Faithlife

This week is the last chance to grab the Faithlife platforms’ free and deeply discounted volumes this month. All three have resources of interest here.

Faithlife has launched a new journal specifically for faculty, Didaktikos, which focuses on issues related to theological education.

The free book of the month from Logos Bible Software is David Garland’s commentary on Mark in the NIV Application Commentary series.

Mark Hoffman has updated his list of “free Bible software and trial versions” to include more recent additions, as well as a number of online resources.

Logos Bible Software supports reopening closed tabs both via panel menus and keyboard shortcuts.

Last month, Faithlife released a substantial web app for free to all Logos 7 users at https://app.logos.com/. But, users are advised that

at this point notes and highlights from the web app will not show up in the desktop app and vice versa. We’re working on creating this cross-platform syncing, but meanwhile you’re data, notes, and highlights are completely safe. Just keep in mind that as we make the transition to a new note system, you won’t be able to access your notes across all platforms.

...

This month, the Logos Bible Software site is highlighting Mark Noll’s The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Eerdmans, 2002), which is on sale for free. Similarly, the Verbum site is highlighting John Donahue and Daniel Harrington’s Mark volume in the Sacra Pagina series (Liturgical, 2002), which is available for free.

In addition to special offers around John Frame’s Salvation belongs to the Lord, Faithlife has some other noteworthy deals this month:

1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, is free via Verbum.
2. Irenaeus, Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, trans. J. Armitage Robinson, is $0.99 via Verbum as a companion deal to Irenaeus’s Against Heresies.
3. Via mobile ed, the Logos Pro Team has made available for free “a case study on Jonah 1:1-16, [through which] you’ll learn to Observe, Interpret, and Apply the Bible, an efficient and rewarding method you can use with any passage of Scripture.”

For the moment, visitors to the Logos Academic Blog site are being invited to subscribe via email. Email subscription unlocks a coupon code for a free copy of Mark Bowald’s Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics: Mapping Divine and Human Agency (Lexham, 2015). According to the book’s blurb,

What is the relationship between divine and human agency in the interpretation of Scripture? Differing schools of thought often fail to address this key question, overemphasizing or ignoring one or the other. When the divine inspiration of Scripture is overemphasized, the varied roles of human authors tend to become muted in our approach the text. Conversely, when we think of the Bible almost entirely in terms of its human authorship, Scripture’s character as the word of God tends to play little role in our theological reasoning. The tendency is to choose either an academic or a spiritual approach to interpretation.

...

At Logos Bible Software, this month’s free book is John Frame’s Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (P&R, 2006). According to the book’s blurb,

Beginning students of theology and church leaders looking for a theological refresher or teaching tool will welcome this remarkably clear introduction to the doctrines of Scripture. In an almost conversational style, Salvation Belongs to the Lord explores all the major biblical truths, explains key terms of systematic theology, and reflects on their implications and connections under the lordship of Christ.

...

Under the heading of “keeping your Greek and Hebrew skills sharp,” Mark Ward has some helpful advice about creating a serial biblical text in Logos Bible Software. For instance, if you create a series between BHS and NA28 and you have BHS open, you can type a New Testament passage in the go box and run straight there. Logos will treat the two resources as combined.

I’d had this done at one point, but then a subsequent software update disrupted that connection, and I’d been looking for a good way to reestablish the connection. Using Mark’s principles, I’ve now got serial relationships established among BHS, LXX (based on the current German Bible Society version of Rahlfs), and NA28 texts. The combination allows movement from any one of the texts to any other. For texts occurring in more than one of the resources (BHS, LXX), it looks like Logos may follow the priority system established via the library.

I’ve previously mentioned Michael Graves’s Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (Fortress, 2017).  The text is part of a projected 8-volume series. Logos Bible Software now has the first four volumes available for order via their pre-publication program. This includes

• Michael Graves, ed., Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church’
• Maria E. Doerfler and George Kalantzis, eds., Church and Empire
• Everett Ferguson and George Kalantzis, eds., Understandings of the Church
• Helen Rhee and George Kalantzis, eds., Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity

For more information about the half-series bundle or to order, see the Logos website.

Noteworthy freebies from Faithlife this month include:

• Bush, Beckham, and Due, Live in Liberty: The Spiritual Message of Galatians (Lexham, 2015)
• Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles (Parker, 1851)
• à Kempis, De la imitación de Cristo [ The Imitation of Christ, Spanish translation] (Subirana, 1908)

On the Logos Talk blog, Mark Ward has a helpful post about techniques for having a “spring cleaning” in your Logos Bible Software library.

The “collections” tool is especially helpful for associating different resources that logically go together for a given purpose (e.g., multiple sets of Patristic texts, multiple grammars).

