In this post, I want to show you what it looks like to read and interact with individual volumes of the Fathers of the Church (144 vols.) using the Logos Bible Software mobile apps.
This is the third post of a series focusing on the Fathers of the Church (144 vols.) in Logos. You can check out the other posts here. The first post in this series demonstrated how to make the most of the commentaries included in the Fathers of the Church series in Logos Bible Software. The second post demonstrated how you can search the Fathers of the Church by scripture reference, highlighting the power of the Ancient Literature guide.
Reading Confessions
Having the FC series in Logos has allowed me to easily read through Augustine’s Confessions over the past couple months. When I had down time — usually at odd times throughout the day — I would just pull out my phone and pick up where I left off.
Frequently, I would read a little after putting one of my children to bed. The dark mode in the mobile app was very nice in that setting.
Logos gives you hyperlinked access to all the editorial notes.
Within the footnote text, you’ll notice that there is a hyperlink to one of Augustine’s sermons. Clicking the link shows you a preview of that sermon opened to the correct location.
The preview you see above is from a volume of The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (44 vols.). I love how even though I am reading Confessions in the FC series, when the editor mentions one of Augustine’s works included in the New City Press series, I can open it with a click. Logos allows all my resources to work together seamlessly.
If I click the hyperlinked title of the sermon, Logos opens the volume in another tab:
Clicking a hyperlinked verse reference displays the passage in my preferred Bible.
Logos makes navigation super easy as well. You can enter page numbers or section numbers, and you can also navigate via a hyperlinked table of contents.
Accessing highlights
It’s simple to highlight text in Logos’s mobile app, and they gives you plenty of options regarding color and style.
I have hundreds of notes/highlights in Logos, and even in the mobile app I can filter my notes to display only my annotations within Confessions.
When reviewing my notes, if I want to make a comment on one of them, I can simply click the note and type a comment below.
All of these annotations sync to the desktop apps as well.
Sharing your favorite quotes
One of my favorite features of reading books in the Logos mobile app is Visual Copy. Instead of just copying and pasting a quote into a social media platform, you can select visual copy and create your own artistic rendition of the quote.
Here’s a couple others I shared:
Conclusion
Logos allows you to interact with the Fathers of the Church (144 vols.) series in a variety of ways. You can use it to fill out your commentary research with ancient voices, you can easily and powerfully search the series by scripture reference, or you can just settle into one volume and read deeply, sharing your favorite quotes along the way.
FC is a massive collection, and Logos has done a great job breaking the set down and integrating portions of it into their base packages. You can take a look at several of the individual FC bundles here. If you are interested in checking out Logos for the first time, a basic version of Logos 9 is available for free here.
Logos is the best way to own the Fathers of the Church series, and I hope this series gives you a better idea of the various ways you can interact with the volumes. You can check out other posts in the series here.
Brian W. Davidson 