Music
If you use christianradio.com, stream K-Love or have listened to Christian radio in the past four months or so, this name will be pretty well known to you. If not, it’s time you heard it: Lauren Daigle. Trust me, you should check out her music. Daigle is a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, and like most professional singer-songwriters these days, she grew up singing in church. But Lauren hardly stopped there. A few years ago she even tried out for American Idol. And she went pretty far, too. She’s also had a few good hits in the past, including “How Can It Be.” But if I’m being honest I never saw anything that special about her until her recent single dropped. Her new song is called “Trust in You” and it’s excellent. Hey, I like it and my favourite music is about as far from her style as possible. I like symphonic metal. In other words, it’s got broad appeal!
Find it @ laurendaigle.com/site
Toilets?
I get it; this is an odd one and some will find it undignified. Perhaps it is. But it’s also sort of interesting. See, there is that famous scene in the Bible where David cuts a piece off of King Saul’s garment while he is being hunted by Saul and his men (1 Samuel 24). In the King James Bible it says that Saul touched his cloak to his sandals (or “covered his feet”). Modern translations of course usually do away with the attempt to give a word for word type of rendering for the Hebrew and instead they just tell us what touching your robe to your sandals means. They tell us that… you know… he’s doing “his business.”
The Bible of course is oddly full of toilet talk. From Ehud dispatching that large man whilst he was on the can (Judges 3:21-22) to Deuteronomy 23:13’s instructions for the old number two while at camp. It’s all over the place. Usually it’s smearing dung talk but sometimes, as in the case of Ehud, it’s actually really important to understand what ancient toilets and bathroom habits were like in order to fully understand the story.
And that’s where the good folks at Toliet-Guru.com and biblical scholars’ and archeologists’ worlds collide. It’s fascinating stuff.
Find it @ toilet-guru.com
Bible Translation
The Purified Translation of the Bible came out some time ago but never got much traction. Though to be fair, it probably has a lot to do with the hobbyhorse issue for which the translation was first created. In any case, the Purified Bible was translated by Dr. Stephen Mills Reynolds who by most accounts is a respectable scholar. Reynolds even worked on the New International Version of the Bible. And this new translation of his does some things amazingly well. For example, it uses apostrophes in order to show when the word “you” was originally found in the singular or plural form, which can have huge implications on a text. Who is told that their body is a temple? Is it the individual? Is it a collection of people? Doesn’t it mean something different if it’s a people rather than a person? I think so. These things are important. The translation is quite unique and might I say “masterful” in that respect. But it’s in the central thrust that things get odd.
See, as the name suggests, this translation “purifies” all the wine into juice. The reason: Reynolds does not believe that the Bible ever advocates the consumption of alcohol. He believes all references to wine, beer and hard alcohol are actually references to other things. So in the Purified Translation, it’s all Welches. Still, this New Testament is dirt cheap and pretty cool.
Find it @ amazon.ca
Photo by Charles Hutchins via Flickr (Creative Commons)
