The United Bible Societies blog has a short article “What can help dyslexic people to engage with the Bible?” that links to a document that sets out a really interesting and engaging multimedia approach to Bible study. By engaging with the text in different ways through also different media the author has an approach to reading the Bible which works well for her, despite dyslexia making traditional Bible-reading approaches difficult. It also provides ideas which people who find reading print easy can use to get deeper engagement with what they have read.

She also gives PodBible and our Think|Pray|Do’s a good review

Tim Bulkeley (founder of PodBible) is trying to podcast 5 minute (or so) reflections on each of the E100 readings at his 5 Minute Bible site, today’s on Genesis 1 and 2 is here. (There is an RSS feed for the E100 series here.)

Over the next 20 weeks, as many people in NZ are following the E100 scheme, PodBible will be podcasting five readings a week, instead of one chapter a day. These 100 readings, 50 from the Old Testament and 50 from the New Testament, have been chosen to give an overview of the Bible.

For more on E100 and for discussion of the passages (on the E100 Challenge blog or try Facebook).

Since I saw the promo video I’ve been keen to see if Google Wave could be the tool we are looking for to encourage people who listen to PodBible to begin to share their responses to the biblical texts to which they listen. Once I’d hoped Facebook would be the tool, but it does not seem to be. It works fine for quick easy relatively trivial communication but does not seem good at extended conversations. Email is good at those, but only good for small groups who want to read the conversation as it grows. Discussion forums are good for such prolongued discussion, but can seem somewhat disconnected and impersonal (no one knows you are a dog on the Internet 😉

I have just received my invitation to Wave so if you like PodBible and would be interested in helping me to explore Wave with a view to using it to get conversation and prayer going around the chapters please email me and I might use one of my eight invitations for you. If you are already “on Wave” please also let me know so I can add oyu as a contact (since I do not use Gmail it could not open my contacts automatically

The two books of Samuel as audio Bible chapters, packaged in roughly one hour collections, for easy transfer to CD or cassette, or for listening on those long journeys.

1 Samuel

• Bible 60 1 Samuel 1-15
  
• Bible 60 1 Samuel 16-31

2 Samuel

• Bible 60 2 Samuel 1-12
  
• Bible 60 2 Samuel 13-25
  

By the way, as a follow up to the previous post on the first day of this month the PodBible site was visited by 1183 people (well actually distinct IP addresses) who downloaded 4,282,972KB this is about 3,500-4,000 Bible chapters!

The average for June was 1214 people per day and 101,231,003KB in the month or over 65,000 average chapters.

Today we podcast the last chapter to complete the whole Bible! After nearly four years of work, starting with 300+ volunteers reading the whole Bible live over Labour Weekend in 2005, and continuine with teams brainstorming ideas for something to Think about, Pray about and Do for each chapter the daily podcast series is complete.

We will continue to provide a daily chapter, but the whole Bible is now available to download chapter-by-chapter. We have begun work on a couple of new projects to develop PodBible further.

First we are packaging chapters to make 60 minute collections (book by book) so that people can download these “Bible60” collections to put on CDs, tapes or their car radios to listen to longer swathes of Scripture (with no TPDs added).

Then we are working to make the daily podcasts available in AMR format (much smaller files than the MP3s we podcast here) for download to mobile phone… news of a launch soon we hope

By ther way if providing Bible readings to more than a thousand people a day sounds worthwhile to you maybe you could help by taking a share of the regular tasks needed to run the podcasts, with a little training we can provide, anyone who is moderately computer literate could do what is needed in less than an hour a week… write to Tim to get more details…

Someone asked:

Is there a listing of the order of the readings? Is it straight through, chronological, some kind of mix?

These are good questions! Being “on the inside” we did not think to answer them till you asked 😉

Bible in a Year: The readings follow the traditional Protestant Canon roughly alternating an Old Testament book with a New Testament book. There are a few adjustments for the different number of books in each “half” of the Bible and because too many psalms or proverbs in a row might be “too much of a good thing” those books are split into sections. The order is the one used by this email service.

Chapter a Day: Here the order is much more complex, basically we are “doing” the books that have not yet been podcast, so that we will have the whole Bible available (we should finish this year though we are repeating the gospels, and to fit in with a Bible reading and discussing plan a friend is organising we may repeat some other books. Again we roughly alternate Old and New Testaments, and have split up the psalms into roughly two week “chunks”.

It is Christmas Day, may you all encounter the God who chose to be born into a human family and lived among us, to die for us; and may the peace on earth that the angels sing about come nearer where you live in the coming year!

BTW now is a good time to start thinking about planning to listen to the whole Bible in 2009, just choose “Bible in a Year” above, or subscribe from this link. If you are on Facebook add PodBible, we hope in 2009 to start using it to get people “talking” about the readings…

An astute listener told us that the volunteer who had split up Ezekiel for Bible in a Year had misspelled his name, so several sections have been corrected, that is why days 332-336 have reappeared on the page and the RSS feed.