Tim at Sans Blogue has posted about my comments about the Pod Bible in the “Faith Comes By Hearing” post.

I wrote:

“Produced in New Zealand using more than 300 “people off the street” they are distributing daily podcasts that include a short reading and devotional application.”

He replied:

1. the smallest readings we offer are the “chapter a day” version (which though short are still longer than most readings in churches on Sunday!) but we also offer “Bible in a Year” of several chapters at a time – it is precisely that hearers get the text in larger “chunks” that I see as one of the advantages of this medium!
2. We do want people to read the Bible devotionally, but I think to say we provide a “devotional application” also misses the point. Our brief things to |think|pray|do| at the end of each chapter (of the chapter a day version) are carefully openended, we try to avoid telling others what the Bible is “saying” but hope to provoke them to work it out for themselves, and certainly to work out the application for themselves.

I had a listen again to a couple of the podcasts and was struck by the fact that the “devotional applications” that I mentioned are in fact a very small part of the entire recording.  Thank you, Tim for the clarification and congratulations on a wonderful ministry.

In my original post I also made some comments regarding the superiority of reading vs. hearing for comprehension.  Tim challenged that assertion as well and I encourage you to read his post which makes some excellent points. On one hand, this issue is simply a matter of common sense.  As I illustrated (hopefully in a humorous way) with the joke about the elderly couple, reading is superior to hearing in comprehending (and retaining) details.  But as Tim points out:

“…hearing, and particularly hearing larger swathes of text, means you are more likely to pick up themes and keywords and motifs that are repeated or operate through a book.”

I couldn’t agree more.  And as you will see in some of my other writing (Such as The Telescope and the Microscope: Tools for understanding the Bible ) I believe in getting the big picture of a text before concentrating on the details and listening to a text is an excellent way to do this.

Tim’s Sans Blogue is definitely a blog to keep an eye on.  There’s lots of Bible, word studies and new media/third wave publishing. For that reason, I’ve added his blog to my “Blogs I Watch” blogroll.