Keeping a home library

Many Seminary students like books. Some of us, I being one, are book geeks. This means that we drive our spouses or housemates crazy with the amount of books that we seem to go through. So why is it important for the seminarian (and minister) to maintain a good library?

1. It allows you to have access to your thought process.
Hopefully, you are reading things you agree and disagree with. When you decide to keep certain titles it means that something important went on when you read that book. The level of importance may vary, but you want to keep the book as a resource for future needs. After a while, you can almost trace the history of your theological development by what titles are in your library. I love finding a book that I went through a couple of years ago. I end up being transported back to that time in my life.

2. You gain the ability to have better citations in papers.
What this means is that you know your library. To really do this, you need to have some sort of collection system for your notes. I use a searchable document that is updated every time I finish a book. This way I am able to quickly find sections that jumped out at me (more on this method at a later date). I have learned that I have a rotating stable of around 20 books that I use most of the time in my specific area of research. Many of these titles were books that I caught myself checking out 2-3 times from the library and decided to buy them. Some are out of print and having constant access to them allows me to not worry about them being checked out (or archived out of the stacks). I know these resources really well, and having them at my house (or wherever you keep your library) just makes it easier to write papers.

3. You can work on something at a moments notice.
While I am in an academic track in seminary, I also serve at a local church as youth pastor. It is a smaller congregation with a retired pastor. From time to time, I find out on short notice that I am needed to preach the next service (sometimes with a four hour notice on Sunday afternoon). Since I have been conscious about buying commentaries and other books, I usually don’t have to worry about not having access to the library at school to work on my sermon. I am slowly buying several commentary series, and when I am devotionally studying a certain section of the Bible I try to buy one or two commentaries on the book, because most of my short notice sermons come from what I have been going through in my own personal study time.

I also am a night owl. So when I am working on a project, or just a blog post at three in the morning, I can go over to my library and find what information about whatever I need.

Part of keeping a good home library is knowing how and when to buy books. Every Seminary student is short on cash, so we can’t just having shopping spree’s at the bookstore. How to build a library on a budget will be talked about in my next post.

Keeping Your Mind Fresh During the Summer

For kids, having the summer off from school means lots of sitting around watching TV, riding bicycles or playing sports, and sleeping in. But seminary students are no longer kids, and summer break is not going to be like that anymore. At least they shouldn’t be.

If you don’t take any classes during the summer, it is easy to get lazy. Once the required reading is done it is hard to find the motivation to pick up a book again and read. It is hard find the desire to open the Greek textbook once in a while in order to keep your mind fresh on what the aorist middle participle of a certain verb is. It can also be difficult to keep your mind thinking through a lot of the ideas and issues you came into contact with during the semester when you would rather sit with a bowl of chips in front of the game.

But these things are important. Those of us who are in seminary need to keep our minds fresh during the summer. Before I started seminary I spent a year working, and hardly did any reading during that time. Once the semester started I fell behind quickly and spent the rest of the semester playing catch-up.  I’d let my mind be idle for too long and it wasn’t quite ready for the intellectual challenge of seminary.

So let me offer a couple of suggestions. First, keep reading. If you are like me, you have a lot of books on your shelf that have never been read, or you have seen a lot of new books in the bookstore that have piqued your interest. Go ahead and read them! Don’t feel the need to rush through them like you often need to do during the semester, but pace yourself. It’s very easy to read a book a week, or if you are working or busy with other tasks, to do so over a period of two weeks. The point is just to keep your nose in a book and keep your mind accustomed to reading.  Someone once suggested to me that reading a good novel along with a non-fiction book is helpful.  Novels are much easier to read, and if you spend a half-hour reading that before you go to the other book, reading that non-fiction book will be a lot easier as well.  Plus, your imagination gets a workout then too.

Second, if you are a student of the languages, you must keep active in studying those. There are ample opportunities to do so. At my seminary, a local pastor comes in to the bookstore every Friday morning and sits with about five students reading through a chapter of the Old Testament in Hebrew, translating as they go. They spend about an hour together. See if you can find a group like that to be a part of. Another thing you can do is take your original language text to church. My pastor is preaching through the gospel of John right now, and so I sometimes take my Greek New Testament with me and follow along. It’s a simple way to keep on top of it.

Third, make sure you keep interacting with people on the levels you do during the seminary. Keeping discussing theology, faith, and the Church. Allow your mind to be active because you have a lot of free time to engage these issues during the summer. Also, take advantage of podcasts–sermons, lectures, conference audio–and set aside an hour every few days to listen to these. Some seminaries have material available through iTunesU or available for download elsewhere online. Lots of conferences makes their audio resources available online as well, and almost every church has sermons available for download.

By all means, enjoy your summer. Spend time with your family, take a vacation, and go to a ball game. But by keeping up with some simple things like reading, once summer is over you will be well prepared to get back into studying.

Thrity Thursday - Great Commentary

Ok, we’re seminarians and we love books. I don’t often recommend books here as I’m sure you already have a backlog of books on your “to be purchased” list. However, I came across this amazing resource that is at an amazing price and thought it was worth sharing.

Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament is edited by D.A. Carson and G.K. Beale and is a comprehensive commentary of EVERY old testament reference in the new testament. For every reference there is a detailed explanation of the context from which the verse appears in the Old Testament, as well as its use and implication on the New Testament text. It is a truly amazing resource.

Now, the really sweet deal is that I found it at BUY.com for $31 (List is $54)… but wait, it gets better… if you use google check-out and it is the first time you’ve ever used it then you save another $10! That means you can get this amazing resource for $21. Worth every penny and then some if you ask me.

So, if you’re interested, check it out:

Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old TestamentLeading evangelical scholars provide comprehensive commentary on every quotation, allusion, and echo of the Old Testament that appears in Matthew through Revelation.

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