If the flood of new prepub titles has caused you to tune out—or you’ve just been waiting for something other than Continuum books—now is a good time to check back in.
www.logos.com/prepub
In the past week, our prepub guy Zack has added some variety to the offerings in the form of:
JPS Bible and Torah Commentary Collection (9 volumes) – This is a great complement to The Tanakh, which has been available for Libronix DLS for some time. We’ve had a lot of customer requests for these commentaries over the years and it’s great to finally beef up the library in a category where we’ve been weak.
Continuity and Discontinuity – A perennial source of debate—and a question that stands at the crux of covenant theology and dispensationalism—is “How do the Old and New Testaments relate to one another?” Or as the preface to this volume poses the question, “How are we to relate what he has said through the prophets of old to what has been revealed through his apostles?” The 13 essays in this volume shed light on the issue and deliver some of the best thinking in this area.
Seven Practices of Effective Ministry – Andy Stanley is the senior pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, GA. In a survey of pastors published earlier this summer by The Church Report magazine, North Point was named third among the “most influential churches in America.” Whether writing a book like this is a cause or a product of such influence, I cannot say…but it should be a worthwhile read, regardless.
The Pleasures of God (Piper) – Satisfaction is universally desired but often eludes our grasp. In this work, Piper shows how our satisfaction is dependent on God’s satisfaction.
Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures – This title was languishing on the Community Pricing Page, if you will excuse the pun, but found a number of advocates among our users. In response to their pleas, we have decided to give it another go as a prepub title and see if it will fly. With more than 13,600 pages of very dense type this is going to be rather expensive to produce…so we’ll need your help (in the form of a pre-order)!
New and different titles on the prepub page
Genre & Source Visual Filtering for the OT
Daniel Foster just came to me and said, “Hey, I didn’t know that the Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text has two resource-specific visual filters!” I said, “Sure, I thought everybody knew that.”
Well, if Daniel doesn’t know … okay, I guess almost nobody knows.
Visual What?
“Visual filter” may sound like something you do to a photograph to reduce red eye, but in fact it’s a simple and flexible feature that the Libronix DLS can use to modify a book’s formatting or content on the fly — that is, right when it’s being displayed. A simple visual filter is the Page Numbers visual filter, which shows page numbers inline (for resources that have page number tagging).
Progress on Copyrighted Orphans
Earlier this year I posted about the Report on Orphan Works published by the Copyright Office. Orphan works represent a wealth of material that is still of great value, particularly in Biblical studies, but which is not widely available and can’t be reprinted or digitized because the copyright status, or copyright holder, is impossible to track down.
In May, Representative Lamar Smith introduced HR 5439, the Orphan Works Act of 2006, in Congress. If passed into law, this Act would provide safe harbor for Logos and others to republish orphaned works without fear of huge legal liabilities if a previously unidentifiable copyright holder came forward. It also provides for reasonable compensation for copyright holders who are found.
This is a win-win-win. It’s good for publishers who want to digitize or reprint older works. It’s good for the works, which get new life and more use. It’s even good for the copyright holders (many of whom are heirs who don’t know they own rights, or that they have any value) who may discover new revenue sources.
And most importantly, it’s good for you. It will put valuable, but hard-to-find, hard-to-use, resources at your fingertips.
Please let your representative know you support HR 5439.
Dear Elected Representative,
Digital publishing, on CD-ROM’s and the Internet, is enabling us to make entire libraries of material available to students who previously had little or no access to valuable content. Students in distance learning programs, in rural areas, and in far-off parts of the world are using computers and the Internet to get access to content that previously could be found only in large libraries in major cities.
Projects like Google Print, and many others at universities and libraries, are putting the contents of irreplaceable, hard-to-access archives at the fingertips of students around the world.
There is a tremendous amount of information in the public domain, but many important works were published after 1923 and are now out of print. In many cases it is difficult to locate or even identify the owner. Publishers have gone out of business. Rights have reverted to heirs who have never heard of the copyrighted work. Titles were published without enough identifying information.
The Copyright Office issued a Report on Orphan Works in January of this year that recommends legislation providing for the use of orphaned works during their copyright period. (http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/)
H.R. 5439, the Orphan Works Act of 2006, addresses compensation for rights holders if they emerge, and provides safe harbor from huge infringement penalties to users who have made a diligent search to locate a copyright owner.
