McGlasson on Hughes Oliphant Old's The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church

I noticed that Logos have Hughes Oliphant Old's 7 volumne tome on pre-pub and thought I'd most comments that Paul McGlasson made on the volume:

The horizontal and vertical dimensions of Christian proclamation are held together best in the expository sermon. In his comprehensive history of preaching, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Hughes Oliphant Old has sought to recover the brilliance and excitement of the grand tradition of Christian proclamation. His multivolume survey clearly lays before the contemporary reader the vast range of powerful and exciting voices from the Christian past, with the corresponding challenge that those voices present for the future. Old has done the universal church an enormous service. Above all, his endeavor to show the magnificent reach of proclamation in every time and place across the face of the globe sets a hight standard for the work of the coming generations. In this introduction, Old charts what he sees as the primary forms of proclamation that ebb and flow across the years: the expository sermon, evangelistic preaching, catechetical preaching, festal preaching, and prophetic preaching. There is no doubt that Old has accurately captured the wide range of preaching in this classification. Throughout the volumes, he is able to show the various forms shaped and reshaped  according to the changing resources of the church. Furthermore, every working minister knows that the form and function of sermons occasionally differ according to changing circumstance. Surely any real progress in contemporary proclamation will depend upon a fresh recovery of the grand tradition that Old describes.

P. McGlasson, Invitation to Dogmatic Theology: A Canonical Approach, 168-169.

Dear Logos

Dear Logos,

I've just spent the past four days tinkering around with your Andersen-Forbes syntactically tagged Hebrew Bible and I have to say: I love it. Honestly, I'm such a geek I have to force myself to take a day off on Sundays. This programme is seriously enriching the way I understand Biblical Hebrew and the way I deal with difficulties in exegesis. I couldn't imagine owning a Bible software programme without it ...

There are two things I'd love to see come out at some point in the future:

1. The database could do with having its semantic tags refined. I think if I had a sophisticatedly tagged semantic database I'd run the risk of never getting off my computer. And I used to hate computers at school! Oh, and given the subjectivity involved in all things semantic and syntactical, perhaps you could get different scholars to make their own contributions. You could then further refine your search engine by adding a button for toggling between different search modes, depending on what scholar we like best.
2. And while we're at it, why not create a poetically tagged database? Again, you could just ask someone like Fokkelman and a few of his competitors to tag the Bible according to colon, strophe, and stanza length, metrical counts, assonance, cases of metonymy and various types of parallelism. Then we could do things like search for cases where subjects and objects cross strophe boundaries, or where particular types of parallelism tend to accumulate. Ooh, I tremble at the thought of it ...

I'm sure that none if this would be particularly difficult to do. After all, Andersen and Forbes have only been working on their project since the '70s. In fact, if you ever do get these projects off the ground, I generously offer to receive a review copy of each programme.

Yours sincerely,

Phil.

Another mouth-watering offer from Logos

Logos have come up with yet another mouth watering pre-pub offer which just makes me yearn ... for money to be able to afford it all! This time its a large section of the so-called Continental Commentary Series, though I'm not entirely sure why it's called "continental" and not just "German" (does "German" critical scholarship raise too many negative associations?).

So anyway, it costs $300 dollars instead of the Logos sale price of $600. If there is a random philanthropist out there looking for a budding Old Testament scholar to support, leave a note in the comments and I'll send you my back details.

Update: Esteban of Vox Stefani has this to say in response:

[D]oes "German" critical scholarship raise too many negative associations?

Yes. Plus, André LaCocque is French!

A free commentary on Matthew/Mark!

Honestly, I couldn't believe this when I read it. I figured there's got to be snag. But no, Logos are in the process of preparing a new commentary series, the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary (9 vols). In order to get publicity they are simply offering the commentary of Matthew/Mark for free. Go here for the details. I've downloaded it and it looks like it'll be a useful supplement to my growing digital library. One of the authors is the blogosphere's very own Darell Bock (who also edits the whole). I'm not much a New Testament person, but I've been told by Chris Tilling that he's a highly respected scholar. I look forward to reading what he has to say about prophecy and fulfilment in Matthew!

By the way, I really am trying not to sound like a salesman here. It just goes to show that the difference between form and content is not something that can be identified by genre alone.