Sarah Dylan Breuer is a good scholar and a great communicator and writes with an easy style. It’s been my great good fortune to get to know her over the last few years – in real life as well as virtually, and she lives with the same enthusiasm and vitality that she writes. (And, incidentally, she was the person who originally had the idea of the U2charist, which was later developed by others). Give yourself a treat and go read her work.

Alan Wilson at Bishop Alan’s Blog:

…Enter Maggi Dawn, and her new book The Writing on the Wall. It’s a trip through the Bible for the biblically ignorant but otherwise educated reader, giving some basic info and background on the stories that have shaped our literature and history. She doesn’t just tell the story, but gives enough background to it to help you understand its meaning, and why it may have been used as it has been. So she turns on a light bulb to illuminate a range of cultural basics — Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, Spenser, Jacob Epstein, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, yea even Monty Python… and hundreds of others.

So, here is an ideal present for the sixth former in your life who seeks some background to our culture. Its clarity and sense of perspective may also help the busy preacher…

A review from Paul Fromont at Prodigal Kiwis

There are many so-called “introductions” to the Bible, but Maggi’s book is a creative attempt to help readers engage the Bible from a different range of perspectives, those derived from art (a “catch all” term that includes paintings, music, and literature) and popular culture.

In re-imagining and re-engaging the bible from these perspectives, Maggi’s book does its likely many readers a wonderful service, especially if those readers may have heard significant stories (.e.g. the Creation account, or the Fall etc) from the Bible, but never engaged or read them from within their own everyday contexts – contexts woven through with the ‘threads’ of art, literature, film and music – whether contemporary or not.

New life is therefore breathed into the significant and important stories of the Bible, and hopefully a new readership will be brought into conversation with the narrative flow and drama of its stories, finding within its pages the invitations that all good stories offer; invitations to discover wisdom, to engage mystery, to discover grounds for new hope, to embrace the means by which new life can be experienced, and to search for new understanding in relation to what it means to be fully human and fully alive.

Maggi is a gifted, skilled, and disciplined writer and I highly recommend all of her published essays and books, but in particular this new book (because it’s her latest). Reading it will be a fruitful experience whether you read the Bible, think you know its stories, or have never read it before. It’s the kind of adventure we all need from time-to-time, and Maggi’s book is just the kind of accompanying friend we need. Read The Writing on the Wall – alongside Google – and the reading experience, like any good tour, will be enriched by seeing the sites as well.

I like finding out about the origins of words and phrases – someone noted the other day that I rarely preach a sermon without mentioning the etymology of at least one word. One of the most entertaining sidelines of my research on S T Coleridge was discovering how many of the words and phrases in the English language had been coined by him.

A recent book called Scapegoats, Shambles and Shibboleths is an alphabetical account of words and phrases that come from the King James bible. It's great fun, and would make a good Christmas present.

]]> http://maggidawn.com/scapegoats-shambles-and-shibboleths/feed/ 1 http://maggidawn.com/the-devil-is-behind-the-niv/ http://maggidawn.com/the-devil-is-behind-the-niv/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:05:31 +0000 maggi dawn http://dev.maggidawn.com/the-devil-is-behind-the-niv/ A couple of weeks ago I posted on a Bible-burning event – the AmazingGrace church were planning to burn any translation of the Bible except the King James Version.

Rain, protesters and local law enforcement apparently led to the event being adapted – it sounds like they cut up the bibles at a small private party instead of burning them. Nevertheless, the comically mis-named AmazingGrace church was pleased with the result which they have reported here, along with a call to a 2010 Bible Burning, all to a fabulous track called the "bogus Bible Blues". You couldn't make this stuff up.

Paula Gooder

One place where the connections are being made is Cross-Reference, a website devoted to joining up the dots between the Bible and English literature. It's aimed at A-level students, although if you're feeling a tad clueless about the BIble at degree level, it's not a bad place to start. The home page is searchable; here are some sample pages on Chaucer and the Metaphysical Poets. And if you subscribe to the blog you'll be kept up to date with new additions to the site.

People often assume that you would only read the Bible if you were interested in religion. But without a degree of biblical knowlege, you can't understand Western art, from the earliest known artefacts right through to Banksy and Damien Hirst; you don't get Shakespeare or Chaucer or Milton or Donne, you'll miss all sorts of inferences in contemporary authors like John Stenbeck, Patrick Gale, Salley Vickers…

Amazing amounts of English idiom were coined by the bible translators of the 16th and 17th centuries. 

Go read. It's worth it.