What Kirk Miller Actually Opens When He Studies a Passage in Logos

The Logos blog editor and former pastor walks through his custom layout: textual variants, original languages, ancient literature, and AI search, all in service of deep study.

I dug up an old conversation with Kirk Miller the other day, one I had with him for the interview archives close to a year ago now, and I remember wanting to rebuild my own layout the second we ended our conversation.

Kirk writes for and edits Logos blog articles alongside hosting interviews, so he’s around this stuff constantly. Before Logos, he spent fifteen years in pastoral ministry, worked as a chaplain at a rescue mission, and served as a theological librarian. He first came to Logos through a school partnership in college and went all in during seminary once he realized a well-built digital library beats a shelf of paperbacks and hardbacks that take up half your office.

A layout with one job

Kirk told me he keeps his layout minimal. He gets a little anxious when too much is open at once, which I remember thinking was funny, because he’s somehow managing multiple monitors of information without any of it looking like chaos. He starts clean and only adds what a given task needs.

The centerpiece is a custom guide he just calls “Guide.” Not the built-in Exegetical Guide, not a topic guide, but something he built himself, section by section, to surface exactly what he finds useful when he’s working through a text. He pulls it up for preaching prep and personal study alike.

Here’s what was in it, at least as of our conversation:

• Commentaries, ranked in his own priority order so his most trusted sources surface first

• Textual Variants, pulling significant variant readings from his textual commentary resources

• Grammars, pulling in Greek and Hebrew grammar sections that comment on the passage. “Sometimes they’re not commentaries,” he said, “but they provide really insightful commentary on a passage.”

• Ancient Literature, surfacing anything from the apostolic fathers or early church writers that touches the text

• Custom Collections, a search across specific curated book sets he’d built up over time

What stuck with me, even months later, was how deliberate the whole thing was. He hadn’t just accepted the defaults. He’d built a guide around how he actually thinks through a passage.

Try it yourself: open a Bible passage in Logos, go to Guides, and select Custom Guide. Add sections one at a time based on what you actually want to see. Start with Commentaries and Textual Variants and build out from there.

The translation he kept coming back to, the NET Bible

Kirk told me he’d used plenty of translations over the years, but the NET Bible had earned his trust more than any other, mainly because of the translation notes. When the translators made a tough call on a word or phrase, they explain their reasoning right there. That kind of transparency is hard to find, and if you care about the original languages at all, it changes how you read the text.

The NET Bible in Logos ships with those notes intact, so you can read the passage and the translators’ reasoning side by side.

Try it yourself: open the NET Bible on a passage you’re studying and look for the translator notes on specific words or phrases. Pay attention to how they explain their choice when more than one reading was possible.

When it got complicated, he let AI Smart Search take the first pass

For harder passages, Kirk said he used Logos AI Smart Search to ask interpretive questions directly: what does this mean, what are the major interpretive debates, where do commentators disagree. He was careful to draw a line, though. He wasn’t asking it to do his reading for him. He was using it to get the lay of the land before he dug in himself, more like a research assistant pointing him toward where to look than an answer machine handing him a conclusion.

Try it yourself: open Smart Search on your current passage and ask something like “what are the main interpretive views on this text?” or “what does this phrase mean in context?” Treat what comes back as a map, not a destination.

The approach behind all of it is the same

Going back over the transcript now, what stands out most is that Kirk wasn’t trying to process more resources. He was trying to ask better questions of fewer, more trusted ones. His Custom Guide kept his best commentaries on top. The NET Bible kept the translation reasoning visible. Smart Search gave him a starting point instead of a dead end. If you want to study more like Kirk, don’t start by adding more resources. Start by deciding which ones actually deserve a spot in your workflow.

Kirk Miller is the editor of the Logos blog, Word by Word. You can find more of his work at logos.com/grow.