Apologetics

So, I'm going to try my hand at teaching some apologetics at church this semester. It will be interesting to see what sort of reception philosophy can have in the "real" (e.g., non-academic) world....

A webpage for the class is here.

Turabian, Chicago and LaTeX

I'm trying to finish my thesis for my MATh from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the most annoying part of the work is getting the thing into the Turabian-modified "Chicago" format. I typeset all my writing using LaTeX, and so I looked around for some software that would do everything semi-automatically for me.

The answer comes in two parts. First, some folks at the University of Notre Dame have produced a class file for their PhD dissertations which happens to get most everything right. So I started there.

The main problem with the nddiss2e class is that it uses natbib's numbered bibliography format. So I had to modify nddiss2e.cls to use jurabib instead. Here are the relevant parameters:

  \RequirePackage[%
             oxford,%
             titleformat={italic,commasep},%
             authorformat=and,%
             commabeforerest,%
             citefull=first,%
             ibidem=nostrict,%
             bibformat=ibidem,
             pages=format]{jurabib}
  \jbuseidemhrule
  \bibliographystyle{jox}

Here, "oxford" gets the bibliographical formatting correct. "citefull" makes it so the first citation in the thesis of each work gets a full bibliographic entry in the footnote. "ibidem=nostrict" takes care of all the "ibid"s. And "jbuseidemhrule" formats repeated author names with rules in the bibliography. I think there may be a few details which don't quite match perfectly, but they seem to be minor enough not to matter. I hope.