Tomorrow’s Christian Graduate, 2003, p. 27
Clicking Your Way to Graduation Day
New Logos Software Brings Efficiency to In-depth Bible Study
By David Kreuger
It’s the first day of Greek class. The professor seems like the reasonable sort, but you’re guessing he’s tough as nails. You scan the syllabus and wonder if you should have pursued higher education to this extent. Maybe you should have taken your uncle up on his offer to hire you at the jiffy-lube.
What if you could calmly stare down that first homework assignment, knowing that parsing, declining, translating and looking up morphological data had become as easy as clicking a mouse? What if you had software that would do away with the frustration and tedium of hunting through books, flipping pages and losing your place?
The brand new “Logos Bible Software Series X - Scholar’s Library” offers this kind of assistance. Logos is easy to use, providing features that will help even the novice Bible software user perform penetrating studies of God’s Word.
Bible Study Starter
The initial screen that pops up when you begin the program is the home page. From there you have a number of options depending on your purpose. Use the Bible study starter to dive into researching a biblical passage or topic.
In the Bible study starter, enter the passage you want to study in the passage window. Click the button representing the study you want to do and click “go.” It’s that simple.
Another feature, the passage guide, is your automated guide to every book, map or resource in your customized library. Unlike other Bible study programs that are hard-wired to search a certain commentary or concordance, Logos actually searches the library of books you compile. Depending on the number of books in your library, you will have a wealth of material to peruse in mere moments.
Considering that there are more than 2,500 commercial electronic books representing more than 100 publishers available under the Logos format, Logos offers the user a tremendous wealth of study materials and opportunities.
Tools
From the passage guide you can launch other reports that take your Bible study to a whole new level by automatically merging information from multiple books in your library. Just select the report; the program knows which passage you are studying. Reports in Logos include: passage in parallel versions, passage in all versions, word-study guide, exegetical guide and search entire library for passage.
For example, working from the passage you’re studying, the exegetical guide reads the Greek or Hebrew text, identifies all the words in each verse for which word-study information is available, generates a word-by-word guide to the passage with the Greek or Hebrew lemma (parsed or declined and glossed) and creates hyperlinks to dictionary and lexicon entries for each word. With a simple click, you can preview the article right in the word-study guide. Expand the articles you find most useful, print the guide, and it will automatically add a bibliography for the resources used.
So many more goodies
Interested in studying a particular topic rather than a specific Bible passage? In the Bible study starter, you will find a topic guide selection. Just enter a topic such as marriage, children, redemption, etc. and click “go.” The topic study section brings up links to relevant articles in topical Bibles.
When you want help skimming a long article, the summarizer tool is just the thing. It loads up the currently displayed article and quickly highlights the statistically most important sentences like a customizable set of CliffsNotes.
Get With the Program
Logos offers a student purchase program that makes this tool more affordable. Students, faculty and staff enrolled in a qualified program save [a large percentage] off the retail price of Scholar’s Library, which contains over 230 titles. In many cases, students can use the books within the software as their required texts for Bible or ancient language courses.
Through the Logos Student Purchase Program, Scholar’s Library...is just pennies when you consider the cost of building a paper library book by book over time. Greg Smith, Talbot seminarian, suggested, “The earlier in seminary a student purchases the Scholar’s Library, the better. He will save time finding information, save costs in not purchasing more expensive paper books and will have many valuable resources for his classes just a click away.”
- David Krueger is the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Linn, Missouri. David has used computers in the ministry since 1985 when he purchased a Radio Shack Color Computer. He is the author of numerous articles on the use of computers in ministry and software reviews.
NOTE: Article is adapted from an article that originally appeared in unabridged form in Christian Computing Magazine, www.ccmag.com.
© 2002 Tomorrow's Christian Graduate. Reprinted by permission. To view the article in print, ask at your school's career center for the 2003 Tomorrow's Christian Graduate magazine.