CHANGING COURSE

Don’t miss 7pm Wednesday 1st July

“Why the Bible?  Which books made it in and which didn’t” 

  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86219446003?pwd=eXFQbU8zdXUwa2VRMnVrYUhoVUx5Zz09 Password: 280694

GOODBYE ONE BOOK, HELLO ANOTHER

By the start of the month, I realised that the coronavirus pandemic would change everything, in the world and in the church.  So I decided to mothball “Has the Church got a Future” for about a year.  I spent four days finishing the last two sections of part 2, looking at the changes  in ‘Economics’ (1,000 words) and ‘Health’ (2,400 words) over the last 20 years.  Now on to my next book!

That is “Making Sense of the Bible in 40 blogs”.  I have been writing blogs about the Bible for three years, so three quarters of the book has been written, though it will need to be properly revised.  29 blogs are done.  I wrote two more this month, about the Bible in general and about the Gnostic gospels.  I shall next be working on six blogs on the Old Testament and three on the New Testament.  It means that I aim to send out two blogs a month, hoping to publish the book with Filament in October.  I shall be busy!

Working on the blog on the ‘Lost Gospels’ was fascinating. Years ago I had bought two books on the New Testament Apocrypha, ‘Lost Christianities’ and ‘Documents of the Study of the Gospels’.  I learnt so much from them.  I only had to order ‘the Da Vinci Code” from Amazon, and my reading list was complete.  I then realised that the writers of the New Testament had to struggle with these odd elitIst ideas from the very beginning!

MEDIA

I created a 10 minute video on singing five meditative psalm chants, from my book ‘Discovering Psalms as Prayer’.  They can be seen on my website ‘bibleinbrief.org, or on  youtube.com under ‘Chants for Prayer’.

I also boosted three facebook posts.

‘How can we make sense of God?’ – about the Trinity, I boosted it twice and got 964 clicks, mostly on Rublev’s icon of the Trinity.

‘The Bible – something you need a transit van to move…?’ got 244 clicks.  It advertised my blog and ten people clicked on the link.

‘What’s in the Bible – and what isn’t’, publicising the Zoom discussion on Wednesday, has got 69 people clicking the link so far.  That’s good!

FILMS

With having to stay at home, Linda and I have enjoyed a mixture of films.  The best ones were ‘Italian for Beginners’, ‘Notting Hill’ and ‘Almost Famous’.  We are really enjoying a BBC1 series called ‘Staged’, in which Michael Sheen and David Tennant are persuaded to rehearse a play ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ on Zoom.  A hilarious take on lockdown life.  Do take a look on iPlayer.