New Resources for Apologetics

| Fri, August 25, 2006 | Products

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


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.

How Much Do You Want to Pay?

| Wed, August 23, 2006 | Products

What if you could visit the website of your favorite publisher, browse a list of books that are candidates for publication, and put a bid on the ones you’d like to own? That’s right…tell the publisher which books you’d like to see published and how much you’d be willing to pay for each one.

Sound too good to be true? Truth is, this is the experience enjoyed by hundreds of Logos users who have discovered the Logos Community Pricing Program.

In a nutshell, the Community Pricing Program works like this: Logos posts a list of public domain titles, you browse the list, put a bid on any title that catches your eye, and sit back and wait for the book to get produced. Your bid is the top price you’re willing to pay, so there are never any unpleasant surprises!

That’s it…easy as pie.

Going Once, Going Twice…

I grew up in a rural part of northern Michigan (some would say “rural northern Michigan” is a redundancy) and loved to go to the Old MacDonald Auction Barn in the neighboring town of Pickford whenever I got the chance. When looking for a new couch recently, I discovered a monthly auction held at a warehouse here in Bellingham. This auction has a lot less farm equipment, but it’s still the fun experience I remembered…and an all-afternoon experience, which doesn’t work out real well for our two kids, aged 2 and 3-1/2.

But it turns out auction houses have anticipated the desire to bid on items in absentia. When nap time came around, we filled out a brief form with our bidder number and the top bid amount for each item we wanted to bid on. The auction house had a person to bid on our behalf and they’d call us the next day if we had the top bid for any item on our list. Absentee bidding lacks the thrill and energy of being there, but it is rather convenient!

If it helps, think of the Community Pricing Program as absentee bidding. You show up at the “auction” (in this case a webpage), take a look around, kick the tires, register your top bids for the stuff you want, and walk away. We’ll get in touch with you by email if your bid was successful. Even better, if your bid was too low we’ll shoot you an email to let you know before the “auction” closes…at which point you can choose to either raise your bid enough to get the book, or let it pass.

Oh, and did I mention that with Community Pricing you’re not bidding against the other bidders…you’re all working together! See, we love our customers so much that as more people bid for a book, the price goes lower! Yes, you read that right:

More bidders = lower prices for everyone!

Ready, Set, Bid!

If you’re ready to get started, jump over to the Community Pricing page to see all the titles currently available for bidding. The bright, red circles at the top of the page walk you through the 3 simple steps to get started.

What, you’re still reading this? Then here’s a preview of what you’ll find on the Community Pricing page: classic commentaries, works on the Life of Christ, Greek and Hebrew helps, a fascinating historical survey, and more. Authors whose names you may recognize include Ironside, Barnes, Alford, Deissmann, Schürer, and Driver.

And if you need any more incentive to get started right now, check this: three items on the Community Pricing page are very close to having enough bids to end the “auction” on those items and move them into production. Now is the time to tell us how much you want to pay for these great additions to your digital library!

Missing in Action (Part 1): Road Trip Memoirs of the 4th Leg

| Tue, August 22, 2006 | Misc.

John Fallahee recently completed the fourth leg of the Bible Road Trip (including the period when the damage to the RV was being repaired) and contributed this travelogue about his experiences. Read previous posts and view photos from the Road Trip.

WARNING: This driver and his family has never been to an RV park, nor driven an RV more than 30 minutes on the highway, prior to this trip! When asked by the president about the RV idea months ago…well, let’s just say that those imaginations were replaced by the following reality!

7/14 – 7/19 “Dad, Where is the Big Car?” Minivan/Hotel: David, my 4 year old son, was having fun helping me place the luggage in the trunk. With a very serious face, he said, “Dad where is the Big car?” I said, “It’s getting repaired, it should be ready in a couple of days.” David in a thoughtful manner carries on, “Well, there is plenty of room in this Mini-Car for me to eat and sleep!” By the way, the family enjoyed Washington D.C..

24 Hours – 4 Presentations: What have you done in the last 24 hours? We visited two churches in the area. I spoke at night at Immanuel Bible Church and trained the next morning. Then in the afternoon we headed to McLean Presbyterian Church and trained in the afternoon and then presented in the evening. Although tired, the fellowship was great! If you are ever in D.C. stop by!
We parked at the RV site by midnight!

