Navigating the Blog

I get emails —

I was wondering about any material you have written and that is available on Romans and where I can find it. Thanks for all you do for Him!

I’ve done lots and lots of posts on Romans. I figure this is as good a time as any to explain some of the newer navigation features of the site.

Suppose, for example, that you want those posts dealing specifically with Romans. There are many, but there are thousands of posts spread over many years to search through. No sane person would want to search for the posts manually.

Search box

You could, of course, do a word search using the Search box, but that would surely be far too inclusive. I mean, I cite to Romans all the time, even when I’m really writing about John or some other book.

Categories

The best solution for a topical search is the Categories tool on the right. It can be a little confusing, but it has the entire site indexed under a hierarchy of categories. “Romans” appears under “Textual Studies.” Some Bible books, such as John, also appear under Adult Bible Classes, but I’ve not prepared Romans materials for a Bible class since I started the blog.

If you click on the Romans link, you’ll be taken to this page. The seven most recent posts on Romans appear in the main window. However, there are 72 posts indexed here.

If you look at the top of the page, you see « 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ». The 72 posts appear, 7 at a time, under each of these links. If you want to find the very oldest Romans post, click on the 11.

Now, back under the Categories tool, beneath “Romans” is a link for “God Is Not Fair.” That series, based on Romans, is separately indexed because some readers might want to search for that series in particular. There are 18 posts in that series.

Again, at the top of the page you’ll find « 1 2 3 », which allows you to navigate through the 18 posts.

Related posts

At the bottom of each post, there’s a list of related posts. These are computer generated by someone’s clever artificial intelligence software. It’s surprising how accurate the links can be, but this is not intended to be complete. Nonetheless, it’s a great way to find similar material.

BibleFox

Everytime a reader or I refer to a Bible verse, the BibleFox software converts that to a link. Click on the link and a window pops up with the verse from the ESV. Better yet, the window also gives links to every other reference to that same verse in the blog.

If you were ever interested to know literally everything I’ve ever written on a given verse, this will do it. The only things missing are the ebooks, because .pdf files aren’t linked by the software.

Google

Google allows you to do a word or phrase search limited to the site. You might search Google for “site: Romans” or “site: Rom”. Those two searches will produce everything on Romans by me or a commenter.

I warn you: these two searches produce about 15,000 results! The readers and I seem to have a particular fascination with Romans!

Obviously, you could narrow the search by referring to particular chapter and verse numbers or phrases from the text.

John

For the current adult Bible class series on John, I’ve added a table of contents at the bottom right. I’ll keep that up through at least May and likely as long as we’re covering the material at church — perhaps through August.

The Pages

At the top of every page are links to various materials, most pertinently to my ebooks and to my Bible recent Bible class materials.

The Bible class materials are just for Galatians and the Creation 2.0 series. These also appear as daily posts. As a result, the other search methods should pick these up just fine.

There are a number of books on challenging topics (all of which include discussions of Romans). These are .pdf files and not part of the Categories system. However, I’ve covered the materials in the books through at least one series of posts apiece. In fact, the posts are little newer and benefit from my interaction with the readers. Nonetheless, if you are doing a topical search on, say, the role of women or baptism, be sure to check out the ebooks.