It’s the fourth week of Easter, and that means another great training video featuring some of our apologetic resources in Verbum. Today we’ll be looking briefly at the cited by tool while highlighting our Faith Basics resources (15% off with the coupon code FaithBasics2013 this week only!), a resource that integrates seamlessly with any one of our base packages.  There’s only three more weeks left in the Easter Sale, so use the coupon code VerbumEaster2013 and get 15% off any of our base packages today!

Today’s guest post is by Isaiah Hoogendyk, language editor for the content innovation department.

I have previously written articles discussing new or existing features in the desktop version of Verbum. Today I’d like to talk about the surprising power of the Verbum iOS app for iPhone and iPod touch (with parenthetical Android notes).

A couple of months ago, I was attending the fourth class of the Catechetical Certification Program, and I learned about a Greek word that’s used in the New Testament and mentioned in the Catechism: parrhesia (keep reading if you want to know how this word is pronounced). Because it’s actually transliterated Greek, I was curious if I could easily figure out the original Greek word behind parrhesia. From there, could I also learn about its meaning and usage in the New Testament, or where it’s used in the Catechism? Furthermore, could I do all this from my Verbum app?

First, I started by typing the word in the search box. The top two hits indicate that the original Greek is παρρησία. The second hit is one that should come up for anyone with the Verbum Scripture Study and above base package. “TLNT” stands for the Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, an excellent resource for doing original-language studies of the Scriptures, especially if you want to learn more about the history of a word’s usage, both in and out of the Bible. But importantly, it transliterates the Greek and Hebrew, so there’s no need to be proficient in those original languages.

After selecting that hit, I went back a page to find the beginning of the entry.  Here, I tapped and held “παρρησία” and then selected the “Look Up” (“Info” on Android) button.

After tapping “Look Up,” I tapped the button to jumpstart a Bible Word Study on “παρρησία.”

Here I can easily learn the meaning of parrhesia: “confidence.” (I can also get a quick pronunciation by tapping the speaker icon next to the word: “par-ray-see-uh.”)

Scrolling down, I find a colorful graphic that shows the different ways the Greek word is translated in the RSVCE. Tapping the reddish section shows the passages that translate παρρησία as “bold, boldly, boldness,” including how the apostles Peter and John had parrhesia when healing a cripple at the Temple gate and subsequently preaching the Gospel.

The last task I wanted to accomplish was to find this word in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Back in the Search panel, my 10th hit (I. “We Dare to Say”—CCC) points to a wonderful paragraph on the Lord’s Prayer:

This power of the Spirit who introduces us to the Lord’s Prayer is expressed in the liturgies of East and of West by the beautiful, characteristically Christian expression: parrhesia, straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved. (CCC 2778)

This is in reference to the priest’s prayer in Mass before saying the Our Father: “At the Savior’s command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say . . .”

And so, during this Lenten season, during which we are called not only to fast and give to the needy, but also to pray, let us dare to call God “Abba Father,” knowing that he provides for our every need, and that he loves each one of us and calls us his children. With this parrhesia, let us “draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need,” as it says in Hebrew 4:16. And may we, with all παρρησία, be living witnesses of the Good News of Jesus Christ, in a world that so desperately needs a Savior.

Calculating the liturgical calendar is a somewhat complex affair. The General Roman Calendar is basically made up of a calendar of Sundays and weekdays calculated relative to Christmas and Easter, an overlapping calendar of saints’ feasts that land on fixed dates, and a system for determining what to do when occasions coincide.

What is today? Well, that depends on the day of the week, how far we are from Easter, and how far we are from Christmas. Also, do we celebrate anyone’s feast day today? Is it a memorial, feast, or solemnity? Simple enough, but, oh, is Epiphany shifted to Sunday where you live? If so, did that Sunday land on January 7 or 8? . . .

The algorithm for forecasting the calendar can thus get rather complicated. We’ve just shipped an update to the lectionary (available in all base packages) to better account for a few of the more obscure wrinkles that you might not have known about.

Sliding Solemnities

The rules of precedence dictate that nothing outranks Holy Week, Easter Week, and the Sundays of Lent, Advent, and Easter. But the feast days that the Church ranks as Solemnities are important enough that rather than just skipping them when they get trumped, we move them to the closest available day.

The foremost example of this is the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Most years, the Annunciation is celebrated on March 25, but sometimes, when Easter is on the early side, March 25 lands within Holy Week or Easter Week. When this happens, as it does this year, the Annunciation is shifted to the Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter. (Note that it’s possible that this placement isn’t just a coincidence. It was a common belief that the Lord was conceived and died on the same day of the year. See The Spirit of the Liturgy, page 105ff.)

