Results tagged “counseling” from Logos Bible Software Blog

Jesus was unequivocal; “In this world you will have trouble.” If you have at least one friend, then you know someone acquainted with grief. If you are in ministry then you don’t need to be told that our churches are filled with the hurting, the wounded, the sick and the lonely. In ministry, helping those who suffer is often the task for which we are least equipped.

The Christian Focus Counseling Collection is a great tool to augment your counseling/care skill set. Included are eight volumes from Christian Focus Publications that are perfect to enable you to revisit a whole host of care-driven ministry needs.

In this collection are books to:

• Help you understand and minister to those suffering from depression with both a Biblical and medical understanding
• Minister to the grieving through the lens of the Old Testament book of Lamentations
• Provide a healthy, theological and balanced look at miraculous healing
• Enable you to understand and minister to couple dealing with infertility issues
• Empower you to provide pastoral visitations that are spiritually nourishing
• Equip others with a self image that is based on a sound and uplifting Christian worldview

The beauty of having resources like this in your Logos Bible Software is that each word is essentially a link to more resources within your library and allowing deeper and more illuminating study. Scripture references are linked to your favorite translation and even original language resources. Studying has never been so uncomplicated and enriching.

If you are looking for more counseling resources for you library make sure you check out the Christian Counseling Product Guide!

Yes, Jesus was quite clear that “In this world you will have trouble.” And it is our sacred responsibility to ensure that we can flesh out his follow-up encouragement, "But take heart! I have overcome the world!"

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If you've been keeping tabs on the Pre-Pub page over the last couple of weeks, you've probably noticed the scores of titles published by Baker. We just announced 9 new collections containing a total of 67 books from Baker covering topics like hermeneutics, Old Testament studies, New Testament studies, theology, preaching, counseling, and more.

Here's the complete list of collections:

• Robert Webber Ancient-Future Collection (4 Vols.)
• Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (4 Vols.)
• Baker New Testament Studies Collection (14 Vols.)
• Baker Encountering the Bible Collection (3 Vols.)
• Baker Preaching Collection (8 Vols.)
• Baker Theology Collection (11 Vols.)
• Baker Old Testament Studies Collection (6 Vols.)
• Baker Hermeneutics Collection (14 Vols.)
• Baker Counseling Collection (3 Vols.)

I'm really excited about many of the titles included in these collections. Several that make the top of my list:

• Muller's Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics
• Schreiner's New Testament Theology
• Carson and Beale's Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
• Vanhoozer's Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible
• Elwell's Evangelical Dictionary of Theology
• Piper's The Justification of God and The Supremacy of God in Preaching
• Chapell's Christ-Centered Preaching
• Silva's Interpreting Galatians

Which collections or individual books are you looking forward to most?

By the way, this is still only part of what I had in mind in my post about lots of great books coming down the pike. Still more to come.

So you've owned Scholar's Library for a little while and have recently added a new collection. Perhaps you just purchased the massive Biblical Counseling Library (30 Volumes). Now you’re wondering how you can put it to good use.

The first step is to create a collection (Tools > Define Collections > New). For further help, see this video demonstration. To save you the time, I’ve already done the work for you. Download the file, and put it in C:\Documents and Settings\ . . . \My Documents\Libronix DLS\Collections.

With your collection file created, you can now start using your new books to their fullest potential. Here are five ways to get the most out of your new collection:

1. Familiarize yourself with your new books. Open My Library (Ctrl+L), and select Biblical Counseling from the Collection drop down. You will see the 30 books that came with your collection. Arrange the books by title or author, and "thumb through" them to get familiar with their contents. If you don't know what you have, you probably won't use them very often.

2. Use your new books in the Passage Guide. If you’re working on a sermon on Galatians 6:1, you might want to find out what your counseling books have to say. Since these books aren’t commentaries, they won’t automatically be implemented into the Passage Guide. But getting them to show up there is very easy. Open the Passage Guide, and select Properties. Toward the bottom, there is a Collections section. Check the box next to it and the box next to your Biblical Counseling collection.

Your report will now display hits for your passage.

3. Find a passage of Scripture. If you want to find a passage only in your new collection and not elsewhere in your library, you may want to use the Reference Browser instead of the Passage Guide. Open the Reference Browser (Ctrl+R), select Biblical Counseling from the drop down, set the Type to Bible, enter Gal 6:1 or another passage, choose how specific you want your search to be, and click search.

4. Find a topic. Open the Topic Browser (Ctrl+T), select Biblical Counseling from the drop down, and type a topic like bitterness into the Find box. Click on Bitterness, and immediately you get several relevant hits to explore.

5. Find a word or phrase. You can also search your new collection for a specific word or phrase. Open the basic search (Ctrl+Shift+S), select Biblical Counseling from the drop down, and search for something like manic-depress* (the asterisk includes depressive and depression).

By using these five tips, you'll be getting the most out of your new resources in no time!

Owning a large digital library is great when you can consult precisely the book you need at the moment you need it. But a vast digital holding can present challenges when deciding whether to buy a new collection, such as the 2006 Christmas Special, Library Builder: Volumes 1-3 (available through December 31).

At present, there is no magical tool that can analyze your licenses, compare them against the product you're thinking of buying, then spit out a report showing you duplicated books, new books, books you'd like, books you'll never use, and books you think you'll never use until late on a certain desperate Saturday night in February 2008.

But a couple of features in the Libronix DLS can come in handy when evaluating a purchase, or simply getting to know your books.

(I apologize if this seems obvious to our seasoned users but I recently came across two users in one day who were not aware of this information and realized that I take it for granted.)

Calling Marian...the Librarian

Everyone probably knows about My Library since there's a big button for it right in the main toolbar. So I'll just do a quick refresher... 

My Library is the card catalog of Libronix—the library-ish way to see what digital books you own. It's built on library standards and the "metadata" about each book—stuff like subject classifications—come from the Library of Congress. Yeah, the whole "library" thing is more than a metaphor with us.

In My Library, you can type in the title of a book to find specific volume, or see what you have from a particular author like A.W. Pink or Oswald Chambers. Viewing your books by subject can help you get a handle on the depth of your library in a subject like creeds, for example.

Just the List, Ma'am

If list-making, rather than browsing, is what you're after...the Bibliography report is the tool to use. Click Tools | Library Management | Bibliography, then customize the report to show the contents of various collections you may have built or all the resources you own. You can also customize the display to suit the task at hand.

"Catalog style with covers" generates the colorful display shown below, which is great for getting to know your books. If you're making a standard bibliography, you may choose something more utilitarian like "APA Style (4th ed.)".

For this screenshot, I chose to run the bibliography report on the "Biblical Counseling Library" collection: a user-defined collection I created earlier. User-defined means the list of books in this collection can be completely arbitrary. The metadata shown in the report comes from the Library of Congress, except for the brief descriptions which our book designers edit together from the book jacket or preface.

Follow the Money Trail

When you want to view the Libronix-based products you've purchased and activated, My Library is no help and Bibliography is only helpful if you've manually created collections. What you need is the Account Summary, a new tool in Logos Bible Software 3.

(OK, you really must at least download the free update if you haven't already!)

Account Summary gives you a handle on the product collections in your digital library, as opposed to the individual books.

To open Account Summary, click Tools | Library Management | Account Summary and you'll see something like this, but with fewer 0s.

Here is a record of the licenses for all the products or collections unlocked on this system. A product like Scholar's Library will be in this list. At the bottom of the report is a list of the books and resources you have unlocked individually, such as Scripture Alphabet of Animals.

Tip: If you suspect that something you own is missing from this list...click Tools | Library Management | Synchronize Licenses (available only in Logos 3) to make sure you're utterly up to date.

So What Have We Learned Today?

Account Summary can be the most useful tool when trying to decide whether to purchase a product such as The Complete Theological Journal Library Bundle, for example. You may recall having purchased a couple of journals discs in the past, but can't remember which ones exactly.

After reading this post you now know that resources like journals don't show up as product collections in My Library; they show up as individual journals. But you also know that Account Summary is the place to turn for a list of the products you've activated, which makes comparison easier.

On the other hand, My Library is the ideal tool for locating an individual resource or browing books by subject. And the Bibliography tool can generate either a standard bibliography or a more detail-rich list with bookcovers and descriptions.

Perhaps a corollary of the dictum "Know Thy Books" is "Know Thy Book-Knowing Tools."

(Note: Before anyone writes in to ask...if you see an item in your account summary that simply reads "Theological Journal Library" that corresponds to what we now call "Theological Journal Library Volumes 1-5" to distinguish it from the journal collections that came after.)

For further reading see "Getting to Know Your Books," a web article written by Rick Brannan that offers some additional suggestions for familiarizing yourself with the contents of your digital library.