furtherandfaster

Short films competition

Enter the Pitch is a yearly competition to make a demo short film on a bible theme. The winner gets to go to Hollywood and make the film with a real though modest budget. The demo short list and long list were posted today so that anyone can have a look at Enterthepitch.com. Alongside each film is a precis about the bible story or theme which inspired the film.

This is the first time I have seen the short list of films in previous years it has been a struggle to find the winner posted - so forward the link to anyone you think would find this interesting - I find it refreshing that the filmmakers have been able to develop the themes and not make tame homage films bogged down in religion and churchiness.

Bible subjected to sentiment analysis

So who wants to know if the Bible is overwhelmingly negative or positive? Well now you can find out. Because it has been analysed.

The great thing about dataculture is its inability to resist using a tool if there is one. Whether or not that tool is useful or adds anything. Here's a stonker. Sentiment analysis is a highly unreliable technique used to determine the amount of positive sentiment in a sentence and the amount of negative sentiment. Usually these techniques leave a considerable amount of the data unclassifiable so left at neutral. In social media the negative counts are deducted from the positives to give a general score.

Let me confess that there is no fence from here to the horizon I am in danger of sitting on here. I loathe sentiment analysis because it is brute computing power applied to .. well anything anyone feels like. And now it is applied to the Bible. There are no neutral scores - but a blend of positives and negatives. Jesus teaching comes out positive. Good. New Testament church gets into a bit of a slough of negativity. Oh dear. I have no idea what exactly this analysis is measuring - only that if it can be measured the computer is going to generate a score.

Have a look. You need to be aware that increasingly this kind of dope data processing is being applied to social media, political coverage -everything which appears in text. And that the ability to code images and films using AI means it is going to be extended to everything. And the conclusions presented as insight.  At the risk of taking the plank out of my own eye (bit negative there) can I suggest you enjoy the blog post? And give the technology a very wide berth.

 

Bible matters

Couple of items here. I discovered that there's an initiative as part of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible to get people to read a chapter apiece on Youtube. Here's what has been uploaded so far. Plenty of great and good as well as wilder and wackier - Richard Dawkins reading Song of Songs 2 - Hmm OK. And Rev Ian Paisley rolling those Hulster vowels to read about the Whore of Babylon in Revelation 17.  But apparently they are taking submissions from all and sundry so do you fancy picking up a KJV and a camcorder and having a go?

 

The other item is Grayling's secular Bible - a useful exercise in that it demonstrates what a secularist thinks a sacred text is and is presumably using this to knock a better version out. The original version was written by goatherd's apparently and Grayling it is time he set the world straight. I enjoyed Maggi Dawn's deconstruction of the secular Bible by explaining how a sacred text gets made and what its good for.  Well done Maggi.  Apparently there's more than meets the eye. Sorry Professor I'm not offended. Just mystified.

Pete Rollins

I'm going to post a sequence of Pete Rollins films because each one is like a cold shower -no idea where he's going to take me but I love the journey.  He has several books out. Orthodox Heretic I haven't read but will do some time very soon.  Here's the first Reduce or Wrestle. Hope it annoys you as much as it annoys and delights me.

Two Qu'rans for one burned Mass Bible Society offer

Massachusetts Bible Society has come with an interesting offer - they will give away 2 Qu'rans for every one burned. Claiming it consistent with the command within the Bible's pages to love our neighbors as ourselves (Lev. 19:18) and to do unto others as we would have done unto us. (Matt. 7:12).
You can read about it here.

Books and sacred fire

The furore over Qu-ran burning takes me back a week. To last Sunday where I was walking in a Bucharest street market and saw a book lying under the table on the pavement - it was leather bound - the cover very dark. When I opened it I found I was looking at an antique copy of the Hebrew scriptures. Dropped in a position that a Jew would find offensive - in the gutter.

At the time I recalled a story I had heard about a multi-faith meeting to which the Jewish group brought some extracts written on single sheets of paper. Each copy was carefully collected in after the meeting.  When asked why the answer came that the word of God had to be treated with reverence. Rather than risk them being put in a waste bin the rabbi explained he would burn them to preserve their sanctity. Burning goes in both directions. After all the Bible is one of the best selling books in the world. What on earth are you supposed to do with the old ones? What is an appropriate form of disposal. Isn't fire a good way to go?

Of course the American pastor threatening to burn the Qu'ran isn't troubling himself with thes niceties. The burning is a calculated insult swathed around with claims about who has the ultimate truth. Calculated to inflame. And it has just about everybody. Worse its not even a matter of principle. Its a hostage threat. Move your mosque from within 2 blocks of 9/11 and I won't set fire to your book.

Pastor Jones doesn't believe the Macabees should be in his bible so he won't have read how Antiochus the Seleucid desecrated the Jewish temple and drove the populace to revolt under the Macabee brothers to fight for their freedom to worship freely.  Blasphemy and disrespect aren't just insults to heap upon those you disagree with. You can be guilty of them yourself if you put your own certainties ahead of all others. And treat them with contempt. Enough contempt has been poured on the hapless pastor already. I understand where he is coming from and share some of his beliefs. What I don't share is the perception that I have the right to insult and trample of the beliefs of others. That's blasphemy in my book.

