I’m a big fan of Animate. Hell, I’m a big fan of anything published and produced by Sparkhouse. But Animate is great. I’ve blogged about it before here and here. When I was at Ashland, we found a lot of ways to use Animate: Faith. We did two rounds of it with our Adult Education program, but I also used it with our college group, and even showed one of the videos to our high schoolers, who seemed to also enjoy it. So while it is geared for adults, I think it works for other demographics as well.
I was excited when they first announced they were going to come out with another series, and even more excited when I saw the lineup:
- Eric Elnes – Canon: Mining for the Word
- Phyllis Tickle – History: Parchment to Pixel
- Rachel Held Evans – Testaments: One Story, Two Parts
- Nadia Bolz-Weber – Gospels: Unexpected Good News
- Jose Morales – Genre: Rhythm of the Text
- Will Willimon – Interpretation: Scripture Reads Us
- Jay Bakker – Grace: Love is the Bottom Line
Over the past couple years, Rachel Held Evans has become a blogger extraordinaire, and so I was glad to see she got included in this round of voices. I think her video in particular is something that people often have questions about, how to think about the two testaments of the Bible (the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Scriptures), when the God portrayed in each testament tends to be such a different God (at least on the surface). Here she describes some of that in a preview of her video:
I also find the materials themselves (the leader guides, participants journals, etc) to be very engaging for participants and great to help leaders plan their use of the materials. Plus Paul Soupiset is just a brilliant artist, and I love the illustrations that he comes up with for the materials. Case in point:
I’m guessing we’ll find some ways to use this curriculum here at Winnetka Presbyterian; it’s one of those resources that you can purchase with confidence, knowing that it will provide meaningful and spiritually rich conversations.
