Lectionary Calendar: Online and Downloadable

Here is a neat, free offering from Concordia Publishing House, the publishing house of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. They call it the CPH Pocket Diary Calendar.

The CPH Pocket Diary is now available as an Internet-based or downloadable calendar file. This file includes the complete set of occasions from the Lutheran Service Book Three-Year Lectionary, including descriptive paragraphs for all Commemorations, pericopes for dates in the Church Year, and additional reminders and important dates.

Basically it's a Google Calendar which you can view online, but directions are also provided for downloading it into Microsoft Outlook or iCal for Macs. If you sync a PDA using either of these programs, then you can get into that as well. I simply added it to my own Google Calendar where it is easy to turn on/off. (HT: Cyberbrethren)
BTW, this lectionary is essentially the Revised Common Lectionary with occasional variants or alternative readings. If you have questions about a particular lectionary reading, I always go to Jenee Woodward's incredible Textweek site.

Logos 3: Always something more...

The Logos Blog recently posted a notice about some new training videos they have posted online. I find these to be well done and quite helpful. They also have been a good way for me to discover more of Logos' capabilities. So, after looking at some of the videos and the Top 20 New Features of Logos 3, I have some observations:

• I had not been aware of the History (Go > History) feature. That is very helpful for tracking my work.
• I've been working with the visual markups. I like how easy the Visual Markup Palettes are to customize. While highlighting text in a variety of ways is great, the main reason I have to use it is to work through Synoptic parallels. One would think, however, that this would work best using one of the Parallel Passages and Harmonies resources like the Aland Synopsis, but markup is not allowed in that resource. That's a problem that I hope Logos addresses.
• The Bibliography tool (Tools > Library Management > Bibliography) is great. I also appreciate that one of the formatting options is the SBL Handbook of Style. I also really like the Remote Library Search (File > New > Remote Library Search). Yes, there are other ways to Google and find books and zotero has become a great tool for me, but this is a nice way to search a variety of national and especially theological libraries and then generate an exportable bibliography.
• I do regularly use the Lectionary Viewer. It's a great way to pull together the texts for an upcoming liturgical day. If you know some XML, it is also very nice to be able to create one's own lectionary schedule. (There is actually a lot one can do in Logos with some XML knowledge, such as the Jackson's Synopsis Tables.) One major problem, however, one that has been lamented on the Logos newsgroup, is that the Lectionary addin does not come with the Original Language Library, and it can't even be purchased as an addin.
• Some things that have sped up my work in Logos: The GO bar (= Quick Navigate Bar: right click on the top tool bar to enable it), the quick Find (CTRL-F in a resources), the Reference Browser (CTRL-R), and the Bible Speed Search.

Enough for now...

BibleWorks Lectionary Module Addin

Thanks to the work that Jenee Woodard does at The Text This Week (textweek.com) in providing lectionary resources (and for her permission to use the tables she created for years A, B, and C) and the amazing job that Pasquale Amicarelli does in converting html into BibleWorks modules, there is now a BibleWorks module that lists all the texts for Years A, B, and C of the Revised Common Lectionary. Within BW, it is a great way to see if and when a text is used. (The link will show up in the Resource Summary tab.) As a help file, it is very nice to have the weekly texts at your fingertip or just hover over them to get a quick idea of what the text is about.

Click HERE to download the module. (Unzip the files into your /databases directory. If necessary be sure to "unblock" the .CHM file.) I'll also pass the zip file along for Hanel and Darlack to post on the master list at The BibleWorks Blog. (ZIP file updated 2007.05.24 and now works correctly)