Welcome Back, Topical Reports

I spent a few months thinking about how I wanted to do topical reports - easily the most requested feature.

The Original Anselm Project

About a year ago, the original Anselm Project produced both passage reports and topical reports. The topical reports were... very repetitive. And that is the last thing anyone wants. I don't know about you, but I cannot stand when people repeat themselves 1,000 times, and when AI does it it gets ramped up by another factor of 1,000.

I worked on the passage reports, and I decided that I would focus predominately on those reports because they were refining much easier. Asking the passage what is important is, in someways, easier: Matthew generally informs Matthew. However, to do a search on love meant searching for all the nuance of scripture.

AI seemed to be the right tool for the job, but I just couldn't find the right process to make something high-quality. With a heavy heart, I deleted the topical engine.

But, I knew it would come back. I realized while making the background for the Synod that it could, in theory, answer topical questions. That was the spark that made me think again about the Mixture of Experts in terms of a topical report, but I needed some free time to sketch out the pipeline of what to do.

AI Ratings of the Topical Report

Now that version 3 of the site was over, I had a few free braincells and came up with a pipeline and process for the AI to run through, and now, topical reports are back. I am very happy with the results.

Grok 4.1 gave the report a 95/100.
Gemini 3 Pro gave the report a 92/100.
ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking gave the report a 95/100.
Claude 4.5 Sonnet gave the report a 92/100.

When I clarified that the Anselm Project was designed primarily for pastors and seminarians, the average jumped to 96/100.

Cost

Now, the new engine for topical sermons is quite thirsty. The token counts are much higher than I expected for a report like this when I started, but the reason became clear: there is a possibility that a topic could span all 66 books of the standard canon. Many topics such as ones like grace take at least 50 books.

As a result, I had to make the engine cost 3 credits instead of the normal one. I'll continue to play around with it, and if I can get the token costs down without seriously sacrificing quality, I will make adjustments.

Sharing

The same bonuses for sharing passage reports apply to topical reports, and the community gallery has been updated.

Anselm Project Bible Version 1.6

A minor adjustment - I created a post hoc engine to standardize names. No more Bathsheba and Beth-sheba. Those should all be standardized now into Bathsheba. All divine variations of the tetragrammaton should render correctly as The LORD, as is the tradition with English bibles.

The APB was never intended to be a purely "literal" translation. It was intended to be a literal-equivalent, similar to the ESV. So, some editing after the fact makes a lot of sense. It's possible some errors were made in the change, so if you final any, let me know.

God bless, everyone.