Category Archives: Breviary

Breviary Preference Glitch

Surfacing briefly to comment on a problem…

I’ve been totally intending to post here a while. In fact, I’m planning a fairly lengthy answer on the good question posed (a bit ago now) on the relationship between “Anglo-Catholic” and “Rite I.” But it hasn’t gotten done.

I’m still spending a great amount of time and energy trying to finish off the “Great Cloud of Witnesses” for the SCLM’s submission to the Blue Book and I find myself unable to do much writing here until that gets done. (It’s an energy-sink kind of thing.)

In any case, I have put the RSV into the St. Bede’s Breviary. However, in modifying the Preferences to include that option, I have dislodged something somewhere that is causing issues for people who are trying to adjust said Preferences. I’m not sure what’s going on. I haven’t had much time to run it down,  nor am I replicating it, so I suspect it might be an iDevice issue. If people are experiencing this issue, please email me a sample of the broken url so I can see what is wrong with the preference code that it is trying to pass.

Anglican Breviary: Call for Volunteers

The Anglican Breviary Online project is now up and ready for material!

Right now, my focus is on getting in materials contained in lettered section C which contains the texts for the Temporal Cycle. As I get volunteers, I shall assign them a section of pages, roughly a week’s worth, to complete. Once that material is in and they request more, more will be given.

I have a page up that serves as a template: The Feast of the Holy Trinity and the Week After. It currently just contains the material for the Feast of the Holy Trinity—I’m still working on the “and the Week After”… However, there’s enough there to give you a sense of what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’re going to get there.

First, we are going for a “diplomatic transcription.” The term “diplomatic” means that we will be copying the style along with the text. Thus, we will be keeping stylistic features like rubrication, drop capitals, the use of small fonts, and the typographical marks like crosses and accented letters.

Second, we will also be retaining a textual link with the physical text by retaining the page number and column letter by section. Thus, you’ll notice at the very head of the page this: [page C442a]. This identifies that the text under it comes from the left-hand column (“a”, the right-hand column is “b”) of page 442 in section C. In other words, we’re including the page number from the top outside corner and including a column letter. Thus, you’ll find the column break a bit down the page after the Matins invitatory antiphon: [page C442b].

Third, the transcription will capture the exact text of the Anglican Breviary. I haven’t run across any mistakes or typos, but even if mistakes are found they will be preserved as is to ensure complete conformity. (We may put in footnotes if we do find any errors that need to be corrected.)

I had set it up so that users could create logins. However, when I sat down to finish things in my example section last night and put this post up, I discovered that I must have done something wrong in the settings as the site had been greatly over-run by bots and a host of bogus pages had been created by users who shouldn’t have had creation and edit privileges. Thus, I spent the time I’d planned to use finishing up the section, locking down and cleaning up instead. Naturally, I’m a bit wary of opening things up too much at the moment until I have a better handle on the MediaWiki admin functions…

So—if you have a copy of the Anglican Breviary and you would like to help, here’s how we’ll proceed for now:

1. Let me know that you’d like to help by sending me an email at the address over on the side-bar.

2. I’ll send you a note back with a week/set of pages to work on and log that on the Plan of Work page. Let me know how you want to be identified in this time before we get proper user names up and running. If you want to be anonymous, that’s fine—I’ll keep a private list too so I know who’s got what.

3. Transcribe the pages any way you’d like—typing it, scanning it and using OCR, reading it with a voice transcription system, whatever—into a basic text format. Please keep an eye out for the special characters:  † ℟ ℣ â ê î ô û. You can copy and paste them from here into the head of a working document or on a dedicated cut-n-paste sheet for easy insertion. For the star, we’re just using an asterisk (*).

4. Skip any psalms!! My editorial assistants have been entering the psalms over the summer. MediaWiki allows us to drop in sections of text from a template so we’re templating all of the psalms so that they will be completely uniform. Thus, if you come to a psalm in your transcribing—say, Psalm 72, simply type in {{Psalm 72}} and let it go at that. If there’s a column or page break in the psalm, just insert it after your psalm marking.

5. Send me the text once you’ve got the page range done, and my editorial assistants and I will take the basic text, apply the formatting, and put it online.

Once I’m confident that the user permissions are set up properly, I’ll open it up so that text can be put directly into pages by authorized users. Also at that point, I’ll ask for help from users with code experience who would like to help apply stylistic features.

