How to do a Lectionary in SAB

Scripture App Builder
1

We would like to create a Catholic Lectionary with SAB. The Reading Plan has some of the right elements, but in the case of a Lectionary, the readings are supposed to be tied directly with a date, whereas a Reading Plan can start on any date and continues from there. There are a few comments about Lectionaries in this thread: Daily Scripture reading plan? - #17 by OJ_Gamache, but I believe this discussion was before the Reading Plan feature had been created, so the landscape has changed a bit.

The Lectionary modules on LingTran (Example Modules | LingTranSoft Wiki) only seem to have the Sunday readings, and aren’t tied to any dates. We have found a French source of the reading calendars tied to dates (Calendriers liturgiques | Liturgie & Sacrements). We’ve had some luck saving those PDFs out as text files and using some clever Regular Expressions to get a list of readings. But if you put those into an app, the app would need to be updated every year. (The readings cycle around again after 3 years, but they would appear on different dates.)

I haven’t figured out a good way to do this yet. Does anyone have suggestions? The Lectionary readings could be put into a RAB app, with a book for each month, and a chapter for each day of the month. So you could go to the book of May, and select chapter 5 to see the readings for May 5th. Or is there some way to use the Reading Plans in SAB?

Surely this is something that others have already done?

Thanks for any help you can give,
Jeff

2

Hi Jeff,
We did a lectionary for the Wamey language of Senegal and Guinea, but this was before reading plans. We had one book for each “season” (e.g. Advent) for each of the three years (so an “Advent” book for year 1, 2 and 3). Our lectionary had 8 seasons X 3 years so 24 separate books. We included the NT in the app so that any NT references in the lectionary readings would link directly to the passage. We used a nested contents menu for users to navigate to the correct year and then correct season. I’m not sure if that helps you or not–it definitely wasn’t a particularly elegant solution, but was all we could do at the time.

3

Here’s a sample lectionary app we built with Kaalam

We used manual USFM files with /xt markers, and recently added the Plans feature of SAB also.

4

Here’s and example of a bilingual digital lectionary site created by the Church in Wales. On phones it is saveable as a progressive web app. In their context the assumption is that anyone wanting to use it on their phone or laptop would have internet access but it also creates downloads for use as printed sheets.