Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Another brick in the wall.

In this week's "Bible study" I had students read about Joshua's destruction of the Amorites (Joshua 10:1-28). My reasons were three: it is as troubling an example of God's miraculous interventions in history as you could hope for (it is echoed in bits of the Left Behind books we've been reading); the sun's standing still is the crucial Bible passage in the Scopes Monkey trial (at least as dramatized in Inherit the Wind); and Jerry Falwell, about whom we're about to read, fashioned himself a latter day Joshua. But it also gave me a chance to show one of the great wonders of the web, The Brick Testament, a literal visualization of much of the Bible, verse by King James verse, in LEGO. (Here: verses 11, 13 and 26.) Not sure whether this makes the horrors of Joshua' clearing out the Canaanites more real or not; I'm gambling that it may make it more real, since we are all so inured to scenes of staged live-action violence that they don't feel real anymore, while the world of LEGO is supposed to be nice (like Jesus)....!