This is a big effort, but I truly believe that it’s worth doing! If you can donate your time, I would greatly appreciate the help. If you can help provide financial support, that is gratefully accepted too—use the PayPal link here and designate it for the Anglican Breviary and you’ll be added to the Benefactors page.

Shifting Directions

Things Being Wrapped Up

After a very busy season, it’s time for an update…

The revision of my dissertation is done and has been sent off to Liturgical Press. The title I believe we’re going with is Reading Matthew with Monks: Liturgical Interpretation in Anglo-Saxon England. The first part focuses on early medieval monastic biblical interpretation centering on the role of the liturgy. In particular, I’m focusing on the Old English sermons and interpretive materials of Ælfric of Eynsham and his situation in the 10th century English Benedictine Revival. In the second part, I take four passages from Matthew, look at how four modern commentators have treated them, then look at Ælfric’s reading as illuminated by his liturgical context. Often, there is some really interesting interplay between the issues raised by the modern readers and the insights coming from Ælfric’s material. I don’t know exactly when it will be coming out, but I believe they’re looking at a late Spring 2015 release date.

I also just concluded a wonderful parish retreat at St. Andrew’s in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky, at the invitation of Fr. Jeff Queen that focused on the background, spirituality, and use of the St. Augustine’s Prayer Book. We had participants from around the Cincinnati metro area (including some readers of the blog!); I had a great time, received a lot of thoughtful questions and feedback, and I think we achieved what we wanted to do. That was capped off by a gracious invitation to preach at Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati, and got to meet and spend some time with Fr. Manoj Zacharia and Mthr. Sherilyn Pearce.

My work on this presentation is going to largely feed into my part of the address that David Cobb and I will be presenting at the North American Society of Catholic Priests Conference in Toronto in the next couple of weeks.

Of course, I couldn’t be in the area with touching base at Forward Movement, and successfully met the height requirement to enter Scott Gunn’s office, Home of the Golden Halo(TM). Work is ramping up on the manuscript I finished earlier in the year on the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer; I’ve been assigned editors and we’re currently talking about a possible April 2015 publication date, assuming no substantial delays. I’m very excited to work with both Richelle Thompson and Mthr. Melody Shobe on this project!

Of my major writing obligations for this season, that’s all but one… We’re still hard at work on A Great Cloud of Witnesses and have to get all of the revisions to collects and tags completed by the end of October when the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music will meet to finalize our Blue Book submission. As a subcommittee, we’ve revised 75 collects and I’m still going through more. Once that work is off my plate I’ll be able to breath a big sigh of relief!!

Now—M has informed me that writing a book is like doing a full Ironman triathlon, but not necessarily for the reason you might think. You might think that she’s referring to the fact that’s a long difficult haul that involves a lot of focus and sustained effort in multiple disciplines like research and writing. While that’s true, that’s not what she has in mind. No, she’s thinking of something else… What you may not realize if you don’t participate in these sports is the huge volume of training time necessary just to complete an Ironman, which is compounded if you actually want to be competitive in one. For instance, it’s entirely normal to do a 50-mile bike ride immediately followed by a 10-mile run on a weekend. (And that’s a fairly moderate workout.) Activities like this take a while…  Due to the time and energy demands that this kind of training takes, most Ironman families & spouses insist that their favorite athlete can only compete every two or three years—because family life can’t sustain them more often than that! Thus, I’ve been banned from writing books for the next year or two in the interest of family harmony.

 Things Ramping Up

Instead of writing books, I plan to head back over to the digital side for a while. Over there, we’ve got a couple of big things on the horizon.

  • More Attention to the St. Bede’s Breviary! The SBB has languished a bit while I’ve been doing all of this writing. I’ve been trying to fix the occasional errors as they pop up, but haven’t done a lot of work with it otherwise. I am now in the final stages of a custom edition for the Companions of St. Luke, an Episcopal Benedictine group. Up next is fulfillment of a request from a good friend of the breviary to include the Revised Standard Version of the Scriptures. I also have some ideas around some new visual elements and an overhaul under the hood. (For my fellow coders out there, I’m moving to a fully object-oriented design.)
  • More Energy to the Anglican Breviary! Although I’ve not said much about it, the Anglican Breviary Online site is up and material is slowly being added. I drafted both Lil’ G and H as editorial assistants and put them to work entering psalms. Since our family vacations hit in August and with the commencement of school, this work has been on hold. I’m ready to pick that up again. I’ll be issuing a call for volunteers shortly once I’ve worked out MediaWiki’s edit permissions. Donations towards this work are gratefully accepted, and names will be listed on the Benefactors page. Gifts can be made in honor and memory of loved ones as well.
  • More Items To Be Added to the Anglican Gradual & Sacramentary! David White, the editor and architect of the Anglican Gradual & Sacramentary has completed his corrections to the files. I’ll be uploading these to the yet-rather-rudimentary page soon. I do intend to put them all into a PDF format, but I don’t see that happening until the beginning of 2015.

