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Clearly understanding what you want in your research is important. Still more foundational, though, is grasping who it’s for.

Online education can readily foster spiritual formation because language always mediates formative presence and spiritual formation is a language game.

Keyboard shortcuts can speed up frequent changes among input languages. If you use Windows, you need some extra steps to save your shortcuts.

At first glance, rhetoric and hermeneutics are quite different things. But, if we look more closely, they comingle in a way that makes them inseparable.

Your research is worth protecting. Nobody will ever have more incentive to keep it safe than you do. So be sure you have a robust backup plan.

Email is everywhere in biblical studies.¹ And for all its benefits, it also presents challenges, one of which is security.

Maybe that’s not a big issue for you day-to-day. But there may also be times when it presents a concern. For those times, though, you can send email securely with a few, straightforward steps.

Like having good backups protects your data from being destroyed, sending email securely helps keep sensitive information out of the hands of bad actors. And by making things harder for them, you’re preserving the time you have to work on important projects rather than running the risk that you’ll need to sink hours upon hours into cleaning up after a mess. As the saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Email can be a useful, and even a necessary tool, but it also has its issues.((Header image provided by Abby Anaday.)) And as might be surprising, one of these issues has to do with its security. Send the wrong thing across email at the wrong time, and you might find yourself picking up the pieces rather than writing up that next research project.

Where Is Email Secure?

When you connect to your email, you need a username (probably your email address itself) and a unique, hard-to-guess password. You may also have decided that multifactor authentication is a good idea. So, to connect to your email, you’ll also need whatever additional authentication factor (e.g., a six-digit code, an app notification, a hardware token).

To get a basic installation of Zotero up and running is incredibly straightforward.¹ It’s also quite flexible and customizable. So, as you work with Zotero, you can tailor its behavior to how you work, including by adding and customizing extensions.²

If you use Zotero on multiple computers, you can easily synchronize your Zotero library among those machines. But the same isn’t the case for the rest of your Zotero profile—all your settings, styles, and extensions. So, any time you change your profile, you have to make that same change on each machine separately.

The beginning of the school year is one natural time to take stock of what lies ahead. Demands mount (or are about to). How can we stay afloat?

The more projects you do, the more likely you are to have to wait for something to finish a project.¹ The likelihood of needing to wait especially increases as you collaborate on projects with others. And as the number and importance of things you’re waiting for grows, you increasingly need to maintain a waiting-for list.²

Elements of a Waiting-for List

A waiting-for list has four key elements. These elements include

A lot comes at you in a day.¹ In years past, what came to you might well land in or be reducible to a physical inbox on a desk.² Today, that might still be possible, but it’s definitely a greater challenge. And you might well find it’s easier to have different kinds of inboxes for specific kinds of incoming information.

Of course, you could easily have too many inboxes. You reach that point when you don’t know where to look for something you need to handle. It also happens when you lose track of something because you don’t regularly think about wherever you put that thing.

The process of formatting bibliographies has several elements.¹ If you’re using SBL style, these elements include

• the structure and formatting of each bibliography entry considered just itself. For these components, Zotero proves incredibly helpful since it allows you to insert a bibliography with the push of a button from the word processor plugin.²
• your bibliography’s pagination, which needn’t take any special attention if you’ve set up the bibliography section properly.
• the heading and top margin on the first page of your bibliography, which also should be well in hand based on your use of heading styles.

Even after you have all this formatting in place, however, you’re still left with the spacing between items in your bibliography and a hanging indentation.

Email is ubiquitous in biblical studies— sometimes too much so.((Header image provided by Thunderbird.)) But there are several principles you can use to get out of your inbox more benefits and fewer downsides.

In the bigger picture, the specific tools you use to access your email is less important than that you use it according to such principles. Doing so will help make sure you’re using it and not being used by it. And you can implement these principles in various ways depending on how you prefer to send and receive email.

Academic New Testament studies sits at the crossroads of various disciplines.((Header image provided by Kelly Sikkema.)) History, rhetoric, social sciences, linguistics, lexicography, and textual criticism are just a few.

Each of these disciplines has its own voluminous secondary literature. Even once you specialize into a particular New Testament book or corpus, the amount of secondary literature is still vast.

Familiarity with secondary literature is critical. But while working through all the secondary literature (not to mention navigating other things vying for your attention), it can be all too easy to not work regularly through the New Testament itself.

A lot goes into writing in biblical studies.¹ And any number of tools can help you marshal your research into strong prose. For instance,

• Logos can give you access to hundreds of shelves’ worth of resources,
• Zotero can help you manage and cite this literature, and
• Word can give you a place to craft your arguments.

But there’s another application that’s vastly more important than all of these combined.

