Every once in a while, questions pop up around the internet concerning the Daily Office Lectionary. These questions tend to be things like:

• How much of the Bible actually gets read?
• What parts get skipped?
• Why do we skip the parts we skip?

These are all very good questions.

I started to address some of these, particularly drilling into the “why we skip what we skip” at the narrative level in my short-lived YouTube series Liturgical Look Forward.

However, I’ve been seeing more of these questions raised, particularly the bigger picture, full-content, book-level questions recently.

In the next few weeks, I shall tackle these questions directly, and answer them from a statistical point of view. We’ll begin with:

• An overview of the scope with questions like:
  • exactly how much Bible is there, and
  • what’s the best way to get a handle on it?
• Daily Office Lectionary, Year 1
  • What are we reading?
  • How much of it do we read?
  • What repetitions are there?
  • What is the actual percentage of Bible Coverage?
• Daily Office Lectionary, Year 2
  • What are we reading?
  • How much of it do we read?
  • What repetitions are there?
  • What is the actual percentage of Bible Coverage?

My plan is to continue into how this lectionary compares with other Daily Office lectionaries including:

• The 1943 Daily Office Lectionary
• The 1928 Daily Office Lectionary
• The English Proposed 1922 Lectionary
• etc.

I confess to having an ulterior motive here…

The high school where I have been happily teaching for the past two years—and where my elder daughter attended—has closed. As a result, I find myself back on the job market. While I loved teaching in that environment, a majority-minority Catholic all-girls high school that mixed suburban and urban girls across the ethnic and economic spectrum together—the pay sucked. As we’re facing a daughter heading into college next year, I’m looking to head back into the corporate world, and am brushing up on my data analysis and manipulation skills.

What does that mean for you? It means statistics and pretty pictures! So—stay tuned for those. I am also hoping to get back into the blogging and writing. (it’s amazing how much free time teaching high school all day sucks up what with planning and grading and all…) The Second Series of the Prayer Book Studies series is on the cusp of being done, and once it is, I am trying to get solid progress going forward on the long-promised Psalming Christ!