Friday 16 October 2009

Word of the day: "chillen"

"And God chilled out" is the title of the brilliant German twitter Bible which the folk at evangelisch.de have published in hard copy book form in time for the Frankfurt book fair. I am so looking forward to reading it.
Earlier this year evangelisch.de succeeded in a world record attempt of getting the whole of the Bible tweeted in 10 days from the beginning of the Protestant Kirchentag to Pentecost Monday. They managed it with a day to spare. Such a great project and I even managed to tweet a couple of passages in German myself.
The idea is of course not to replace the Bible but to deepen people's encounter with it through giving some passages new meaning in their tweeted version. It's of course not a translation but a poetic interpretation of the Bible. The title is brilliant too - "and God chilled out" for the end of the creation story when God rests. I love the way words get borrowed from one language to another, someitmes changing their meaning.
So when are we going to see an English version of the Bible in twitter? I was talking to a religious publisher in the Netherlands the other day and they are very interested in the idea. The other thing that's great about it is the use of it to build community - of course the many people who took part in the project will also want to buy the book! Twitter is a really interesting tool for building a sense of being part of things together with people at an event.

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