So—that’s where we stand on things. Lots to do; only 24 hours in a day to get them done! With help and lots of prayer, I’m confident we’ll get there…

Electronic Anglican Breviary Project on Kickstarter

Today I have officially launched a Kickstarter project to convert the Anglican Breviary to digital form and to make it available as a completely free web application.

For those not familiar with it, the Anglican Breviary is one of the great liturgical works that has come out of the Catholic movement in Anglicanism. 30 years in the making, it was produced in the year 1955 by the Frank Gavin Liturgical Foundation. Like all breviaries, it contains the traditional hours of prayers of the Western Church: the long early morning Matins office with its readings from the Church Fathers interspersed with psalms; the main offices for the hinges of the day, Lauds and Vespers; the daytime offices of Prime, Terce, Sext, None; the bedtime office of Compline; and the brief Capitular office that includes the martyrology recounting the saints to be remembered. Built on the structure of the Roman Catholic Divine Office according to the usage established by Pius X, it utilizes the Scriptures of the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalms of the Book of Common Prayer to place these prayer hours within an Anglican idiom.

For more information on the Anglican Breviary itself, visit its home site at www.anglicanbreviary.net, owned and operated by Mr. Daniel Lula, the man responsible for keeping it in print. We have corresponded regarding this initiative, and I have his blessing to proceed.

Transcribing and coding this roughly 2,000 page volume will take a lot of time and energy, so I have split it into three manageable parts.

  • The first will see the transcription of the Commons, and the bulk of the behind-the-scenes programming that makes everything work. Additionally, I will be creating a wiki where the transcriptions will be housed in a plain-text form.
  • The second portion will include all of the material in the Proper of Seasons.
  • The third portion will include all of the material in the Proper of Saints.

Completing this work will accomplish some goals very near and dear to my heart. Obviously, it will preserve the Anglican Breviary for future generations and will introduce it to a far wider audience than it has had in the past. Beyond this clear win, it will accomplish these additional goals:

  • The transcription will provide a web-based source of material from the Church Fathers relating to both seasons and saints that can be incorporated into a host of possible future platforms. I plan on pulling it into the St. Bede’s Breviary myself.
  • The transcription will give us the opportunity to study lectionary inter-relations in a way not possible before.
  • Should we seek to create an updated Anglican Breviary that meshes with the current liturgical calendar used by Anglican churches worldwide (as well as the Roman Catholic Church), a hefty chunk of the necessary material will already be available in a clean, machine-readable form.

My experience with the St. Bede’s Breviary (SBB) has shown me the downside of trying to accomplish such an effort on a voluntary basis; for the sake of my family, my efforts have to be focused on those projects that contribute to our income. As a result, the SBB has often received the last and least of my energy, stolen away in bits of time on weekend mornings before the girls get up. As a Kickstarter funded project, I would be able to engage the Anglican Breviary wholeheartedly, knowing that it was helping me provide for them in a much more direct fashion than the SBB!

I’m hoping to receive pledges to meet my goal by February 5th. That’s not a lot of time, but is—I think—sufficient time provided there is enough energy and will to get this carried out. Please check out the link and consider what you can do to support this project and ensure the future and flourishing of this gem of catholic Anglicanism!

Preferences Issues

It appears that some people are having issues with the new preferences at the breviary—others aren’t…

Obviously, this is my least favorite kind of error as it’s difficult to diagnose and replicate! I have put in some fixes this morning that may take care of the problem(s), but as I’m not experiencing them it’s hard to say if they’re fully fixed or not.

First, having javascript enabled for the site will remove a whole possible class of issues.

Second, if you are having an issue, telling me that there’s an issue is helpful, but even more helpful is including the url that’s breaking and what browser you’re using. Without this data, there’s nothing I can do to troubleshoot the problem.

New Preferences at the Breviary

The new preferences page and underlying code has been rolled out at the breviary.

