09/01/2022
I haven't posted anything here for a long, long time; the downturn in sales due to pandemic restructuring of church programming has definitely thrown me off my game.
The lack of posts here reflects the absence of posts on my blog, for which this page has acted mostly as an announcement board -- basically a platform for linking to blog posts which are in turn simply online publications of the Editorial Pages that accompany the seasonal installments of The Sunday Paper. In both places, the last activity was last November.
Looking at those dates, I realize that my activity on this page, while never very high, stopped completely when I became the eNews editor for our parish, which launched me into high levels of digital activity on a different platform, namely Mailchimp. Learning to make a decent-looking weekly newsletter on Mailchimp was about as much as I could handle, without muddling that process by periodic forays into Wordpress. My admiration is great for all you folks who deal with multiple platforms all the time.
Another reason I did not post the Epiphany and Lent 2022 Sunday Paper Editorials on my blog is because they were, in whole or in part, quotations from other writers. For the record, the Epiphany editorial is a reprint of a lovely piece by my daughter Grace Pritchard Burson and you can read it here:
http://www.gracepritchardburson.net/2021/12/21/blankets-and-bechdel-tests/
The Lent editorial is a rather wistful piece commenting on various articles about online church that I've been collecting. I may eventually summarize it either here on on the blog, but (hopefully) it is no longer quite so painfully topical, so, after such a long delay I am preferring to catch up in a different way.
I have just (finally) posted on my blog the Eastertide editorial (link in the next post), which is a review of yet another brand-new children's Bible, and therefore follows up on the previously most recent post. In a day or so I will also post the current ("Fall 1") Sunday Paper editorial, which pursues this topic in another way.
This whole topic of children's Bibles strikes me as a kind of indicator for some really basic issues in Christian formation and evangelism, not only for children but for adults. What does it mean to say that a curriculum, or a church, is "Bible-based"? What do different Christians mean when they say "The Bible says ... "? How, in a cultural increasingly attuned to digital media and less and less attuned to texts, do we pass down our sacred text?
Blankets and Bechdel tests in Sermons on 12/21/21All Saints’, Dorval Advent IV, Year C December 19, 2021 You may have heard of the “Bechdel Test” – a test of the representation of women in movies, books and the like, popularized by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who credited the idea to her frie...
