quodlibetens / dailypatristics

Patristic sermons and homilies for the liturgical year

DAILY PATRISTICS

A project to retrieve patristic sermons and homilies from the Anglican Breviary for every day of the liturgical year.

ABOUT

The project is designed to return brief patristic sermons and homilies for each day of the Western liturgical kalendar. At least in the first instance, all the texts will be those found in the Anglican Breviary - which are almost entirely English translations of those found in the Roman breviary (1911 rubrics). This will mean in practice that not every day has its own texts: ordinary feriae will borrow from the preceding Sunday; low-ranking feasts from the commons.

Integration of additional sources to enrich the whole kalendar would be a possible future project once the first phase is working.

STRUCTURE

This is a web project, planned to consist of a single webpage, powered by single script for processing user requests and returning the correct text.

The texts are stored in a number of JSON files, which are in appropriate directories following closely the Anglican Breviary's structure, all within the 'texts' directory.

Once the web version is up and running, if it proves useful, there is no reason why equivalent mobile apps couldn't be developed too.

MORE ABOUT THE TEXTS, and using them

As of October 2021, the texts themselves are only just starting to be added. As more appear, they will become a potentially useful resource in their own right.

The texts are taken from the Anglican Breviary, published by the Frank Gavin Liturgical Foundation of New York in 1955; they are translations of Latin originals, mainly from the Roman Breviary. To the best of my knowledge after reasonable enquiries, the translations in the Anglican Breviary are free of copyright protections. For that reason the license used for this whole project, the GNU General Public License, also applies to the texts if you use or redistribute them from this project or its source files. (The same texts may be available elswehere under different or no conditions.)

The texts are provided here within JSON files, which make them more useful by adding a lot of peripheral information, that can be read by both people and machines. These JSON records tell you the liturgical day the text is assigned to; the author and source; the type of text; the Gospel pericope corresponding to each homily; and so on.

LICENSE NOTE

The whole project is licensed under the GNU General Public License 3.0 (and later versions), as specified in the LICENSE.md document. This means you have wide-randing permissions, under a few conditions, to reuse everything in it for your own projects and purposes. So please do!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Mr Daniel Lula of https://www.anglicanbreviary.net for assistance with an enquiry. If you would like to find out more about the Anglicn Breviary or get hold of your own copy, that is the site to visit.