It irritates me how no one seems to read anymore. Steve, a fellow blogger, commented yesterday: “I wish more people under 40 would think. . . .” Amen! But discovering and learning new information and ideas is foundational to meaningful thought. The problem is, people don’t read anymore! I have friends who brag about how they got college degrees and rarely touched their text books. How is that possible?!?
Of course one of the first books that this generation has stopped reading is the Bible. My peers (young adults) describe it as archaic, irrelevant, fallible, and boring. My generation has seen every major marketing tactic possible. We are bombarded with visually stimulating advertisements that appeal to our love for technology and demand for immediate satisfaction. Why would we slow down to read a book? Can’t I get the SparkNotes version, a condensed Bible? Do I have to read the whole thing? Forget it!
The publishers of Bible Illuminated: The Book seem to think they have a way to market the “good book” to us:
Martin Luther King Jr. graces one page, Angelina Jolie the next. A photo of a man on fire opens the Book of Revelation. And laid across a two-page image of gasoline spilling from a pump is the quote that begins, “The whole earth was amazed and followed the beast. . . .”
“In general, Bible publishers have always been creative, but now they are scrambling to meet a culture where people are moving away from print reading,” said Paul Gutjahr, an associate professor of English and adjunct associate professor in religious studies at Indiana University. . . .
The Bible is reinvented quite often. While essentially still the same book, Gutjahr said that for the past two decades, updates were largely focused on new translations. There are also versions that come out each year that are essentially the same book, with different covers and sizes based on people’s wants. But he sees the next trend as one toward textual translation and visual translation.
“In a visually literate, advertising-skeptical age — how do you grab people’s attention?” Gutjahr asked. “Mixing the biblical text with Angelina Jolie doesn’t surprise me.”
First published in Sweden last year, “Bible Illuminated: The Book” is the glossy fashion magazine-style publication that features Jolie. It looks like it might be more at home on a coffee table or the nightstand of the latest hipster hotel than a church.
The creation of former advertising executives, it pairs intense photo essays — including images such as a child with a gun or beatings in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold’s II’s regime — with passages from the New Testament. It is aimed at people who might not otherwise ever read the Bible. (Skidmore, 2008, emphasis mine)
My wife always says, “I’m a visual learner.” I think there is a lot of truth to that, there is powerful imagery in the Bible and it helps to capture some of that for the readers. But there also should be some caution here, so as to not mislead people with imagery virtually unrelated to the text. The authors of Bible Illuminated: The Book have done a great job marketing the Word to a new generation, but we must be sure that in our attempts to appeal to culture we don’t sacrifice or blur the message.
- What are some other ways you could market the Bible to the next generation?
- How could “visual translation” change or confuse the textual translation?
- Does the next generation need to become more literate or should we continually simplify the message so that they can understand it? In other words, is it our role to bring the message to the audience’s level or do we share some responsibility in educating the recipients of it? Could it be both?
It is my hope that this post encourages some discussion and ignites thought. Please comment by clicking on “Comments” directly to the right of this post’s title. God bless!
References:
Skidmore, S. (2008, October 8). New Bibles cater to ever-changing culture. The Christian Post. Retrieved October 8, 2008, from http://christianpost.com/article/20081008/new-bibles-cater-to-ever-changing-culture.htm.
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Great to see you writing this kind of post again Dan. Thanks for the link as always, I’ll get some social media links out there for you and also help with the monetization. Looks like you’ve figured out how to set ads in the new format, I may need some training there
Yeah, I just manually added the Adsense, good ol’ copy and paste. I have yet to figure out how to serve ads in between posts. I think I’ve been frustrated with prayeramedic readership because I’ve met their demand for concise articles, but I often want to write longer pieces. Longer stuff will start going here.
I like the freedom so far. I intend to push the boundaries as much as possible.
Ok I am figuring out how to get ads in with the posts, it took some manual editing of the *.php scripts and the help of none other than FeedBurner help files!
If you figure it out, then we’ll for sure need a workshop day, since I’ve never been able to get the ads thing to work in feedburner, thus wasting the 300 subscribers i have, many of whom probably don’t come to the site every day.
I think I got it, subscribe to my feed and let me know if they are in there or not.
Superior post. Keep up the smashing work,You must definitely have to keep updating your site
Thanks Bible Verses, I needed that encouragement