As most of you know, I spend about half my waking hours on a train and am quite reliant on my mobile technology. So, when M asked me to outfit her Palm for her I did… Here’s the core tech suite that any Anglican running the Palm OS needs:
- Gonna need a Bible. This one’s my favorite. It’s intuitive (once you figure out the screen-tapping-scroll thing), free, and has a huge number of texts. The essentials are, of course,
- In English
- The King James 1611 with Apocrypha [A lot of us folk–especially in the South–cut on the KJV becuse of other types who use it. BUT, don’t forget that it’s *ours*! I mean, Lancelot Andrewes was head of the the Genesis – 2 Kings committee…]
- The Douay-Rheims with Apocrypha [This is the English translation of the Vulgate. If you’re working with medieval stuff, look to this.]
- The Revised Standard Version [Permission slip required for use]
- In other languages
- The Greek Bible [LXX and UBS version of the NT]
- The Hebrew OT
- The Vulgate
- Optional: Textus Receptus [I think it’s important to see what the church transmitted and it’s often very useful to compare this with the eclectic text to get a quick view of where exegetical complications may be that editors have attempted to smooth out over the years…
- Grab a reader because you’ll need…
- a BCP…
- then go and get the Daily Office for the month.
- Lastly, get the Church Pension Group’s liturgical calendar and news reader. If you synch with an active internet connection, it’ll pull the lastest stories from the ENS onto your Palm for you.
No Jerusalem Bible or New American Bible? KJV is still my favorite. The language is somewhat less clotted than Douay-Rheims. Glad you included the Deutero-canonical writings.
I’ve never looked hard at those two versions. I know they’re popular in Catholic circles but… I guess I do have a bit of a prejudice against the New Jersualem since it’s the English Translation of a French translation of the originals.
…And how could I *not* put in the Apocrypha? What good is a Bible that doesn’t contain the whole Bible? ;-)
Thanks, D. Here’s my question: do you know of any true reader that a person could buy? I mean, some machine that literally reads aloud the OT and NT passages-of-the-day? The thing I’m missing, as I drive along singing prayers, etc., in the mornings, are the lessons themselves. And I’d really like to add them in.
And if such a thing doesn’t exist, shouldn’t we invent it?
Hmmm…Office podcasts…
No, I’m thinking of a “Books on Tape” sort of thing, but interactive. The whole Bible that could be programmed ahead of time with all the readings for the year.
Hey! Maybe we could put all the Psalms and Antiphons in there, too, with the right tones for the right days and everything. And hymns for the various feast days, etc.
I guess that’s a sort of Podcast-sounding thing, but I’d want there to be more available, so you could sing the Office, and then listen to whatever else you wanted, too. See what I mean?
That’s intriguing. What mechanism would you use for it? Are you thinking a set of cds or something else?
Hmmm. Let’s see.
Here’s what I’d need: all the readings for all three years (which are, of course, just sections of a larger database – the Bible. We’d just need the Lectionary to be able to pick the readings correctly.
Then, we could also have the Psalms chosen properly, according to what Office it is. (We could even throw a Coverdale version in there, for people in a poetic mood.) The really interesting part would be the extras: hymns and antiphons, and the chanted versions of Psalms and responses. I guess we could have a variety of sources for that, maybe, and a person could decide? We’d have to provide documentation, so that people could follow along – but the best thing is that they could learn how to sing everything just by listening, over time.
We could call it Office-at-Home™. And then, people could maybe program other things into it, too – books of any sort, to be read aloud, or include other interesting features.
I guess this would have to be a stand-alone sort of thing, and you could throw stuff on there via CD, yes. My only question is whether we should have this done in machine voice, or have it done with human beings reading and singing. Is machine voice getting any better these days?
Of course, maybe the development expense isn’t worth it, since there are only about 4 of us who’d be interested….
;-)
This would be for the car, right? So it’d have to be or be able to put on a mobile unit. It sounds like–essentially–a multimedia database. Actual human mp3 files would be preferable to my mind. From a practical perspective a human would enter something like “Wednesday after Lent 4” which would tell the unit to start fetching certain files in a prescribed order. That doesn’t really sound all that complicated once all of the files were collected and appropriately tagged…
I know this is an old post, but it generated a question: you indicate that one should use the DRB if working with medieval subjects, what do you think about the revision of the DRB the Confraternity NT of 1941? Thanks!