Daily Gleanings: Free Books (9 December 2019)

This month, Logos Bible Software is offering Jaroslav Pelikan’s Acts commentary from the Brazos series for free.

The deeply discounted companion volumes are from the same series and include Stanley Hauerwas’s Matthew and Peter Leithart’s 1 & 2 Kings.

Similarly, Verbum is offering for free the Matthew volume of Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea.

The deeply discounted companion volumes there are from the Fathers of the Church series and include Jerome’s and Hilary’s commentaries on Matthew.

Daily Gleanings: Free Books (25 November 2019)

This week is the last opportunity to grab the Faithlife platforms’ free and deeply discounted volumes this month. In a rare trifecta, all three have resources of interest here.

The free resources include:

  • R. T. France’s commentary on Mark from the New International Greek Testament Commentary series.
  • Jason Fout’s Fully Alive: The Glory of God and the Human Creature in Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Theological Exegesis of Scripture in the T&T Clark Theology series.
  • Leland Ryken’s J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life.

The companion discounted volumes are:

  • From the NIGTC: James Dunn’s volume on Colossians and Philemon and Anthony Thiselton’s on 1 Corinthians.
  • From von BalthasarA Short Primer for Unsettled LaymenLove Alone Is CredibleExplorations in Theology (vol. 1), and The Glory of the Lord (vol. 1).
  • Other biographies of C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

Daily Gleanings: Free Books (12 August 2019)

This month, Logos is giving away Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum’s God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015). The related titles on deep discount are:

  • James Hamilton Jr., God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2010).
  • Gerald Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology (Crossway, 2012).

For more information and to order, see Logos’s website.


This month, Verbum is giving away the Berit Olam series volume on 2 Samuel by Craig Morrison (Liturgical, 2013). The related titles on deep discount are the volumes on Genesis, Psalms, and 1 Samuel.

For more information and to order, see Verbum’s website.

Daily Gleanings: Software (30 July 2019)

Freedom introduces another new Chrome extension, Limit, saying,

Ever wish you could allot yourself a time limit on distracting websites? Limit allows you to set a time limit on any site you choose. It then gently notifies you that your time is almost up, so you can wrap up. Once you’ve reached your limit, if you try to visit the limited website you’ll be directed to Freedom’s calming Green Screen. It’s simple, effective, and free!

For more information and to install, see the Chrome web store.


Logos adds additional options for the double-click shortcut, as well as now including a triple-click shortcut.

Both types of shortcut allow lookup, search, and inline search options. The double click option allows a further word selection option, and the triple click option also allows paragraph selection.

For more details, see LogosTalk’s discussion of this feature.

Daily Gleanings (23 May 2019)

On theLAB, Dougald Mclaurin discusses how faculty can “work with librarians to help students write better papers.”

Similarly, see also these prior discussions about how to use your school’s library or other libraries near you.


From Brill:

With the publication of Keeping Watch in Babylon, Brill is happy to have published the 100th volume of the series Culture and History of the Ancient Near East.

To celebrate, we are offering a selection of free articles from some of the most successful volumes in the series. Access to these articles will remain free until July 31st, 2019.

The openly available articles are listed on the announcement page.

HT: AWOL

Daily Gleanings (22 April 2019)

Recently, I’ve worked through part of Augustine’s Enarrations [Expositions] on the Psalms. There’s much that’s of interest in this work in terms of Augustine’s theological exegesis.

But one of the minor features that repeatedly struck me was Augustine’s repeated discussion of “reins.”

In this reading, I used the English version from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. So, it’s an older translation, and I’d though it was for this reason that the word “reins” appears in what I thought to be some odd cases.

In any event, several instances made tolerable sense when interpreting “reins” as being like those for a horse. But then I came across a case where it was a bit too much of a stretch (27.14).

So I finally cracked a dictionary and noticed that “reins” actually has three meanings in English:1

  1. As a noun (either singular or plural) indicating some kind of tension mechanism,
  2. As a verb indicating the use of something like the noun form of the word,

These two uses I was familiar with, but the third was the surprise that made much better sense out of the NPNF translation of Augustine’s Enarrations:

  1. As a noun (plural only) indicating the kidneys, loins, or this area of the body as the seat of emotion.

In the end, the lesson is that it’s never a bad time to be open to broadening your English vocabulary. And especially when reading an older English text or translation, it’s often a good idea not to assume a particular meaning if something strikes you as odd. It never hurts to double check a dictionary for an older meaning(s) you might not previously have been aware of.


Logos 8.4 releases with a small host of updates and improvements.

There has been some difficulty getting accurate results from searching notes for Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic text in v.8.

It could be that I simply overlooked the mention of this fix among the descriptions of the changes included in this update. But this release does seem to have remedied these challenges as well.


  1. These entries are paraphrased from the 11th ed. of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary