Verbum Gift Card

If you deselect the default Catholic filter when browsing the Verbum e-store you will see the complete catalog of Logos Edition resources.

Shopping the Verbum e-store is not as informative though. One example, there is no side panel to alert you to what collections, bundles, or base packages a resource is included in.

I used my coupon and bought a volume of the Navarre Bible. Am trying to collect all of the volumes. Have 2 so far.

Floyd Johnson said:

I do wish Mark Shea's (a long time Internet friend) books were available via Verbum; but, alas, I do not think they are.

Some are, but in prepub, so you can't use your coupon. And they're a lot easier to find on logos.com. The search function on verbum.com is horrible!

• Making Senses out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did
• By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition (very much recommended, but in a bundle)

The only thing I can find that's not in prepub is the Catholic Scripture Study International. Some of the volumes seem to be coauthored by Mark Shea.

Floyd Johnson said:

Any other recommendations (by Mark or otherwise) will be appreciated.

I don't really know what you might like, but here are some titles that are very good and quite likely of at least some interest to you:

Scripture Matters: Essays on Reading the Bible from the Heart of the Church - As Verbum's $.99 this month, now is a great time to pick it up. Scott Hahn is well educated and readable, and he also understands the terminology and ways of speaking of many Protestant groups, as a former Presbyterian minister. I would have recommended this at full price. With the savings, you might be interested in one of the volumes of his journal Letter and Spirit.

Verbum Domini by Pope Benedict XVI is a great, cheap source for top-notch 'official Catholic thinking' on Scripture. There is no greater living Catholic theologian than the present Pope Emeritus. Period.

An Introductory Bibliography for the Study of Scripture: Less Catholic per se, and 26 years old, but still useful.

What It Means to Be a Christian by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is a truly reader-transforming work. You will not regret the time you spend reading and praying about this. I haven't, anyway.

Spirit and Life: Essays on Interpreting the Bible in Ordinary Time is something of a sequel to Scripture Matters.

The Sayings of the Fathers is my favourite work that Faithlife has on the Desert Fathers. It's a true gem, full of practical and yet surprising wisdom.

Toby Steele (Faithlife) said:

can you please elaborate?

Look above! Neither Floyd nor I could find the collection with By What Authority? in it — and I even knew it existed. Go to https://verbum.com/search?context=product&query=mark%20shea&sortBy=relevance&limit=60&page=1&view=list and tell me where it is. Not among the first 120 results anyway. Or try https://verbum.com/search?context=product&query=by%20what%20authority&sortBy=relevance&limit=60&page=1&view=list. Same result. On logos.com the first search takes me to a special page with all his books and no one elses, and the second has the collection just a little bit down (with the results above equally relevant, not totally irrelevant like on verbum.com). If we can't find the books, how can we buy them?

In advent one of the free books was even more impossible to find. I don't think it was there at all. I think it was the Tabletalk bundle.

I hate verbum.com. I only use it for an extra account with freebies I mean to give away some day. For myself, I go to logos.com. I don't have the time to try to find things on verbum.com. 

One major difference seems to be that if I search for something like By What Authority (without quotes), logos.com prioritizes results which keep the words together, even if those results are further down on a product page (as with a title in a collection), while verbum.com prioritizes results that happen to have one of the words in the title, with the others randomly occurring somewhere else. That's generally pretty useless för search purposes.

Toby Steele (Faithlife) said:

I'm not sure if we plan to feature search results for individual resource titles when they're exclusively sold in collections. I've asked about it and will let you know what I hear.

This is really important, both on verbum.com and logos.com. I've spoken to Phil about it, and I think he (and others at Faithlife understand).

The point is that although Faithlife loves to sell bundles and collections, users will often simply want to purchase and read a particular book. We've already got to search both logos.com and verbum.com to see if that's possible, and the poor search results when a book is hidden in a collection doesn't help. Personally, I use Google when I'm trying to buy books from Logos. It's quicker to search both sites that way, and the results are more reliable.

Toby Steele (Faithlife) said:

fgh said:

The search function on verbum.com is horrible!

fgh, can you please elaborate? How can we better improve the search functionality on verbum.com? What search techniques do you use on logos.com that seem to fail on verbum?

I'm not fgh, but I just noticed that sorting by savings still doesn't work properly on Verbum.com, to put it mildly.