Logos Bible Software Launches 1500 Quotations for Preachers (with Slides)

A few months ago I reviewed a Logos product called 300 Quotations for Preachers by Elliot Ritzema. In that review I gave some really good feedback about Elliot’s work. One of my biggest compliments was how thorough he was in pulling some of the best quotes from all over Christianity over the last 2000 years. Well, Elliot and Logos have just stepped it up from there with 1500 Quotations for Preachers.

Unbelievably thorough:
This new product splits the 1500 quotations up into five groups:
300 Quotations from the Early Church is from the years 100–600
300 Quotations from the Medieval Church is from the years 600–1500
300 Quotations from the Reformation is from the years 1500–1650
300 Quotations from the Modern Church is from 1650 forward

They also include an additional 300 quotes from the Puritans.

Highly functional:
What is more, like the original 300 quotations package, this one is full searchable, searchable by theme and comes with its own professional developed powerpoint slide for each quotation so you can plug it right into your presentation. Here is what it looks like:

Here is the layout of each quote:

If you click the writer’s name you get where the citation for the quote. If you click the picture, you get the slide they have produced for that quote. If you click it, it does this…

You can right-click the larger image, save it or copy it and put it right into powerpoint. It is very fast and the images look good. The big advantage here is having such a large collection of quotes in a database that you can search (even search by the scriptures they tag each quote with!) and nearly instantly put them into a presentation. That saves you from having to scour the internet trying to find the right quote and having to find an image to pair it with and format it all in powerpoint. Kudos to Elliot, Elizabeth Vince and Rebecca Brant for all that they put into this package. Also, each slide’s background image is tied to the era from which it came.

Unaware of any bias that influenced selection
In looking through the quotations I don’t really notice much selection bias. We all have our biases but I can’t really see any glaring through based on what was selected. It would be easy to cherrypick quotations that fit with our own conclusions and that is just about inevitable to some degree but if it is present in this software I haven’t noticed it yet. It is hard to keep to your biases when you include 1500 quotations from various people over 2000 years of history!

Three suggested changes
There are two things I think this are missing. It would be nice to have a brief bio on each person they quote. It would also be helpful to have a link that could be clicked to get you to the full context of the quotation. Stripped from its context, quotes can mean many different things. That doesn’t diminish the usefulness of this software. Logos has informed me that if the work it is quoted from is in your Logos library, that it will take you to the quote in context. Seems like they thought of just about everything. The last change I would make is to change the ordering of these in the Logos library software so they are in chronological, rather than alphabetical order.

If you are interested in purchasing it, you can find it here – 1500 Quotations for Preachers (With Slides)

I appreciate Logos for asking me to review this material. I did receive a copy of this for reviewing it but that doesn’t affect my ability to review it objectively. In other words, I would try to talk you into spending your money is it wasn’t quality enough to warrant it.