TIP of the day: Cultural Criticism - entending Logos

Corrine L. Carvalho's Primer on Biblical Methods is one of my favorite books on Biblical interpretation - defining many methods and setting out the questions the method is designed to answer. Today my topic is Cultural Criticism. Carvalho's exercise:

[quote]

Take  a biblical figure, like King David, Moses or Jesus, and find three films that depict this figure. What do these films assume about the audience's attitude towards the Bible? Do these films veer away from the biblical text? When and why? How might each file influence the audience's interpretation of this biblical figure?"

A similar approach can be taken towards cultural criticism based on art or literature or music. However, Logos has a limited number of resources appropriate and tagged for such study. This post shows how to alleviate this shortcoming.

1. Find a solid index of materials such as The Text This Week's Movie Theme Index.

2. Copy the index into a .docx document. For each theme add the coding for a heading field. How did I know I needed headings? after many failed attempts based on logic, I tried facts - I added a generic Collections to a Topic Guide, chose the Search option at the bottom of the list and observed what field it was searching for.

3. Open the Personal Books tool.

4. Select add a book.

5.Fill in the basic metadata for the .docx file, set type to Encyclopedia and add the .dox file as the source. Click on Build book.

6.Open the collection tool from the tool menu. Create a collection that includes the Personal Book you just created as well as any another culture index resources you may own or may have built as personal books.

7.Using the Guide menu, open a Topic Guide. For testing select a topic that you know is in your new personal book.

8. Add an additional Collections section to the Guide.

9. Using Settings to point the Collection section to the collection that you created above.

10. Run the Topic Guide. Clicking on the result in the new section will open your movie theme index PB; Click in the PB resource will open a browser to give you the information that the original site, The Test This Week, provides on the movies indexed to the theme (topic) acceptance).