What I'm Doing Here

Syntopical is a long term program of personal scripture study.  I am making use of two amazing resources that I've long known about, but have only casually used.

• The Topical Guide of the LDS Scriptures.
• The Syntopicon of the Great Books of the Western World

Both of these resources share a common characteristic: they attempt to gather relevant texts together by topic as an aid to the student of ideas.  In the Syntopicon, scholars at the University of Chicago took 102 basic concepts and then attempted to index all of the passages of the "Great Books of the Western World" that applied to those subjects in a tool that fills two full volumes of their printed set.  One of the Great Books thus indexed was the Bible.  The Topical Guide is a concordance indexed around almost 3500 topics that bring together scattered verses from the four standard works of LDS scripture (in addition to the Bible, Mormons regard the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price as authoritative and canonical texts).  It is the product of the combined work of hundreds of leaders, teachers and students of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

While neither work is exhaustive nor without its blind spots, failings or controversies, both are attractive to me because they represent the distilled results of tens of thousands of hours of reading by hundreds of serious students of the texts of scripture.  I have at my fingertips on any given topic hundreds, sometimes thousands, of references found and organized for me by those who have gone before.  I am able to see patterns and connections from an elevated perspective because I am literally standing on the shoulders of giants.  By using these two tools, the combined collective wisdom of the civilization into which I was born, and the tradition of faith to which I belong is literally at my fingertips.

The structure of my program is this:

• Each year I will select two of the 102  topics of the Syntopicon and look up each Bible reference included under that topic.
• Using the LDS edition of the Bible I will follow all footnotes for the texts indicated by the Syntopicon.
• Where a footnote in the LDS edition of the Bible references an entry in the Topical Guide, I will look up each of the scriptures on that list.
• For each text referenced I will read the surrounding chapter to gain what insights I can from context.
• I will attempt to communicate the patterns and connections that emerge in summary form by the end of each year.

For 2016 I have selected the follow topics from the Syntopicon

• Angel
• Wisdom