There have been a few additions and some cosmetic changes, but most of the changes have occurred under the hood.

As always, I’ve tested it as well as I can, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some errors still slipped through. If you find any, I’m sure you’ll let me know…

The other substantive change is a new option in Morning Prayer that will allow you to substitute the Great Litany in for the ending of the Office with a click (or restore the usual with a click if you decide against it).

iDevice Preferences Solution

Finally, I think I’ve figured out the problem with the iDevice preferences problem with the breviary!

The issue seems to be the way in which the Safari/Webkit browsers implement the Javascript I was working with; I’ve tightened that up and things should work now.

So—if those using iPhones/iPads could check the functionality of this page: http://stbedeproductions.com/breviary/test/combined_preferences.php and let me know whether the preferences stick and work when you click the “Pray with your new settings” link, I’d appreciate it!

iOS Users: Breviary Update 2.0

Page proofs for the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book are finally done and off to the publisher. SCLM work is taking up some time as well, but I stole the morning to work on the breviary preference problem and I *believe* I have it solved. So—users of iOS devices (and other devices), give this a try: http://stbedeproductions.com/breviary/test/combined_preferences.php

Once you save your preferences (and a pop-up should show you a long string of numbers), a “Pray with your new preferences” link will show up under the button and should take you to a functional breviary experience. So far, it works in my desktop Chrome browser, on the Kindle Fire, but my Android phone’s browser doesn’t like it and inserts a string of “undefined”s where they shouldn’t be. (That’ll be the next hurdle.)

Give it a shot—let me know what happens in the comments!

Breviary Update 1.5

Thanks to those of you who tried your iOS devices (and Windows 8 devices) against my attempted solution. Needless to say, it failed the test… Interestingly, while the solution worked on my Kindle Fire, I likewise failed to get a satisfactory result on my Android phone.

I’m looking into some of the newer browser capabilities/technologies that came along with the HTML5 standard and, after reading and playing a little with the cache capability, I’ve discovered that what I’m looking for is actually the local storage function. Again, it’s a fairly new technology and I don’t know how widely it’s implemented. However, I think there’s a good chance that most mobile devices should be able to handle it.

I was trying to figure out how to make it work with my code and came to the realization that I’m using a lot of server-side code to create client-side implementations. Not the best way to go… As a result, I need to retool several functions and transform them from (server-side) PHP into (client-side) JavaScript. Luckily, the syntax between the two is similar enough that this shouldn’t be too difficult.

So—I’ll have another test for you modern mobile users in a little bit, that (hopefully) will be more successful than the last!

[Update: Actually, before I recode everything, let’s see if this will do what I hope it will… iOS/mobile users, please try the “Save your Preferences” button at the bottom of this page: http://stbedeproductions.com/breviary/test/combined_preferences.php

There should be a pop-up mentioning local storage and perhaps a string with gibberish in it. I’ll fix the gibberish if this is actually going to work… Thanks again!]

Breviary Update

Ok—so I’ve been working all this past week to get the preferences re-coded for the breviary, and I think I’ve finally accomplished most of what I’ve set out to do. There are a few other things I’d like to add, but this is what we have for the moment…

There have been a variety of preference issues; most notable, iDevices have had real problems setting cookies. I’m testing a solution that uses JavaScript rather than PHP to set the cookies that I believe should be much more effective.

I’ve tested it on my laptop and on my Kindle and it works fine. However, lacking an iDevice, I can’t check it on them… If someone who does have an iDevice would like to help, I’ll provide the basic steps. I’ll warn you, though, doing this will alter the cookie and will change your settings over to the new settings in ways that won’t play well with the old ones. On the flip side, if this works, everything will shift over to the new settings and that won’t be an issue…

The steps are simple:

  1.  Go to this url (it’s my test space): http://stbedeproductions.com/breviary/test/combined_preferences.php
  2. Arrange your preferences however you like them. The sections slide for ease of use.
  3. At the bottom of the page is the “Save your Preferences” button. Click it when you’re done.
  4. When you click it, it should give you a long string of numbers, then tell you your preferences have been saved. Click “ok.”
  5. Then, in the footer under the button is a link entitled “pray the breviary.” Click the link.
  6. When the regular opening page loads, click the “Pray the Office” button under the “Use your default settings…” section.
  7. See if it worked like it ought to.
  8. Leave me a comment as to how it went.

That’s it—thanks in advance!