Results tagged “John Calvin” from Logos Bible Software Blog

Today marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin (July 10, 1509 – May 27, 1564). Hundreds of thousands commemorate this day with gratitude to God for this man and his influence on the church.

Many who disagree with his theology still regard him as a gift to the church. John Wesley called him “a great instrument of God,” and Jacob Arminius considered Calvin “incomparable in the interpretation of Scripture” and recommended Calvin’s commentaries second only to the Bible itself. So learning and benefiting from Calvin isn’t just for the five pointers.

To join in the celebration of the grace of God in the life of John Calvin, we decide to launch Calvin500.com—a resource site devoted to everything John Calvin—and create several new Calvin collections, including the impressive Calvin 500 Collection, which contains more than 100 books by and about John Calvin.

If you missed the original announcement and haven’t yet seen the site or the collections, be sure to give them a look.

In addition to the site and the collections, don’t miss out on the two special birthday presents we have for you.

More Books, No Additional Charge!

First, we’ve added 11 new volumes to the Calvin 500 Collection, bringing the total up to 108! To cover the addition of these new titles, the price needs to go up. But instead of raising it immediately, we decided that we’d keep it at the already crazy price of $299.95 through the weekend. If you’ve been contemplating placing your pre-order, you have one last chance to pick up the most comprehensive Calvin collection on the planet at the lowest possible price. First thing Monday morning (July 13), the price will increase.

If you’ve already pre-ordered the Calvin 500 Collection, you’ll get all of these 11 new titles at no additional charge, but we need your help to cover the added cost. Please spread the word about the even bigger Calvin 500 Collection. Blog it. Tweet it. Facebook it. Or email it.

Get a Free Copy of Calvin’s Institutes!

Second, we’re giving away the Beveridge translation of Calvin’s Institutes through the end of the month. To get your free book, you’ll need three things:

1. a copy of the Libronix Digital Library System installed on your PC or Mac
2. a Logos.com account with a credit card on file
3. a Libronix Customer ID that is connected to your Logos.com account

Here are the steps to follow to get all set up:

Step 1: Download and install Libronix for Windows. (Mac users can purchase the Mac version of the engine, or buy a Mac base package.) If you already have Libronix up and running on your computer, jump to the third step.

Step 2: Activate Libronix. When you do, you’ll create a Libronix Customer ID (usually your email address, if you enter it). You can find your Libronix Customer ID by going to Help > About Libronix DLS.

Step 3: Create a Logos.com account. If you already have one, just log in.

Step 4: Make sure that your Libronix Customer ID is associated with your Logos.com account. Go to My Account, enter your Libronix Customer ID from Step 2, and click “Confirm.” If it’s already there, no need to do anything.

Step 5: “Buy” the Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. Go to the page and click “Add to Cart,” or just add it straight to your cart from here, and then make sure to add the CALVIN-500 coupon code to your cart and click “Update Cart.” Proceed through the checkout process and then click “Submit Order.” If you don’t have a credit card on file, you’ll need to enter your credit card information. Don’t worry. You won't be charged. It’s an unfortunate inconvenience in our current checkout system, and we hope to change it at some point.

Step 6: Unlock and download your new book. If you’re on a Windows machine, just click the orange “Unlock & Download” button. If you’re on a Mac, just synchronize your licenses (Tools > Library Management > Synchronize Licenses) and manually put the book file in your resources folder (Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Libronix DLS/Resources on the startup volume).

Step 7: Start using your new book! Open Libronix, open My Library, then type Institutes to find it. Double-click it to open it.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Protestant Reformer John Calvin. For several years we have had Calvin’s Commentaries and Institutes available, but there is a large portion of Calvin’s writings that we don’t yet have (e.g., his collected writings in Latin span 59 dense volumes!). So we decided that 2009 was the perfect time to work on digitizing as much of Calvin’s corpus as possible—and to update our existing Calvin material.

Seven New Calvin Collections

We are excited to make available for pre-order seven new Calvin collections:

• The Calvin 500 Collection (97 Vols.)
• Calvin’s Commentaries (46 Vols.)
• The Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin: English, Latin, and French (9 Vols.)
• The Letters of John Calvin (4 Vols.)
• Tracts and Treatises of John Calvin (8 Vols.)
• John Calvin Biography Collection (10 Vols.)
• Calvin and the History of Calvinism (20 Vols.)

The Calvin 500 Collection contains all of the volumes from the other six collections and is an unbelievable value. It offers an additional 50% off the cumulative Pre-Pub prices for the individual collections—which themselves are already priced very low! It’s 97 volumes, nearly 40,000 pages (!), and currently just $299.95. That makes this the lowest priced Pre-Pub (in terms of price per page) that we have ever offered! In short, this is an amazing deal that you won’t want to pass up.

If you already own our earlier editions of Calvin’s Commentaries and Institutes, don’t worry. There’s an upgrade collection available that offers you an even lower price based on what you already own—and you’ll get all of the newly updated content at no additional charge.

Calvin’s Sermons

What about Calvin’s sermons? Most of Calvin’s extant sermons were translated into English in the late 1500s, but 16th-century English uses different spelling, and the majority of these volumes haven’t been updated to modern English spelling. We’re in the process of evaluating our options for a Calvin Sermons Collection and hope to be able to put it on Pre-Pub in the near future.

Additional Titles

The literature by and about Calvin is as massive as the great Reformer’s influence has been. It’s possible that we missed important books in our research, so we may add additional volumes to many of these collections over the next few months. That means the prices will probably have to go up to cover the additional production costs, so you’ll definitely want to pre-order early to lock in the lowest price! If you pre-order now, any additional volumes that we add to these collections will essentially be free!

Calvin500.com

In conjunction with the release of these new collections, we’ve also just launched a brand new website: Calvin500.com. We’ve done a fair bit of research on Calvin, so we thought we’d share it with you. You’ll find information about Calvin, bibliographies of Calvin’s works and literature on Calvin, a list of all Calvin 500 conferences, a page that tracks all Twitter mentions of John Calvin, and some fun stuff like a Calvin quiz and a couple of birthday countdown widgets. There’s also a blog where we will post news and announcements. Be sure to subscribe to the Calvin 500 feed to stay in the loop.

Blogging at Conferences

By the way, if you’re planning to attend any of the Calvin conferences this year and would like to blog the conference at Calvin500.com—or even if you blog about them on your own blog—let us know. We’d love to feature you on our site.

Go check out the new site and collections, and help us spread the word by blogging about it or mentioning it on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking sites you frequent.