L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #175 Context Menu: below the line: Preaching theme & theological topic

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #174 Context Menu: below the line: Speaker/Addressee - Logos Forums

14. Preaching Theme — Is powered by the Preaching Themes Dataset.

Verbum Help (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2022).

The Help document skips over Theological topics, going directly to labels.

The important documentation:

• Husser, Lydia. Preaching Themes: Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2016.
• Thompson, Jeremy. Lexham Systematic Theology Ontology: Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2019. (overview)
• Ward, Mark, Jessica Parks, Brannon Ellis, and Todd Hains, eds. Lexham Survey of Theology. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018. (detail topics)

I am not in a position to tell you how to use Preaching Themes. I find that the categories are so broad and the relationship of a passage to them so tenuous, that they do not meet any of my needs. That is not to say that they are not helpful to other Logos/Verbum users. It is useful to note their role in the Homily builder and the Sermon starter which indicates how fundamental they may be for a preacher.

Notice that Preaching Themes are their own expandable/contractable section on the left-hand side of the Context Menu. There are limited actions available for a Preaching Theme: start a sermon guide, copy, and search. There is no direct link to the definition of the theme.

Preaching themes are often merged with cultural concepts, concepts, etc. for the controlled vocabulary which provides a broader range of data on the Factbook page. They are also often related or equivalent concepts which affect the search results (see below)

The topics metadata of the homily builder is not limited to Preaching Themes but for indexing purposes they are preferred.

The search is built from the Context Menu as usual but the result of the search are dependent upon the value of the match reference search parameter. Because of the size of my library, I always leave the parameter set to narrow. The default is "default"; people with small libraries may wish to use broad. The results you get may cause you to change this setting. Note the description of these options on the right.

I find the Theological topics a bit more helpful despite struggling with the use of vocabulary and classification unlike my own. On an objective measure of bias:

In putting this together, I did a little analysis of the Lexham Survey of Theology, to see how even-handed it was, and whether I could use this as a basis for further work.  The two people who contributed the most are Gerald Bray (25 entries) and Jack Kilcrease (17 entries).  While Jack refers to Bavinck in 82% of his entries, Bray refers to Bavinck in just 4% of his entries, suggesting that each contributor was given a great deal of freedom in choosing who to refer to, and so the survey is far from neutral, never mind comprehensive.  This suggested I needed to look elsewhere for balance, although the survey definitely still has its uses.

If anyone would like to see the mini spreadsheet showing this, it's available here: 4174.LST Contributors.xlsx

The Context Menu for a Theological topic is very similar to that for a Preaching theme. The Theological Guide replaces the Sermon Starter Guide and a Lookup function for the definition of the Theological topic is supplied.

 

Note that the search argument has its own abbreviation "LSTO"; that the reference matching search parameter is in play for the results; and that the lookup points to the topic in the LSTO.