How to make devotional commentaries link to the Bible text

Ideas and suggestions about new features
ErikJon
Posts: 431
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 11:24 pm

How to make devotional commentaries link to the Bible text

Post by ErikJon »

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Although my subject heading appears as a question, I am posting the observation in the form of a suggestion...

On occasion I have been known to overlook the obvious, so feel free to show me if I have somehow overlooked the feature that I am suggesting in this post...

There are quite a number of excellent devotional commentaries already formatted for TheWord. Personally, I have never been in the habit of using devotional materials, but only of reading the Bible every morning and praying. Consequently, these materials, while useful to me, are not useful in the devotional format. (That comment, in itself, may sound like heresy to some).

However, I would love to tap into the excellent devotional observations of these materials, for their value as life applications and homiletic inspiration, if it were not for the format of the module. I have tried to contemplate how to use the materials in that way, but it has been difficult to come up with a solution, and I am tempted rather to simply eliminate them from the Program, as sad as that may sound.

The ones that I am speaking of are those which are not arranged canonically but by date. In the index pane (topic tree), each topic is merely a date. One is supposed to choose his daily reading by the date. As he does, lo and behold, a wonderful commentary on a given Bible passage appears, complete with a reference and even a thematic title. Still, the comment is hidden behind a date. One would never think to look behind "September 5th" in order to find a nice teaching on "forgiveness," but that is precisely how they are laid out.

In fact, these thematic titles are not usually clear enough that one could do a thematic search to find the passage. Instead of the typical topical heading such as "Forgiveness" for example, the title might be "Responding to injustice" or "Do unto others." Consequently, if I should do a book-module search while preparing a sermon on forgiveness, I may search for the word "forgiveness" or "pardon" or "mercy" or something of the like, and still, I will never get this nice, perfectly-applicable brilliant passage-commentary in my search results. Or, I could start with a topical dictionary (if I were desperate), and perhaps be led to the one Bible passage in question, among thirty others, and may just possibly happen to think that the comment I need is not in any of my fifty ordinary commentaries, but perhaps in the devotional ones, but this is very unlikely. A "topical Bible" will take me to passages directly, but will not guide me to any section of any commentary, especially not to any of the nice devotional commentaries that I already have installed.

Consequently, I propose (in my relative ignorance of the field of programming) that somehow a future version of TheWord include the option of "finding' these comments hidden behind the dates, and then linking to them instantly whenever the corresponding verse is selected in Bibleview. It seems feasible to me, particularly since Bible references are often included in the headings (but not in the topic tree) of the articles that they address. Such a feature would greatly enhance the utility of the devotional commentaries, without requiring an overhaul of any such module into CMT format, which could take many days, in some cases.

If none of this is possible, please excuse my fantasizing.
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I'm an Independent Baptist running TheWord portable v 5.0.0.1481 from an external 500GB hard drive with over 1,900 modules installed and loaded in my current module set. I'm using 32-bit Vista Ultimate SP1 with a 2.7gHz processor and 4GB RAM.
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