Blog friends, I want to show you something cool. I was recently introduced by Jimmy Akin's podcast to Logos Bible Software for Catholics. I have long slavered over Logos’s incredible software libraries, with bibles and lexica and commentaries galore — whole books by the hundreds loaded up on the cart. Unfortunately, their scholarly packages are well beyond my price range. Oh, to convince my academic librarians that advanced Bible study materials were necessary for my degree in American history… (Or to be a seminarian at an institution with resources.)
Recently, Logos has been making forays into the Catholic market. Jimmy Akin had an interview with Dr. Andrew Jones, Logos’s Catholic product manager, and on their recommendation, I promptly splurged on Logos’s Catechism of the Catholic Church Collection. It contains nine volumes of rich, Catholicky goodness — the Catechism; the collected documents of the Councils of Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II; the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Sources of Catholic Dogma, and a couple of Catholic Bibles (the Douay-Rheims-Challoner and the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition) — All for the unbelievable price of $50, with a discount tacked on for listening to Jimmy (listen to the podcast above, and you can get it, too). And it is pretty amazing. Not only do I have the Catechism and all of these other works at my fingertips, but they are hyperlinked to each other. Every Scripture reference in the Catechism pulls up the referenced Scripture in a popup. Best of all for me are the hyperlinks to the Sources of Catholic Dogma — the assembled nuggets of tradition from every pope and every council and every other writer over every age who had anything relevant to say and on which Catholic dogma is founded — it pulls all of this up with the click of a button. And the apps for the iPad and Android are very sleek. It even remembers what page I’m on between my different devices. The end result: I can carry my entire library of Catholic dogmatic works with me everywhere I go, and pull references up in seconds! I heartily recommend this thing. And they have a lot of other valuable Catholic publications, with more being added all the time!
Now, as my title suggests, plugging this software isn’t entirely selfless. The way Logos puts out new products is by offering them for pre-order, gathering interest in them, and then when enough people have signed on, they put the item into production. This past week they sent out another offer I couldn’t turn down: the Missals of the Roman Catholic Church — all three of them — for $60 on pre-order. That’s the new, third edition English Roman Missal, as well as the underlying Latin of the current missal — and for you traditionalists (I know there are several of you — and really, when offered the opportunity, who doesn’t want to be a traditionalist?), the 1962, pre-Vatican II Latin Missale Romanum, largely unchanged since Tridentine days. To buy all of these in book form — if you could even find a 1962 missal; believe me I have looked — and the new missal alone costs $70 — overall might cost as much as $500 — but $60! I want it! And I can’t get it until more people pre-order it! Don’t you want it, too?
Other stuff I really want, but can’t afford (donations gladly accepted):
- Navarre Bible, New Testament — The Navarre Bible is one of the best Catholic Bibles with rich, extensive commentary from many great thinkers and theologians. This edition is actually affordable! And they need people to pre-order it, too!
- Navarre Bible New Testament, Standard Edition (12 vols.) — More extensive in their commentary and notes than the one-volume edition. I’m gradually accruing these by second-hand, but it sure would be nice to have them all…
- Navarre Bible Old Testament, Standard Edition (7 vols.)
- A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture
- BDAG-HALOT Bundle — The mother and daddy of all Greek and Hebrew lexica.
And so on and so forth. There’s a lot of good stuff here. I’m like a kid in a very expensive candy store.
Check out, too, Logos’s Catholic site, and their blog, Verbum.
Bibleworks is big where I come from. I’ve never used Logos, but what would you say are its advantages over other similar products?
It’s a lot more expensive. 😀
I’m not really sure. I’ve never used BibleWorks or anything else. I know that Logos manages to get the rights to publish a gazillion different works. Looking at BibleWorks' contents, it has a lot of good stuff, too. But the two things I want more than anything — the BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich Greek lexicon) and the HALOT (Kohler-Baumgartner-Stamm Hebrew and Aramaic lexicon) are only available for BibleWorks as add-on modules to the already not-cheap base package. They are just plain expensive no matter how you get them. The print editions are just as expensive as the electronic editions — but who wants to lug those tomes around?
Now, it seems, Logos has an advantage, for me, in that it’s offering Catholic stuff. 😉
I would say also, based on my limited experience, that it’s nice that Logos is a lot more modular. I spent $50 and have a working package with bibles and a Greek New Testament and a lexicon or two and some other valuable texts. Each work they sell is available separately, so I can go à la carte (pretty much the only way I’ll ever afford to go). There are also a good many works, too, that they let me read but not download, and they are always offering something for free (some classic or another, usually — it was a book of sermons by George Whitefield last week). It would be nice to preview some of these other programs, but BibleWorks doesn’t offer a trial version, and I’ll probably never pay $360 for it.
I totally understand your Logos-envy! I do have one gripe with it though… they don’t have the rights to the Catechism package outside of the US. And for this bibliophilic Antipodean that is just… cruel. *sobbing*
Boo! 🙁 I wonder why that is? I may see if I can thump some heads for you…
Well, I’m blaming your bishops. Or your American hegemony… or Obama. We on the fringes of civilisation (i.e. those of us who spell civilisation with an s) are used to this sort of evil… 😉
But quite seriously, I’ve been told it’s a copyright thing. So who knows?
And even more seriously, thump as many heads you want. 😀 I will be cheering!
Yes, apparently, the problem is with the copyright of the Catechism itself, not with anything else in the package. So it’s our bishops. But it’s probably Obama’s fault. For getting their underpants in a wad. Is there a Catechism available in print in Australia?
Yes, when in doubt, blame Obama does seem to the standard American Catholic response these days… But your bishops sure are worked up! (But that’s for another conversation – in which you’d see just how much I wasn’t joking when I said I could be a Communist :p)
I do have a print Catechism and obviously I also have acess to the online ones so I’m just being that spoilt, rich kid whose throwing a tantrum in a very expensive candy/lolly shop as you put it! What can you do? Me and my firstworldproblems. 😀
Maybe I should become a communist…
From the mouth of Andrew Jones, the Catholic product manager himself:
“Copyright for the CCC is controlled by the various bishops’ conferences. The USCCB controls the copyright for the United States and has given us permission to produce and sell the work. We are working on solutions for international sales– Hopefully, soon!”
Thanks! I’ll keep an ear out for good news. 🙂