The Journey Continued: Bringing the Bible Back to Catholics

Today I'm going to start the Bible in a Year podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz. I don't know yet how much I'll blog about this, but I do know that I may not blog every day, as I'm currently also doing St. Augustine's Confessions with Catholic Classics. Then there are the normal events that life brings that one cannot necessarily predict. So basically, I'm trying to say in my usual meandering way that I doubt I'll finish this on December 31, 2026.

While I go through this podcast series, the same as I said at the beginning of the Catechism in a Year series will also apply here:

For this journey, I will be open and free with my thoughts, not dwelling on making apologetics or scholarly points, but simply taking the [Bible] on its own at face value. I'm using this blog mainly to record those thoughts, not to convince anyone of anything, and Twitter/X is too limiting for that.

That, of course, does not mean I won't make "apologetics or scholarly points" when something catches my interest or if I think it's warranted, but only that this won't be my primary focus.

You can use any Catholic Bible for this second journey, but I have chosen the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. With all due respect to Ascension Press for their Great Adventure Catholic Bible, which I also own, I've been eager to use this one from Ignatius Press more in-depth for the footnotes and commentary alone! They both utilize the RSV2CE translation, so that's not an issue. I do like the indexing tabs from Ascension and have those on my Ignatius Study Bible. All in all, though, I would say whichever version you fancy more, use it.

Here is a pretty good review of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible:

You can also find a pretty good review for the Great Adventure Catholic Bible here, if you prefer that version. I rather like the note-taking features the new edition has (I have the older one), but I'm still going to go with Ignatius for this.

Ok, with all that said, let's start with the first of three(!!!) introductions to the series:

I'm really glad to see Jeff Cavins in this, because I first got turned on to his stuff about 20 years ago and really enjoyed it! I'll be using the 365 Day BIY Reading Plan inspired by the work of Cavins for this series.