7/21 “Mom…What’s that smell?
We drove over 4 hours to Norfolk, VA to pick up the RV and as you can see the kids were pretty excited! When is the last time you ran to a car?

Video clip (WMV, 3.2MB)
Liquid spills, Frightening Smells, but no Chills: During the repair process all power and gas were shut off. When Stephanie went to open the refrigerator door, once-frozen but now rotting, liquid chicken sprung from the dead and onto my wife.

The eggs were breeding a cure to the avian flu and the milk curdled into white cheese balls. We were left wondering if something ate something else! We were forbidden to take pictures of this crime scene.

Don’t Open the Fridge!: Though Stephanie worked hard to clean the fridge, the smell lived on until we discovered a cure. The new RV House rule: only Momma opens the fridge!

HOUSE KEEPING TIP: Place a few chunks of charcoal inside the freezer, wait 24 hours, and all smells removed.

7/21 – 7/24 “Let’s Gas it up!”Our First Gas stop: By the time we reached Mechanicsburg, PA, we needed to get some gas. As we pulled in, John Palm–owner of the local auto repair–expressed curiosity in the RV and tour. I sat down in his shop and showed him Logos Bible Software. He was so excited, he bought the software on the spot. John teaches and oversees the Sunday school program at his church.

RV SURVIVAL TIP #1: To bring the sides of the RV in, you must turn the RV off!

If you choose to ignore this advice, fear not, the RV campgrounds will knock on your door and assist you in operating your RV.

RV SURVIVAL TIP #2: To turn on the gas stove, the gas sensor need to be on!
If you choose to ignore this advice, you will go hungry!

Discmobile

| Mon, August 21, 2006 | Misc.

As a city, Bellingham has some unique characteristics. And more than a few unique characters.
One particular street that I often walk along seems to be a favorite for folks living in vehicles. Buses, cars, VW microbuses, campers, you name it…but one of the stranger sights was this car, covered in compact discs.


I suppose the owner/tenant was mostly interested in the discs’ reflective properties that served to keep his vehicle cool. He was probably less interested in the contents of the discs…

Yes, closer inspection revealed that this fellow had plastered his car with hundreds of Logos Bible Software discs! When Logos 3 shipped, we had to throw away a lot of old inventory (sans serial numbers, of course). Normally, our shipping department spray-paints discs that go into the dumpster as an added precaution…but this time quite a number of bright, shiny discs made it into the dumpster and were re-purposed in a way we couldn’t have imagined.

An Unusual Salsa

| Fri, August 18, 2006 | Misc.

If you’re a regular reader of the Logos blog, you know we enjoy salsa so much that we hold an annual “cook-off” devoted to the stuff. Dale Pritchett posts this paen to the spicy sauce from the midst of the Bible Road Trip.

And now for something entirely different. . . hot strawberry salsa!

Meet Brian Creveling of Creveling Family Restaurant and Creveling Family Farms, makers of more kinds of unusual salsas than you have ever tasted. Jenni and I wandered into the Creveling Family Restaurant in Sparta, Michigan, before our Logos presentation where we struck up a conversation with the owner, Brian Creveling. First Brian asked us if we cared to advise him on the color scheme of the restaurant and then he introduced us to his real passion, salsa making.

Brian’s salsas are something else. There are the normal tomato, chili and garlic components but from there it reaches out to strawberry, blueberry, peach, pear and apple salsas in both medium and hot. Did I mention, Brian loves garlic? You have never tasted anything like this before.

Well, at the risk of sounding like a commercial from the Food Network, let me tell you, Brian makes some of the best tasting salsa that has ever warmed a tortilla chip and it is not something you have had before. Just call him at 616.885.6667 if you would like to order.

Greek Syntax: Sleepy Disciples

| Thu, August 17, 2006 | Training

Hi folks, I’m back after an extended holiday. And for an upcoming home group study, I’m starting to work through the epistle to the Colossians. So I’ve been reading it recently. In reading, I came across Colossians 1.9, which has the phrase “we have not ceased to pray for you”. In looking at the word “pray”, I noticed this is a predicator (“pray”, in an embedded clause) with an adjunct (“for you”). At least, that’s how the ESV translates it. So I wondered what other sorts of adjuncts modify the word used here for “pray” (προσεύχομαι).

