Thursday, October 19, 2017

Bible in a Year: Your Daily Encounter with God

Description:
It’s a mountaintop experience if you can open up the Word of God. It’s majestic, it’s beautiful, it’s breathtaking. It gets us out of our day-to-day and into God.


The simple format of this premium, leather-bound version of Bible in a Year will keep you engaged as you make your way through all 73 books of the Bible.


Commentaries are written by renowned Catholic biblical scholars and theologians, including Dr. Tim Gray, Dr. Mark Giszczak, Dr. John Sehorn, Dr. Scott Powell, Dr. Michael Morris, Dr. Elizabeth Klein, and Deborah Holiday. 



• Each day features three readings, one each from the Old Testament, Wisdom Literature, and the New Testament 
• Insightful daily reflections are written by leading theologians to facilitate deeper meditation and encounter with God through his Word 
• Revised Standard Version of the Bible – Second Catholic Edition


This beautiful, leather-bound book is a perfect gift for any occasion!  (It is also available in a paperback edition.)  



Thanks to John and Chris for alerting me to this new edition, which will be released at the beginning of Advent.  More info can be found here.  The also have a sample which you can see here.  This is a product of the Augustine Institute.

9 comments:

Jeff S. said...

It says "as you make your way through all 73 books of the Bible".
Does that mean you'll read every verse of every chapter of each of the
73 books, or does it mean you'll read something in every book of the Bible but not everything?

Thomas said...

Ignatius press has this book at 6x9 inches and the page numbers listed say there are 1344 pages, so it looks like it could be the whole bible.

Matthew Doe said...

I always find these things rather pointless. Why not simply publish a reading plan? Or, indeed, a "value added" reading plan with reflections, prayers, and quotations from spiritual authors?

I have tried creating my own reading plan, actually along similar lines to this one (three readings per day: OT history, OT wisdom & poetry, NT). In my day job I do lots of scientific programming, so I was trying to make a truly "optimised" reading plan. For example, try to keep the character count as constant as possible across different sessions, arrange the reading order so that the maximum number of cross-references get covered, etc.

I found the two key problems are: (1) It is difficult to obtain electronic copies of the bible that are ready for analysis with a computer (basically, clean ASCII with separated out, or unequivocally detectable, marks like verse numbers). (2) Semantic chunking of the bible is difficult. Basically, the computer does not know things like "these three verses should be included because they finish the story". Actually, people have done the semantic chunking already - remember all these "headers" that publishers tend to insert into their bibles, breaking up the bible text into parts? That's basically what is needed.

So, if someone has access to a "clean" electronic version of the Catholic bible, that has aggressive "semantic chunking" (many subdivisions added, and these are available in the electronic version), and ideally also all full set of cross-references (again, available in the electronic version), then I would love to hear about it...

Ronny Tadena said...

Matthew,

What you describe sounds a lot like the features provided in the Verbum bible software program. They have access to many different bible translations, both Catholic and otherwise, and give you the option to create reading plans broken up across whatever sections or length of time you could want.

I spent the last three years with the software constantly tinkering with how many different sections (ie history, wisdom writing, prophets, Gospel, NT letters) what duration of time, (ie OT/NT in a year or maybe OT/NTx2 in a year etc.) I even started mixing in different translations based on the sections, (ie Douay for Gospels, KJV for Psalms, JB for NT letters etc) honestly it was a real time sink. In the end I just went back to a physical bible, reading one ch of historical, one ch poetry/wisdom, one Prophetical, one Gospel ch, and one NT ch. The length does vary somewhat from day to day, but it just feels a lot less complicated. Plus I spend more time focusing on the reading than trying to think up yet another way to "optimise" my reading plan.

It was fun to tinker though, so I'd recommend the software if you'd like to try it out!

Matthew Doe said...

Verbum (the Catholic version of Logos) is way overpriced in my opinion. I would pay about a fifth of their current price for their packages, grudgingly, and would consider about a tenth of it to be a good deal.

Anyway, it is certainly correct that it is easier to "just read" than messing about with reading plans. However, it is even easier to "just not read". One has to find motivation where one may, and as someone with a technical background this sort of thing can keep me proximate to the bible at least...

Steve Molitor said...

Like Matthew, I would also like to find computer parseable versions of the bible. I'm a computer programmer and there are interesting things one could do with an easily parseable, public domain version the bible.

Project Gutenberg has the KJ available for download in plain text and other parseable formats: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10. No chapter headings though.

I'd love to find others: if any knows of any please let us know!

Thanks!

Steve

rolf said...

These one year Bibles are popular with Protestant publishers, I see them in the bookstore all the time! I think that it is a good thing to have one that is in a Catholic edition (RSV-2CE) with all 73 books! Plus it offers a Scripture refection each day. And it sounds like it might be offered in a genuine leather option! This is a good thing!

Anonymous said...

rolf,

There already is a Daily Reading Bible in the RSV/CE. It used to be published by OSV if I remember correctly. I have one.

Amazon (none available): https://www.amazon.com/My-Daily-Catholic-Bible-RSV-20-Minute/dp/B001TKCNRI/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1508815893&sr=8-8&keywords=my+daily++catholic+bible

Ebay has some: https://www.ebay.com/itm/My-Daily-Catholic-Bible-RSV-20-Minute-Daily-Readings-/222657996809?hash=item33d7736809:g:bMMAAOSw7XBY8SKJ

vladimir998

Anonymous said...

I used to have a very simple plan for reading the Bible every year. I would read three chapters of the Old Testament and one chapter of the New Testament. That got me through the O.T. in a little less than a year (358 days) and the N.T. 1.4 times a year.

After a few years, I got tired of following such a regimented plan and was content to get my Bible reading from the Offices I pray everyday.

Now I’m using Paul Thigpen’s: My Daily Catholic Bible, which has the benefit of being in an e-book format, which is how I do most of my reading these days. Older eyes like adjustable fonts.

Pax,
John