Sometimes, things you don’t anticipate sneak up on you. That’s what happened with me.

Many readers know that I work for Logos Bible Software, and I have for 30 years (just had my anniversary).

So it might be a little shocking to tell you that I’m leaving Logos. My last day there will be Friday, September 29, 2023. I’ll start a new job, with a different employer, on Monday, October 2.

Working at Logos has been like a dream. I’ve worked with so many incredibly talented and smart people, and we’ve pulled off some amazing things that, at least from my perspective, I had no right to be involved with. Bible translations. Edition of the Greek New Testament. Lexicons. Text-critical stuff. Analyses of all sorts of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Greek New Testament. Oh, and Apostolic Fathers, and Christian Apocrypha. Not to mention Josephus, Philo, and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Greek).

It has been incredible. And I am indebted to a large number of people; friends and colleagues (in that order) who will always be dear to me. I’m not going to list them all here, and chances are if they read this they know who they are.

But I do want to mention a few longtime “partners in crime,” starting with Eli Evans. He and I pulled off amazing things that smarter minds wouldn’t even have tried. He’s genuinely an amazing human, and I’m better for having shared over two decades of my life working with him on all sorts of stuff. Thank you, Eli, for the impact your friendship has had on me. (Also, read his novel because it is crazy good.)

Next up is Bob Pritchett. What can I say about Bob? I had the privilege, for nearly 30 years, of working for and with someone who had confidence in me and my abilities (in hindsight, maybe more confidence than I’d give myself). He pushed me, and he sharpened me. And I am grateful.

Another valuable friend is Steve Runge. Steve invests in people, and for some reason he saw fit to invest his friendship in me. And I’ve learned a lot from him, of course about Greek, but mostly about how to be someone’s friend. I’m much better off for our years of friendship.

There are others. Sean Boisen. Isaiah Hoogendyk. Peter Venable. James van Noord. Vincent Setterholm. Mike Heiser. Bill Nienhuis. Colleagues and collaborators who, when we were all together as a group, could each complement the other in various ways such that the whole was always greater than the sum of its parts.

There are so many others, but I can’t even begin to name them. I mean, it’s been 30 years. Thanks to you all.

Now, what will Rick be doing next?

I’ve accepted a job offer from a group called BiblioNexus. I’ll be working with them to create an information infrastructure (a “foundational knowledge framework”) to support minority language Bible translation.

Some great news is that I’ll once again be able to work with longtime friends and colleagues (some former Logos colleagues; some who never worked at Logos) in this effort. In a line I’ve used many times before, and that I stole from Steve Runge, it’s like in the movie “Oceans 11,” when Basher (Don Cheadle) and Rusty (Brad Pitt) are walking away from a failed bank robbery (where Rusty rescued Basher from being arrested to recruit him for another job), and Basher says, “It’ll be nice working with proper villains again.” On that note, I’m thrilled to be “working with proper villains again” and get back into spending the majority of my time writing code to sift original language data to produce information and knowledge that we can use to support the process of Bible translation in minority languages.

Further up, further in!