 

 

Goldingay

Just finished Men Behaving Badly by John Goldingay - a psychological study of Saul and David the first of the kings of Israel. It turns out I seem to have read a lot by this man - an academic by trade he has a way of writing himself into the studies he writes - and you get an impression of him as someone who is raw around the edges and isn't afraid to let it show. I was so impressed with this last book that I ordered The Usual Suspects which is his account of his experience looking after his wife who he married knowing she had Multiple Sclerosis. It too is a gripping read.

One of his other books After eating the Apricot had a chapter on eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Which traditionally was not an apple (unknown in the middle east then) but an apricot. It turns out the Goldingay is another word for the apricot. Something for readers consuming a book by a Goldingay to think about. And typical of his playfulness.

His approach to the study of the Bible is unpredictable and bold and his drawing on his own experiences is a good paradigm for study. You can't study it objectively or subjectively without failing to make a proper connection. You have to stand alongside the text and let it work on you. And let it ask you questions that make you feel uncomfortable. Goldingay works in Fuller University in California now. I doubt I'll ever get to meet the man but he has become one of my heroes. Respect. Deep respect.

Dialogue in sacred spaces

I met Bernard Coyault - general secretary of the Alliance Biblique Francaise at the Bible Societh trustess meeting. He's one of those mavericks you can't help warming to. When he spoke after dinner he talked about how he uses Bible stories as a contact point with immigrants in the northern Paris suburb where he lives. Because the stories are resonant and transcend culture and language. They become vehicles for dialogue and the exchange of values whether or not there is a shared faith.  Really interesting guy. I am hoping to collaborate with him on an Ipad project soon.

Through the letterbox: value creation please?

I got a couple of pieces of direct mail last week which I thought worth commenting on. Firstly a book from the Mail media centre. Great excitement - everyhing you ever wanted to know about Direct Mail. Great. Only the book is empty. Why? Because you have everything you need on the mmc.co.uk website. Very droll. But I'll tell you something. The first time I logged onto the site was to get the link to tell you about it. There's a flaw in creating something of perceived value, leading the recipient up the garden path then leaving them with waste paper. Because the point of the mailing was to give them something with tangible value. Which I don't think this is. Would I prefer a book to a website? Yes I would. So having gone to the cost of printing a book and mailing it to me do you really think I'm going to control my chuckles (yup you really got me there) and obediently log onto the website.

Actually my first thought once I had opened up the piece was not about the website or how well I had been fooled. It was for the hapless postmen who if my memory serves me correctly have been following a programme of industrial action because they think they're handing out a ton of worthless direct mail and not getting paid for it. Creating worthless books as part of a direct mail for your own postmen to deliver looks like a bit of an own goal to me. I think I'll present this to my local postie and see what he makes of it.

And onto a mailing by the Bible Society - who are trying to get money out of me to pay for the printing of Bibles for the Chinese. And including a couple of printed pages with a postit note explaining that they really have been printed in China - and inviting you to pray for the Chinese Christians who will receive the Bible you're just about to make a donation for.  Now I might turn around to the Bible Society and ask why they are 'wasting' money printing tens of thousands of pages in a language I can't read and mailing them to potential donors. But it doesn't work that way at all. The flimsy (and creased pages are a reminder that value is more than production values. There are people who are making do with flimsy bits of paper like this. All I have to do is write a cheque to give them a printed Bible which is altogether more substantial. Suddenly these flimsy torn pieces of paper feel valuable to me. Even if I can't read what is printed on them. Excellent work.

Direct mail is such a transient medium then creat ives ought really to think very hard about how they can create tangible value from it. Its all going to go in the bin anyway. So think of what you can do to slow down that inevitable process and make something different happen. By making something more valuable than the sum of its parts. Ooh and I also received the latest issue of Directory - new ideas in direct (and digital) communications edited by my good friend Patrick Collister. Its chock full of brilliant award winning direct campaigns from all over the world. You can expect me to write about some of them very shortly.

Glo bible is go

I finally finished the installation of the Glo-- Bible at midnight last night (Monday). More interesting is that I started the installation at around 7pm on Saturday. Which for me is a personal record. The installation was relentless and stable enough but I bet most people wouldn't bother if they kew it would take that long.I've embedded a vid so you can see how whizzy it is. I look forward to using it. It has certainly already cost me time and money. I mention the time.. well I had to install a new hard drive in the laptop because Glo takes up 18GB of memory which was enough to make my Vaio fall over. Is it worth it? Dunno yet.

Glo Bible is positioned as a high def study guide with lots of multimedia. I have occasion to study the bible more than many and I can tell you that I won't be using it for this purpose. Producers of reference material I think overestimate how much people use their material. I have loads of reference books and use hardly any. And multimedia reference is an odd one. I mean if there were a Youtube encyclopaedia would you buy one? 

So now I've got your curiosity why would I spend that amount of money and most of a weekend puting this on the hard drive of a laptop? Presentation that's what. The interface is remarkable and it is fun to zoom around one of the guided tours and to click on the next 'room' and be transported into it. I think Glo Bible could be a brilliant presentation tool for using pictures and images instead of lots and lots of words of which the Bible has plenty already. So I plan to plug it into a projector and use it as a supplement for workshops, sermons and that sort of thing.  I'll let you know what happens when I get around to using it.

But 2 days to install a piece of reference material? I don't think so.