When Easter is very early, the Solemnity of St. Joseph can be bumped as well. This last occurred in 2008, when the Church decided that, unlike the Annunciation, St. Joseph would be shifted backward to the Saturday before Holy Week. This won’t happen again until 2035.

The feasts of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and (more rarely) the Birth of John the Baptist can also be affected thus. Assuming that the Church continues to handle these consistently and doesn’t change up the rules as she did in 2008, we can accurately predict them into the future.

St. Andrew the Biannual

The feast of St. Andrew can fall either before or after the First Sunday of Advent. Consequently, it has the curious property of being able to occur more than once in a single liturgical year. For instance, it occurred on the Wednesday after the First Sunday of Advent in 2011, and again on the Friday before the First Sunday of Advent of 2012. Unfortunately, last year we didn’t realize our algorithm hadn’t accounted for this possibility until it was too late. This is now corrected for 2012 and will be correct the next time this occurs in 2016–2017.

Caveat Lector

With these corrections, I believe that our lectionary resource accounts for all predictable occurrences in the general calendar, and for the adaptations found in the current US lectionary (though we’ll continue to proof it against the annual calendar issued by the USCCB). Where the US adaptation differs from the general calendar, both are given as options. There remain, of course, things like local variations and options that we can’t account for, so clergy and others preparing for the public celebration of the liturgy would always be wise to consult the ordo and official liturgical text for their territory, diocese, or religious order.

Other Lectionary Improvements

While we were improving our handling of the calendar, we corrected user-reported typos and added a couple of other minor enhancements to the linking within the lectionary as well. First, when there is more than one option for the day, we’ve added a link below the heading to make this more visible. Second, in the list of readings at the top, we’ve added links to the headings that take you down to the text of the reading below. This should make figuring out all the options for the day and navigating around the readings a bit easier.

These are all mostly minor improvements, but enhancing our liturgical resources and getting the data right is a top priority for the development of Verbum—a necessary foundation for deeper integration of the Church’s liturgical use of Scripture into the tools and features of the software.

The discipline of regular spiritual reading is a great way to enrich your Lenten observance. Between different methods of lectio divina, Lenten devotionals, and spiritual classics, there are a lot of options available. Logos can help you deepen your reading, and even keep you on track with a reading plan.

Let’s say you just want to follow along with the daily Mass readings this Lent. If you open up the Lectionary from the homepage sidebar, you get a simple layout with the Lectionary and the Bible.

You can just stick with this to focus on the text itself, or you can use a few tools to dig into your library for the spiritual insights of others.

One important but often overlooked tool is “Cited By”, located in the “Lookup” section in the lower right of the Tools menu. Cited By is the easiest way to search open resources, collections, and series for a reference. When you open it, you may find that, by default, all of your collections are listed, but if you want to focus your search, open the panel menu and, under “Show Collections,” uncheck everything you don’t want.

Here, I’ve limited the Cited By search to the Church Fathers collection and a collection I created containing the volumes in the Catholic Spirituality Collection. I’ve also set both the Bible and the Cited By tool to Link Set A in the panel menu of each. This means that the Cited By tool will follow along with the Bible, so that when I click the reference for the next reading, the Cited By tool will automatically be populated with citations from the Church Fathers and classics of Catholic spirituality.

Finally, a good commentary or set of notes can be very helpful for reading the Scriptures. I find that the Navarre Bible (Old Testament and New Testament) can be a particularly good choice for devotional reading, since it tends to not just comment on technical or theological issues in the text, but to draw out insights for one’s spiritual life, often quoting the Fathers and saints of the Church.

If you open a volume of the Navarre Bible and set it also to Link Set A, it will follow along (automatically jumping to the correct volume) with the Bible and Cited By. I’ve also dragged the tab down to the lower half of the middle panel so it displays below the Bible.

If you want to be able to go back this layout, open the Layouts menu in the upper right, click “Save as named layout,” and give it a name, such as “Lenten Mass Readings.” Then you can easily go back to it via the Layouts menu if you’ve been working on something else.

Of course, the challenge of this particular kind of task in Logos (as in so many other aspects of life today) is maintaining focus in the face of seemingly infinite information, but a simple layout like this that you can quickly open up can help—especially if you establish a routine and order of reading, starting with the Scriptures, then moving to the commentary, etc., that allows you to slow down without flitting from one thing to the next.

Today, at Mass, the Church prays Psalm 51, the Miserere. As the Navarre Bible points out, in the liturgy, Psalm 51 is “the penitential psalm par excellence,” so it’s not a surprise that we hear it several times at Mass in Lent and on Fridays at Lauds. Acknowledging our sins, let us make its prayer our own—offering to God our hearts, contrite and humbled.