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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

Citation managers like Zotero can simplify how you reference series. But what a citation manager puts out is only as good as what you put into it.

Microsoft Word’s language list can be helpful for multilingual documents. A few simple steps will set it right again if it gets messy.

Zotero can do a lot of work, including giving your citations the proper case. With non-English sources, two features are especially helpful.

Dark mode isn’t magic. But if you find it helpful like I do, then you can enable it in Zotero in either of two ways.