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Faith communities can be perfectly valid audiences for your research. And like any audience, that who will naturally shape your what.

In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus argues that 666 is a particularly “fitting” number for the name of the beast in Rev 13:18:

since he sums up in his own person all the commixture of wickedness which took place previous to the deluge, due to the apostasy of the angels. For Noah was six hundred years old when the deluge came upon the earth, sweeping away the rebellious world, for the sake of that most infamous generation which lived in the times of Noah. And [Antichrist] also sums up every error of devised idols since the flood, together with the slaying of the prophets and the cutting off of the just {cf. Matt 24:37–38/ Luke 17:26–27}. For that image which was set up by Nebuchadnezzar had indeed a height of sixty cubits, while the breadth was six cubits; on account of which Ananias, Azarias, and Misaël, when they did not worship it, were cast into a furnace of fire, pointing out prophetically, by what happened to them, the wrath against the righteous which shall arise towards the [time of the] end {cf. Matt 24:15/ Mark 13:14}. For that image, taken as a whole, was a prefiguring of this man’s coming, decreeing that he should undoubtedly himself alone be worshipped by all men {cf. Rev 13:15}. Thus, then, the six hundred years of Noah, in whose time the deluge occurred because of the apostasy, and the number of the cubits of the image for which these just men were sent into the fiery furnace, do indicate the number of the name of that man in whom is concentrated the whole apostasy of six thousand years, and unrighteousness, and wickedness, and false prophecy, and deception; for which things’ sake a cataclysm of fire shall also come [upon the earth]. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.29.2 [ ANF 1:558; affiliate disclosure] square brackets original; curled brackets added)

Once you know who your research is for, you can then determine what it means to create publishable research for them.

If you’re a student, your research isn’t just for your professor because your assignment likely imitates something outside your class.

To start cutting through the clamor of the urgent and discern whether something is actually important, you need to ask these 4 questions.

Doctrine needs to respond to a question that arises and demands an answer. If it’s a freestanding assertion, it loses connection with its life context.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.