Many religions have texts that contain beliefs, ritual practices, or commandments. The Quran is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from Allah. The Bible is a collection of religious texts sacred to Christians, Jews, and others. Unique to the Latter Day Saint movement is the Book of Mormon.
The study of these texts is a core religious practice of believers. Looking for a way to quickly understand what the scriptures say on a given topic, I developed a simple Shiny app using R as a study tool:
When a user enters a search term (e.g. “faith”, “gospel”, “sacrifice”, etc.) and clicks “Search”, the app returns a summary table and a detail table. The summary table shows the number of verses that contain the search term by book of scripture. The detail table shows the actual text of all the verses containing the search term.
You can find a full-screen version of the web app here.
In the future, I’d like to enhance the app by adding the ability to search for a phrase (e.g. holy ghost), instead of just a single word. I’d also like to add functionality to compare the presence of multiple words and phrases in different volumes of scriptures. For example, comparing the frequency of the appearance of words like “man” and “woman”.
Hopefully this simple scripture search app can be a helpful tool in your own study. You can find the R code for this project here and access the Shiny app directly here.
