Two newsworthy items today:

1. I was just interviewed, along with Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, by National Catholic Register regarding the new ESV-CE Augustine Bible. We get deep into the details about the origin and style of the new translation. Check it out: https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/augustine-institute-publishes-major-new-catholic-bible Here’s an excerpt:

Giszczak: A lot of Bible translations pursue a philosophy of “dynamic equivalence” or “thought for thought” style translation, which produces perhaps a very readable text, but not a very exact one. And the ESV takes the opposite approach of what they refer to as an essentially literal translation. The ESV is really trying to be as transparent as possible to original languages, and provide a word for word style translation rather than thought for thought style translation. And so it allows people who are studying Scripture, they get that much closer to the meaning in the original language, because they can trust what they’re reading is really what it says. So with the ESV, when you’re studying it or when it’s being preached from, you’ll hear a lot fewer of those phrases that we’re still accustomed to hearing in homilies, “well, what it really says here is.” So often the homilist or the preacher has to correct the translation in order for the people to understand it. But with the ESV, you have to spend less time retranslating in the context of study, and you can spend more time just understanding what’s there on the sacred page.

1. The Summer Scripture Conference 2020 at University of St. Mary of the Lake in the Chicago area has been cancelled due to the pandemic. I had mentioned that I was scheduled to speak at it a while back on my blog. But that won’t be happening. This is the year of cancelling everything! However, the organizers have asked me to film my planned lectures to share with their registrants. Once we do that, I’ll post the videos here too to share them with you.