This was the beginning of a rabbit trail, but a fun one. I won’t detail the syntax search (I’ve done similar searches before, check the syntax archives) but I would like to poke around a bit in one area where some interesting hits were grouped together.

In searching for adjuncts that modify προσεύχομαι, I happened across Matthew 26.36-46. In those 10 verses, there are three instances of προσεύχομαι. The first (v. 36) has two adjuncts, the second (v. 42) has three adjuncts, and the third (v. 44) has four adjuncts.

This concentration seemed interesting, so I poked through the text further. I spent all of 15 minutes or so thinking about this before I recorded the one-take video below, but it is an example of the kinds of thoughts that slowing down and examining the clause structure through the syntax graph can generate.

Serendipitous discovery facilitated.

Classical Greek Lookup

| Wed, August 16, 2006 | Products, Training

When studying Greek words, it is sometimes fun and beneficial to see how the words are used outside of the New Testament. One of the features of Logos Bible Software, version 3 is the ability to look up Greek words in the online Perseus database, which includes a wide variety of classical Greek texts, many with morphological and lexical tags, and some with English translations.

Let’s say you wanted to see references to crucifixion outside the New Testament. In this screenshot, I’ve right-clicked on σταυρόω – the verb form of ‘to crucify’ – in my lexicon (in this case BDAG), chosen ‘Selected Text’ and ‘Perseus Greek Word Lookup’. I could also have right-clicked the word in a Greek Bible and chosen ‘Selected Text’ and the ‘(Lemma)’ form instead. Of course, I may also want to run this lookup on related words, such as σταυρός – ‘cross’.

Here Perseus has provided some analysis of the word. Note the link to ‘Configure display’. Use this link to choose between displaying texts in transliteration or Unicode or some other Greek encoding. After some initial analysis, you can see hit counts by genre – in this case 92 hits in prose and 1 hit in poetry.

Clicking on ‘Greek Word Search’ will generate a concordance of the 93 hits of this word in the database, as seen below.

You can see hits in authors such as Josephus, Xenophon, Epictetus, Thucydides, and Appian. Clicking on the first line of each hit will open the Greek text to the larger context of the hit. Clicking on individual words will provide analysis to help you translate the passage. Sometimes a link to an English translation or Latin version is available as well.

Major victory on Road Trip

| Mon, August 14, 2006 | Misc.

Dale Pritchett recently started the final leg of the Bible Road Trip. Read previous posts and view photos from the Road Trip.

Yesterday we got through an entire day without a major RV mishap! The feeling was heady! This is big news as we complete our first full week in the Starship Enterprise. This is a big ship in a small galaxy. Jenni kept reminding me that this was not my old Harley Davidson. It would be better for parking lots, curbs, speed bumps, trees, shrubs, stop signs, medial barriers, bridge railings and assorted honking motorists (just wishing me well, I am sure) if it was a Harley. I may deserve special thanks for leaving Michigan, Indiana, and Missouri.

Today I broke the one-day streak. Jenni and I worked out an exhaustive check list to be completed before leaving the RV park. We checked off the items on the list, agreed we had forgotten nothing, pulled twenty feet out of our parking space only to see a bunch of wildly enthusiastic, waving neighbors shouting to us that we had left the door wide open and the steps down.

Despite our general road trials, the evening meetings are going well and we have met some serious Logos users. This is a real source of encouragement to us. We have had some great time of fellowship with pastors, students and long time Logos users. Every night there has also been a small group of curious first-time people who have heard about the software but have never seen it.

One day we had a truck driver at a rest stop come over and tell us he had just heard about the software on the radio and wanted to know more. It is amazing to us how many people recognize the bus and wave or honk and give us a thumbs up.

KeyLink Summary

| Fri, August 11, 2006 | Products, Training

In a recent article on Hebrew KeyLinking, I mentioned that using the arrow keys to scroll between lexicons isn’t always the best way to survey all the articles on the word you are studying, because the arrow key navigation is based on how a lexicon spells a word, not on the KeyLink look-up tables Logos Bible Software 3 supports for navigating from the Bible directly and accurately to the lexicons. I mentioned that you can more accurately get to all your lexicons using the Bible Word Study report or the Exegetical Guide, or you can use the right-click menu to select a specific lexicon as a KeyLink destination if you want to consult a resource other than your default lexicon.

