Friday 10 July 2009

Month 29 - Joel

This month we move onto one of the shortest books in the Old Testament: Joel. Starting at 7:30pm on Monday 27th July at 41 Linden Road. In terms of resources I'll be using the entries for Joel in James Limburg's and Peter C. Craigie's commentaries on the first few minor prophets. As the book is so short, I hope to go much more in depth into the book itself.

There are no filmed versions of this book, though in searching for them I did stumble across one that uses the quasi-Joel sounding phrase: The Day of the Locust from 1975 the year of my birth. Bizarrely it features a character called Homer Simpson, though the link to his more famous namesake is apparently coincidental.

Biblical Horror Stories for Children

...that's my title for my talk at this year's Greenbelt Festival. The idea is that I'm going to be looking at the parts of the Bible where God appears to have people killed, wondering why the place we're most likely to hear these stories is Sunday school, and asking how we should respond. I'm hoping to use a clip or two from Bible films, as there are some really good examples of how we selectively read the text to suit our sensibilities.

In part, I'm setting this page up now so that I can post links to any slides and clips I use in the talk itself. That way anyone listening on CD/MP3 won't miss out. So watch this space.