The “hide resources” feature can also be quite useful if a base package or collection upgrade was more cost effective but included some resources that weren’t useful. For instance, my library has several different BHS texts, but I’ve hidden some of the older or unmaintained versions so that the main one is always and only the one that appears when I go to open that text in my library.

Recently, my Logos Bible Software homepage popped up this helpful video that explains searching with the “INTERSECT[S]” operator. I have largely missed the memo on this operator until now, but it is apparently a one-stop shop that will cover operations otherwise performed by “WITHIN”, “ANDEQUALS”, and “WITHIN 0 WORDS/CHARS”.

For April, Logos Bible Software’s “free book of the month” and discounted companion focus on Scripture in its cultural contexts.

The free text is Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brien’s Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (IVP, 2012). According to the book’s blub:

Brandon O’Brien and E. Randolph Richards shed light on the ways Western readers often misunderstand the cultural dynamics of the Bible. They identify nine key areas where modern Westerners have significantly different assumptions about what is going on in a text than what the context actually suggests. Drawing on their own cross-cultural experience in global missions, the authors show how greater understanding of cultural differences in language, time, and social mores allow us to see the Bible in fresh and unexpected ways.

...

March’s free and reduced-price companion volumes from Faithlife include:

Logos: Paula Gooder, This Risen Existence: The Spirit of Easter, and for $1.99, Dennis Ngien, Fruit for the Soul: Luther on the Lament Psalms Verbum: Bonaventure, The Life of Saint Francis, and for $0.99, Bonaventure, Mystical Opuscula

I haven’t yet found a dedicated Spanish “free book of the month” page, but the past several months have also had on offer a free Spanish resource. This month’s is, in translation, A. W. Pink’s Reflexiones paulinas: Estudios en las oraciones del Apóstol (vol. 1).

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Logos Bible Software, Logos is giving users $25 of credit toward orders at Logos.com before 1 March. Originally, the offer had been limited to credit toward a select number of resources but has since been expanded to “any order on logos.com.”

Combined with academic pricing, the offer coupon code, and $0.34, I was able to load up on:

This month, Logos Bible Software’s free book is N. T. Wright’s Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Christian Discipleship (SPCK, 1994). The book falls into two parts:

Part one outlines the essential messages of six major New Testament books—Hebrews, Colossians, Matthew, John, Mark, and Revelation. Part two examines six key New Testament themes—resurrection, rebirth, temptation, hell, heaven, and new life—and considers their significance for the lives of present-day disciples.

...

Noet has Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed free in the month of January. A taste of Maimonides’s ethical reflections is also available for $0.99.

Today, Logos Bible Software has Louis Berkhof’s Introduction to the New Testament for free.

Today’s Advent givaway by Logos Bible Software is Geerhardus Vos’s Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline.

For today’s Advent freebie, Logos Bible Software has volume 2, part 1 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics ( The Doctrine of God).

Today’s Advent giveaway at Logos Bible Software is the Cornerstone series commentary on the Pastorals and Hebrews with contributions by Linda Belleville, Jon Laansma, and Ramsey Michaels.

For Advent, Logos Bible Software is providing an additional and daily free or discounted book and media deal. Today’s book freebie is N. T. Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God(SPCK, 2005).

Logos Bible Software’s free book of the month for December is now live. The selection is Stephen Fowl’s Ephesians from the New Testament Library series. Also deeply discounted to $1.99 is Luke Timothy Johnson’s Hebrews volume from the same series.

Also available for free on the Logos platform via the Noet website is James Joyce’s Dubliners, with Joyce’s Ulysses coming in as the bonus deep-discount item at $0.99.

The folks at Lexham Press have kindly sent along a copy of Michael Heiser’s book, Supernatural. Heiser holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Languages from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Supernatural is a follow-up to Heiser’s previous volume Unseen Realm (Lexham, 2015; see Supernatural, 9). Both continue following up on themes Heiser previously explored in his doctoral thesis on “The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second Temple Jewish Literature” (2004).

November’s freebies at Logos Bible Software include several fine texts:

• Lutz, Matthew (Hermeneia, vol. 1)—with vol. 2 coming in at $1.99.
• Kuyper, Collected Works in Public Theology (excerpts)
• Caesar, Gallic War (Loeb Classical Library)

Update: Verbum now shows November’s free text too: Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on Advent and Christmas.

Yes, search, but also read, note, and remember.

The Faithlife platform family (e.g., Logos, Noet) now has Mortimer Adler’s 60-volume Great Books of the Western World (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990) available for preorder. It seems the information from Adler’s Syntopicon has also been embedded within this digital version of the series.