I encourage you to support this important legislation which advances the causes of commerce, education, and human knowledge.
Grammatical Relationships: Parallel English & Original Language
An earlier post on the Bible Word Study Grammatical Relationships feature garnered the following comment. I inserted the referenced graphic as well.
When I do what you did, I get everything except the side by side translations of the passage as you show above (where you made the notes in red). For instance, I just show the cite Matt 13:14, but not the translations with the colored keys to the study word and the subject. What am I missing?
Yes, this isn’t exactly obvious. Grammatical Relationships mirrors the preferences you have set for syntax search results. So try creating a basic syntax search — such as searching for all primary clauses with the word ἀγαπάω as the predicator (verb) in the OpenText.org database. You know, like we find in John 3.16. Here’s a short video to show you how: Flash, 9:20, 11 megs, with sound. [NB: When I recorded the video, my computer was in the midst of a massive process that took some significant processor cycles. So it's a little slow in some areas.]
Then modify the search results. Note the “Current View” drop-down in the results menubar. This controls the columns. Also note the Bible button. This is where the English will come in. If your preferred Bible is the ESV, then toggling the button on should cause the ESV to display with proper highlighting in the search results window. Again,
href="http://www.logos.com/media/blog/swf/SyntaxSearchResults/SyntaxSearchResults.html">the video shows you how this works
These preferences will then be mirrored in Grammatical Relationships.
New Resources for Apologetics
Over the past couple of weeks, we have quietly released many new apologetics-related resources for Logos Bible Software. Some of these are brand new to the platform and a few are re-releases. Here’s a quick round-up of these titles…
Cults & Religions
Religions A to Z – Quick, what’s the Emergent Church movement? Falun Gong? How about Shambhala or Rastafarianism? This book, by the author of Nelson’s Illustrated Guide to Religions, gives you the lowdown on the religions, movements, cults and denominations that shape our world. Far from a dry rehearsal of facts, the author provides a lively engagement with each of the religions from a Christian point of view.
- Mormonism & Jehovah’s Witness – Formerly available as part of the Baker Digital Reference Library (an old Logos Library System product), these eight books have been rebuilt for Libronix and re-released for individual purchase. They are extremely detailed and practical guides for witnessing. If you spend some time with these volumes, you’ll probably know more about the history and writings of these groups than the person who comes knocking on your door.
- Jehovah’s Witnesses Answered Verse by Verse
- Answering Jehovah’s Witnesses Subject by Subject
- Jehovah’s Witness Literature
- Index of Watchtower Errors
- How to Rescue Your Loved One from the Watch Tower
- Mormonism: Changes, Contradictions, and Errors
- Mormons Answered Verse by Verse
- How to Rescue Your Loved One from Mormonism
- Jehovah’s Witnesses Answered Verse by Verse
Creation/Evolution/Science
Bible and Spade Collection – 30 years’ worth of archaeological journals from the Holy Land. The organization behind this journal–Associates for Biblical Research –has as its stated mission to strengthen the faith and biblical understanding of Christians. If you enjoy archaeology for its own sake, or as part of the larger conversation about creation and the Bible’s historicity, you’ll want to pick this one up.
- Dennis Gordon Lindsay on Creationism – 10 volumes on the topic of creationism and evolutionism. If you purchased a Logos base product prior to May 2006, you probably already have these. But if not, they are now available for individual purchase via download.
The Genesis Factor – Taking a different approach to life’s big questions, the authors of this book use the Socratic method to help readers engage in a “conversation” with the book of Genesis.
Engaging the Culture
Christian Ethics in Plain Language – Author Kerby Anderson offers a survey of Christian ethics followed by 18 chapters addressing important ethical issues that are a hotly debated today.
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist – Well-known author Norman Geisler and Frank Turek throw down the gauntlet for skeptics by exposing and challenging their dearly-held beliefs, then arguing that Christianity is the most reasonable worldview.
Reasonable Faith – One of the heavyweights among apologetics resources, this volume by William Lane Craig serves as a textbook in apologetic or philosophy of religion courses. As Craig explains in the preface, this work is intended to “fill the gaps” left in traditional theological education and works of systematic theology. Here he addresses the apologetic angle of each major theological topic in post-Reformation Protestant theology: faith, man, God, creation, and Christ.
More new books (many of which did not pass through the prepub program) can be browsed in the New Products listing.
