Day Zero: An Introduction to the Journey

My original intention was to post each day's chapter, and follow it with some discussion, perhaps drawn from a commentary, or simply my own observations. By the way, I will do my best to let you know which is which. After all, you can trust the commentaries! I am always at risk of making an error, so where you should consider the Fathers authoritative, please do not do the same for my offerings! <- Please note: What just happened is likely to happen at any time! I started out with one point to make, but without any warning, suddenly shifted to something else. In my classes, I always have to warn my students: sometimes, we may fall into a rabbit hole; other times, into a wormhole. How do you know the difference? If we can find our way back, it was a rabbit hole. If we have no clue as to where we are, or how we got there, it was a wormhole! For the record, what happened here was a rabbit hole.


Back to the point: posting the actual text. The problem with doing this is that any attempt to use any sort of contemporary text will invariably result in a copyright violation. So far, the only copyright-free versions are the venerable old King James Version (KJV), and the 1899 Douay-Rheims American Edition. Frankly, the KJV language is not the easiest to work with; and the Douay-Rheims isn’t much of an improvement. The Douay-Rheims also has the disadvantage of its being a translation from the Latin Vulgate for use in the Roman Catholic Church. This is not a negative criticism of the Roman Church; just a recognition that the D-R was prepared to a very large degree for use by the Counter-Reformation in Europe; and I'd prefer to use a version that has been translated from the Greek...


What does all this mean? It means that, until/unless a better translation that can be copied and reposted on the Internet can be found, I will not be posting each day’s chapter; only the comments and observations, with the occasional short passage from the text that day, when doing so will be helpful, or necessary, to the discussion. This will not, therefore, be as convenient as I had hoped; but I will post a link to the site for each day’s text, and hope that will be sufficient.


So, put on your crash helmets and buckle your seat belts, and let’s get ready to go!