, even in the face of the ever-present temptation to pull a Jonah.

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Church

“The Fruit of Abortion is Nuclear War.”

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

Today was the feast day of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose profoundly wise words grace the title of this post. It’s hard to overstate what she meant to the world during the last years of her life. Everyone, regardless of religious affiliation (or lack thereof), saw her as a living saint. Just the idea that someone like that can exist in our cynical times is a testimony to the truth, one that quietly cuts through the fog of modern despair with a beacon of hope.

I can do no better tonight than to let her speak here in her own words:

“Humility is the mother of all virtues; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”

“Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor… Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.”

“Abortion is murder in the womb…A child is a gift of God. If you do not want him, give him to me.”

“It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”

“Jesus has made Himself the Bread of Life to give us life. Night and day, He is there. If you really want to grow in love, come back to the Eucharist, come back to that Adoration.”

“We must have a real living determination to reach holiness. ‘I will be a saint’ means I will despoil myself of all that is not God; I will strip my heart of all created things; I will live in poverty and detachment; I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make myself a willing slave to the will of God.”

“I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle; I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.”

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Media & Culture

On the Cultural Relativism of Statutory Rape: Score One for Reality

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From the Department of Degenerate Disgrace: An article showed up in the Boston Globe a while back about a former U.S. Vice Consul to Brazil (no pun intended) who was asking a Virginia U.S. District Court judge for leniency after having been found guilty of taping himself having sex with various 14-17 year-old girls. Gons G. Nachman argued that it should be considered OK for him to have done this, because he did it in countries (the Congo and Brazil) where, he claimed, girls mature more quickly, and the cultural emphasis is on finding financially stable men for them to marry. A psychologist was being lined up to assert that the cultural differences between America and these other countries somehow made Nachman think what he was doing was acceptable.

I find this a fascinating twist on the usual relativist dissembling, which appeals to subjectivism: just because it’s not right for you doesn’t mean that it’s not right for me; whatever I feel is “natural” to me, and I am good, so whatever is natural to me is good, so whatever I feel like is good for me, and the only “wrong” is depriving me of doing whatever I feel like, or making me feel bad about it.

But here we have Nachman taking a completely different tack. Instead of arguing that his subjective sensibilities should define the morality of the situation, he is claiming that an objective circumstance (his geographical, and by extension cultural, location) was impinging upon the morality of the act, to the point of trumping his own subjective knowledge of the moral character of the acts – for he seems to be admitting that the acts would be not only illegal in America, but also immoral.

Nice try, Mr. Nachman. Even if the argument could hold its own water (it can’t), it would reduce morality to mores – which might fit snugly into your worldview, but would have nothing to say in the face of cannibalsim, genocide, or human sacrifice.

It seems Judge Gerald Bruce Lee also saw through the smoke (I’m glad this was tried in Virginia, not Massachusetts!). According to The Post Chronicle, Judge Lee last month sentenced Nachman to the maximum sentence (20 years) for the charges he was convicted on.

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Politics & Economics

RNC Night 3: Sarah Barracuda Night

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Watching the Republican convention last night, I was struck by how poorly some of the speeches were delivered. I’m not saying this to pick on the Republicans – this seems to be a general malaise in our political system. Admittedly, I tuned in and out early the evening, but I was not impressed with what I heard.

I couldn’t even listen to GOPAC chairman Michael Steele, who’s supposed to be good at this kind of thing. Then, the ranting guy who looked so much like Mitt Romney – well, I’m not sure what was up with him. But the worst of the night might have been Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle. She was brutal – pausing for grudgingly offered applause after almost every sentence. It was tedious.

Fortunately, the bigger lights performed well. I could listen to Mike Huckabee anytime. And Rudy Giuliani: as much as I might dislike his cross-over politics, he is certainly a master of the microphone. I really wish I could like that guy more.

The night, of course, belonged to Sarah Palin. And while she lacks the stage charisma of Giuliani, she has a disarming grace about her that exudes a rare combination of confidence, competence, and earthy approachability. She certainly had her audience in the palm of her hand. Even while staying away from the social issues that really would have had the house rocking, there was an excitement evident that I haven’t seen in the GOP since I don’t know when.

The more I think about this appointment, the more brilliant I think it was. Palin brings to the McCain candidacy the one thing it was lacking most: passion. It’s not so much her age, or her gender, or her good looks, or her “Sarah Barracuda” reputation – all of these elements play a role, but there is a magnetism about her (not unlike Barack Obama) that just makes her very easy to like. . . a lot.

That was McCain’s political weakness, as I see it. He’s respected, he’s trusted, but nobody was excited about him. I’d see poll after poll showing, in so many words or less, how much more supportive Obama’s supporters were of him. I tried to think it wouldn’t much matter, as McCain’s supporters – even the lukewarm ones – would eventually end up voting for him. But I did have nagging doubts as to whether too many of the more or less conservative folks would stay home, while the Obama wave crested.

But I think the game is altogether changed, now. The conservative base is thoroughly energized by this woman, and some other folks are seeing the Republican party in a whole new light.

Who would have thought that the future of the GOP would be a “hockey mom” from the tundra? But she just might be. . . and if I were Joe Biden, I would not be looking forward to October 2nd – although I sure am!

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Religion & Society

Fraudulent? Does That Matter?

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Few things make me feel like I was born on the wrong planet as much as the blatant denial of the meaning and authority of reality – that is to say, the reality of objective truth. This is truly a malady of modern human reason, and it seems to be rampant – maybe even epidemic. There are days I’m sure I’ve seen everything, then there are days, and I think this is one of those days, when I’m almost afraid to look out the window at the world for fear of the lunacy I might encounter.

I came across a startling statement in a Boston Globe article a couple months ago or so, which I decided at the time to let slide without comment, but the story reappeared last week, and fits too well into a pattern with some other recent stories, suggesting that we have inadequate cultural resources at our disposal, on account of our social penchant for subjectivism, with which to deal seriously with personal fraud.

The statement came from a 71 year-old Massachusetts woman named Misha Defonseca, in an article discussing her ongoing troubles with an American publisher named Jane Daniel, in which Defonseca offered what she must have thought was a serious explanation for fabricating the story behind a book she wrote at Daniel’s urging. Defonseca claimed to have been a young Jewish girl who escaped the Nazis and was raised by wolves in the Ukraine, among other adventures. The book was huge commercially in Europe, and was even made into a film in France, but the story was a complete fabrication. Defonseca isn’t even Jewish, never mind the bit about the wolves.

Defonseca’s troubles with Daniel don’t really interest me – it is a tawdry story without any redeeming characters – but her explanation for the fraud she perpetrated floored me when I read it in the Globe:

“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement released by her lawyers.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? Not only did a 71 year-old woman think this statement up, but her lawyers apparently thought it could somehow garner sympathy! What if they’re right?

It’s important to understand that she did not make the story up to publish in a book for profit; she had been telling the story for years to anyone that would listen. She has spent half a lifetime feeding off the attention her “fantasy” has attracted her (not to mention the large sums of money earned over the past decade or so), and yet now that her hoax is revealed, she shamelessly tries to cling to her story by subjectivizing the grounds for judging her actions. As long as she wants the story to be true, she figures she can continue to perpetuate it at some level, denying any culpability, with no concern for the many people she deceived, no sense of genuine repentance, and no apparent understanding that the truth matters. By her own words, her life has become so intertwined in this lie that she cannot extricate herself.

In a world in which the public order has repressed religious authority as being unreasonable and oppressive of individual freedom, we see in this embarrassing episode the worst elements of religious self deception and irrational, delusional pretense coming to expression in the hope-forsaken framework of the psychologized modern mind, with its pathetic appetite for self-esteem and “affirmation,” trapped in a prison of relativistic subjectivity that is incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Reality (that is, the truth) plays such an inconsequential part in her chosen shade of existence that she will likely go to the grave without ever comprehending the evil she has contributed to the world through her shameless dishonesty. But perhaps even sadder is that she has completely lost her own self in the process.

This is, after all, not her story at all, even as she so desperately wants to believe it is. It is the story of someone who never existed, the story of no one at all. It’s the story of nothing – it’s not even a story; it’s a fraud – it’s not real. Her story, indeed, can never be known, because her existence has been emptied out meaninglessly, replaced by a fraud that has no reality, no existence. No one will ever know her, because her story can never be told; eternally lost in the fog of deceit and moral corruption, she doesn’t even know herself.

Truly, the saddest thing about the indulgent “identity” culture of modernity’s narcissistic bent is that identity can never be found in the mirage of self-seeking, only lost:

Thus says the LORD:
What fault did your fathers find in me that they withdrew from me,
Went after empty idols, and became empty themselves?
Jeremiah 2:5 (NAB)

Somewhere, there are those who, as young Jewish girls, did go through the horrors of Nazism, who must feel nothing but shame for this woman, who cannot manage to be ashamed of herself.

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Bible Study Tools

WORDsearch Versions Comparison Published

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At long last, I’ve completed and published a chart comparing the functional differences between the current WORDsearch 8 version, the previous major release (WORDsearch 7), so-called classic WORDsearch (WORDsearch 5), and the current version of WORDsearch’s free Bible Explorer 4 application.

I originally intended it as a tool to help people trying to decide whether to upgrade to WORDsearch 8 from either WORDsearch 7 or Bible Explorer, but the addition of a column comparing the functionality of classic WORDsearch adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation.

See the page here.

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