Studying the Bible in Obsidian
The Weekly Review: Vol VIII Issue 7
Howdy!
It's mid-April, and here in northern Canada, I daresay we may be close to seeing the last snow for the year. It's felt a long time coming, but the sun is out and it's close to 20° C. I'll take it!
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Bible study with Obsidian
It's been a long journey for me in finding the right mix of tools to aid my study of scripture. It started with Olive Tree's Bible Study app, eventually moved to Ulysses, and now, thanks to my exposure to the Zettelkasten system, Obsidian is now the home of my notes.
This is one of those topics where each individual could have a slightly different setup than the next person. But tools like Roam Research and Obsidian are the perfect for taking your study to a deeper level.
Steps to set up
The first thing to do with either tool is get Scripture into it. Plenty of people are tackling this problem, so a quick search should get you a few options. I used the following resources:
- This thread in the Obsidian forum
- Joe Buhlig's copy of the script mentioned in the thread
- Renamer (included in Setapp) to get the files into the desired format and naming convention
- Sublime Text to do some large scale find and replace on some of the bits and bobs I didn't care for
Each chapter is its own note. Here's how that looks:
It took a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, but once the Scripture was in place, the rest is pretty easy. I chose to have each verse on its own line with a space in between. This keeps it readable, but more importantly, it lets me refer to specific verses in other notes.
My notes
The next step was migrating my notes that have come through using the Bible Study app and Ulysses. But I did things a little differently in Obsidian than I have in the past.
Previously, my notes would reside alongside the verses. In most Bible study apps, you can make a note and it shows in some in the UI with the verse number. I used the same format in Ulysses with footnotes or annotations.
In Obsidian, I instead create a separate evergreen note for each chapter of the Bible. Well, not each chapter — just the ones where I have a thought I want to jot down.
The verse references look like this [[Deut-08#^75d332]]. Hovering over that link and holding CMD will show a pop-up with the content of the verse. Or, I can refer to it this way to have it show in Preview mode: ![[Deut-08#^75d332]]
I still tend to read mostly from my physical Bible. But when I choose to read in Obsidian, I can open two panes: one for the chapter of the Bible, and one for notes on the book I'm reading.
The ability to connect your thoughts on related topics is why I started using a tool like Obsidian. And Bible study is the perfect use case for it. If you're a student of scripture, give Obsidian a try.
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Items of note
Marius once again reviews the current landscape and isn't crazy about any of the options. He spends a good bit of time on Ghost to start things off. His main issue:
Ghost(Pro) is perhaps the only option to essentially tick all the boxes, but only on its Basic tier and above. That costs a whopping $36 USD per month, or $29/m billed annually—more than I’m paying now and significantly more than I’d like to be paying. The new Starter tier was promising, coming in at a much-more-reasonable $9/m, except the Starter tier takes away a critical feature: custom themes.
I didn't realize they had added a cheaper tier than the one I'm on now. But I wouldn't use it without a custom theme either. However, I see my website as an extension of my business. So I'm willing to pay a certain level of expense for it (which helps with reducing taxes anyway).
He also had some thoughts around their focus on memberships and paid newsletters:
I expect some of those rough edges to be sanded off over time, but what’s clear is that Ghost really wants to be the platform for paid newsletter publications. I think that’s a brilliant business move for them, it’s just not the kind of thing I’m doing here. Now that their intentions are clear, I expect they’ll continue to evolve in ways that don’t quite match up with what I’m after.
That raises a good point.
God's good gift in making us men and women
Kevin DeYoung shares an excerpt from his upcoming book in the format of this article. You'd have to be hiding under a rock these days to not see how this goes against the grain of the current culture and political leanings (especially in the US).
God didn’t have to make two different kinds of human beings. He didn’t have to make us so that men and women, on average, come in different shapes and sizes and grow hair in different places and often think and feel in different ways. God could have propagated the human race in some other way besides the differentiated pair of male and female. He could have made Adam sufficient without an Eve. Or he could have made Eve without an Adam. But God decided to make not one man or one woman, or a group of men or a group of women; he made a man and a woman. The one feature of human existence that shapes life as much or more than any other—our biological sex—was God’s choice.
If JK Rowling came under attack for stating that biological sex is of some import, Kevin DeYoung wouldn't stand a chance (in mainstream media).
Friends, this is a super sensitive topic and an important one for our times. I've spent a lot of my work time over the last 6 months thinking about what it means to be a Christian working for a people-first company. How can I be inclusive and seek to foster a diverse team and work culture even though some of my beliefs go against that which is promoted by most groups I interact with in my professional life?
I don't have all the answers, but I do know two things. An unsolicited opinion is usually never helpful, and how I approach these topics should be far different than how I approach individuals who are of a different opinion than me.
I'm still working through this day-by-day.
4-Day Work Weeks: Results From 2020 and Our Plan for 2021
It's been interesting to watch Buffer move to a four-day workweek and share their results.
The four-day work week resulted in sustained productivity levels and a better sense of work-life balance. These were the exact results we’d hoped to see, and they helped us challenge the notion that we need to work the typical ‘nine-to-five,’ five days a week. It’s worth noting that though we’ve seen sustained productivity levels, we’ve been gauging that based on teammate feedback and not company-wide goals, that is changing in 2021.
As a team that is coming up on our fourth full year of 4DWW, Wildbit is pretty familiar with the benefits it brings. But it was odd to see this post focus so much on statistics rather than focus on how people feel. Yes, their surveys are focused on people's perception of stress and happiness. But overall, the piece seems to stress productivity over all else.
Perhaps that is due to the questions that a team is inevitably asked about when making this kind of change. But, perhaps, in the middle of a global pandemic and related increases in mental health issues, we should encourage businesses to focus more on community, people, and impact instead of profits.
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Quote of the week
As is true for most infrastructure work, these gruntish behind-the-scenes tasks are often neglected, or derided as irrelevant, underfunded, ignored. That is, until they break, or a pandemic hits, and then we realize how infrastructure is everything, and without it our world reverts to some troglodytic cave state, or perhaps worse, an ever-widening extreme of haves and have-nots.
Craig Mod, The Healing Power of Javascript
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Currently
Watching: we recently viewed A Beautiful Day in the Neigborhood, a film about the life of Fred Rogers that starred Tom Hanks. I didn't grow up with the show (we didn't have cable TV), but I sure enjoyed the film itself.
Listening: It's been a busy end to Q1 and start to Q2 planning for me. So it's been a lot of Chilled Cow for me (I use the playlist in Apple Music).
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It's more sunny skies here, so I'm off to work from the deck. Maybe even get a sunburn!
Peace & love ✌️