Introducing KYRIYS

If you’re not familiar with it, I’d like to introduce you to KYRIYS (pronounced like “curious”).

One feature with some substantial upgrades in Zotero 7 is the built-in PDF viewer and annotator.((Header image provided by Zotero via Twitter.)) For a long time, I’ve not used this feature. But seeing the updates that it’s gotten, I decided to give it a try, and I really do like what the developers have done with it.

One potentially complicating factor, though, is how Zotero stores annotations in its database, not in the PDF. Zotero also doesn’t directly integrate with cloud storage providers.

Zotero is an incredibly helpful research tool.¹ But it’s only as useful as the information it contains. So, the more you improve what your Zotero library contains—whether by adding or correcting contents—the more useful the tool will become.

There are multiple ways to add additional resources to Zotero. Several of them allow Zotero to automatically input information from various places. But if the information you import is itself incorrect or just doesn’t import properly, Zotero won’t be able to use that information as it should. So, especially when you automatically import resources into Zotero, it’s well worth proofreading briefly what you’ve imported.

Zotero has been undergoing a major overhaul.((Header image provided by Zotero via Twitter.)) In May 2023, Zotero announced the public beta for the popular research platform.((Dan Stillman, “Announcing the Zotero 7 Beta,” Zotero Forums, 20 May 2023.)) Since that time, the beta version for Zotero 7 has received scores of updates.

Among the most notable elements in this overhaul are

• performance improvements based on retooling Zotero under the hood,((Stillman, “Zotero 7 Beta.”))
• upgrades to and new markup tools in the built-in PDF viewer,((Dan Stillman, “Available for Beta Testing: Updated Reader with EPUB/Snapshot Support and New Annotation Types,” Zotero Forums, 7 August 2023.))
• an integrated dark mode,((Dan Stillman, “Available for Beta Testing: Zotero, Redesigned,” Zotero Forums, 25 January 2024.)) and
• better use of screen real estate.((Stillman, “Zotero, Redesigned.”))

The desktop user interface is also becoming more consistent with the mobile apps. Yes, that’s right, there are now “apps” plural. For some time, Zotero’s only official mobile client has been on iOS.((“‎Zotero,” App Store, n.d.)) But there’s now also an Android client in beta as well.((“Zotero,” Google Play, n.d.))

Macrium Reflect is a wonderful backup tool. It does have a missing feature, but thankfully, a comparable solution is available.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel like you’re lost when you’re looking at stepping out into a career in biblical studies.((Header image provided by Katja Anokhina.))

The content of biblical studies is one thing—the manuscripts, texts, traditions, languages, and literature. All of that is why you set out to join this discipline in the first place.

But you keep hearing how bleak prospects are, how hard everything is. And you’re not sure where it all leads.

There’s so much material available to support your research. You just have to know where to go and how to look for it.

In biblical studies as in other knowledge work fields, email is everywhere.((Header image provided by Joanna Kosinska.)) But it’s prominence and frequency far outstrip its importance.

Because of this, email and similar tools have a distinctive capacity to pull you away from more essential activities into less essential ones. Thankfully, however, you can minimize email’s downsides while you maximize its value for cases where you can’t readily avoid it. So, needing to email a journal editor about publishing an article needn’t leave you paying excess “email tax.”

By itself, τὲ καί can’t indicate who Paul was writing to in Romans. But the phrase puts on the table important pieces to the puzzle.

Style manuals often require that footnotes have a blank line between them. There are two common mistakes about how to get this blank line.

Email is easy, cheap, and flexible.((Header image provided by Proton.)) Those factors make it a persuasive default for how coordination happens in knowledge work.

The only problem is that these same factors sometimes make email even more a liability than it is an asset. But the fact that email creates such liabilities doesn’t mean there aren’t clear ways to reduce them.

Preferring Systematization to Spontaneity

Cal Newport has discussed these problems extensively and suggested an intriguing solution.((Cal Newport, A World without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever ( affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2021).)) As a tool for facilitating the flow of knowledge work, email falters badly because it’s too easy, too cheap, and too flexible. It facilitates high volumes of messages that then require similarly high levels of time and attention to process.

Faith Comes by Hearing has a selection of free audio Bibles, including the English Standard Version.

Registration requires both an email and a physical address.

Email is a deeply entrenched protocol within biblical studies. Partly for that reason, it presents a constant choice of which problem with it is better.

Biblical studies isn’t a matter of “(s)he who writes the most email wins.” But that obvious truth that can still get obscured all too easily.

For all its benefits, email presents definite challenges. But those challenges are mainly ones of degree rather than kind.

Email can be a useful tool, and sometimes a necessary one. But you need to be careful with using it so you don’t end up being used by it.