About
Where this came from, and how we handle texts and copyright.
✝ From Calendar Explorer to today
The Liturgical Calendar is the present-day incarnation of Calendar Explorer, a Windows shareware program Albert Collver first released on March 24, 1997 (32-bit Visual Basic 5, $17 via CompuServe). That first version already offered the three-year and historic one-year series, liturgical colors, Western and Eastern Easter dating, and a full church-year calendar.
Nearly thirty years later it has been rebuilt as a free, open-source web app — Visual Basic became Python/Flask, Windows-only became any browser, and paid shareware became MIT-licensed software on GitHub.
📜 Sources & permissions
This site publishes only facts and public-domain texts:
- Dates, reading references, and hymn numbers and titles are facts, freely citable.
- The One-Year (Historic) propers — introits, collects, and graduals — come from the Common Service Book of the Lutheran Church (1917), which is in the public domain — the same historic wording later carried into The Lutheran Hymnal (TLH, 1941).
- We do not reproduce copyrighted CPH / Lutheran Service Book texts (collects, introits, hymn texts). The three-year series lists reading references and hymn numbers only.
- Scripture is shown through licensed Bible APIs — the ESV via Crossway's authorized API; KJV and ASV are public domain — fetched live for display and never stored on this server.
Built to respect copyright; to our knowledge it contains no copyright violations. As always, verify against official LCMS materials before liturgical use.