I’m sticking with my story; it’s all true. But I over-looked a new feature in version 3. Sometimes I want to do a quick survey of my lexicons on a given word, but I don’t need all the other searches and features of the Bible Word Study report. Of course, I could manage my preferences and turn off most of the sections of the Bible Word Study report until I stream-lined it for the task at hand, but then I’d have to reset my preferences the next time I wanted to dig deeper. As it turns out, there is a fast way to execute all my KeyLinks on a given word while making use of the KeyLink look-up tables for increased accuracy: the KeyLink Summary report.

As an example, open one of the newer Hebrew Bibles (such as the Westminster 4.2 morphology or the Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text) and go to Psalm 19:9. Let’s say we wanted to check out what our lexicons had to say about the word ‘pure’ (bar in Hebrew). We only care about the entries for bar that mean ‘pure’; we don’t want to read about when it means ‘son’ or ‘grain’ or ‘field’ or a ‘soothsayer’ or a ‘cargo ship’. Right click the word and choose ‘Selected Text’ and then select the Hebrew word with the term ‘(Lemma)’ after it. (‘Lemma’ indicates that you are working with the dictionary form of the word. Selecting this form also makes use of the KeyLink look-up tables, if they are present.) Now click on ‘KeyLink Summary’.

Your exact results will vary depending on what lexicons you own, the order of your KeyLink preferences and whether or not you’ve downloaded the new texts and lexicons that are part of version 3.0 or, even better, the beta version 3.0a. But you should see something like this:

In the screenshot, I’ve clicked the plus signs next to the top three articles in order to be able to read their articles right in the summary report. You can see that we’ve landed on the correct homograph on the expanded examples. (Some of the other lexicons don’t have look-up tables yet, so they still link on spelling alone. Most of the prestigious lexicons have completed look-up tables for version 3.0a, but other lexicons are still works in progress.) You can navigate directly to the lexicon articles themselves just by clicking on the title of the lexicon. That way you can follow any links in the lexicon, or read surrounding articles, or execute searches against the lexicon.

Clicking the word ‘More’ will expand the report to execute more KeyLinks further down your list of KeyLink preferences.

That’s it: the KeyLink Summary is a simple, one-purpose tool for quickly surveying your lexicons.

Weights and Measures Calculator

| Thu, August 10, 2006 | Training

One of the features of Libronix DLS that was completely redesigned for version 3.0 was the weights and measures calculator.

Click on the thumbnail to take a look at an example. This example was taken from Revelation 14:20, where we’re given an image of a horse-high river of blood running 1,600 stadia. Ick, right? But enquiring minds want to know, just how icky are we talking about here? So I click ‘Tools | Bible Data | Weights and Measures’ and enter ‘1,600 stadia’. I could have used ‘stade’, ‘stades’, ‘stadion’, ‘stadioi’ or ‘furlong’ if I wanted. A stade is an eighth of a mile, but the length of a mile in Roman times was different than today’s standard mile. One of the really cool features of the new calculator is that it doesn’t assume it knows which stade length you want, nor does it assume you know that there are two lengths to choose from. Instead, it displays both.

Note the second line of the results: 1.00 stades (Roman) = 0.92 furlongs (modern). (A furlong is another name for an eighth of a mile, the report just happens to call the modern measurement a furlong, though as you can see, it is savvy enough to show furlongs when you ask for stades.) So right away you are informed that the measurement for a stade will be different depending on which stade you are interested in (Roman or modern), even if you didn’t know there was a choice!

Beneath the conversion formula between the related measurements, the report is split into columns, one column for each measurement that 1,600 stadioi might be referring to. From here, it is easy to look up conversions to other measurements of length, such as kilometers or miles. Again, each list shows ‘miles (Roman)’ as distinct from the modern standard ‘mile’. 1,600 Roman Stadioi equals 200 Roman miles, but only 183.93 modern standard miles.

Take a look at the next example. Here I entered 1 shekel, but a shekel can be a measurement of weight or of money. And when it is money, it might be gold or silver. (The modern Israeli shekel is not listed here, though that would have been an interesting addition to this table.) Note how two different charts of two different colors make it easy to separate out the different kinds of shekels. Again, you didn’t need to know that there are three different things a shekel could refer to in order to see the conversion charts.

Trying to fathom (pun intended) modern equivalents to ancient measurements is always a bit difficult, and exact precision often eludes us. But with Logos Bible Software, getting to reasonable estimates just got easier than ever.