And once again he started teaching by the lake and, the massive crowd congregated toward him so he embarked toward the boat so he could sit in the lake. And the whole crowd was shore side. And he would teach them with lots of parables and would speak instructions. “LISTEN! Did you see the guy seeding seeds, and what happened to the seed that fell on the road; and, how it went to the birds who ingested it; and, how some fell on the rocky grounds and thus arose but had no soil, so when the sun rose, the seed was burned and was dried since it had not roots? And some fell among the thorns, and the thorns went up and choked it and so no fruits appeared. And some seeds fell on the good soil and yielded fruit and bore a thirty, sixty, and hundred-fold yield. And so he had said, “he who has ears to listen, LISTEN!”
Mark 4:1-9
Sowing the Seed is a commentary on the world’s scriptures at play in everyday life. From Hebrew Hipsters to the Apple Store’s stance on blasphemy, I consider the significance given to sacred texts, holy rituals, and other pious performances for solutions to the world’s problems. At the same time, I chronicle how profane expressions take on a significance once reserved for religious actions. By paying special attention to the ways people act out these scripts, I intend to facilitate critical thinking about the world’s orienting practices– sacred and otherwise.
Richard Newton is the author of Sowing the Seed and a PhD student in Critical Comparative Scriptures at Claremont Graduate University.
Sowing the Seed by Richard Newton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at sowingtheseed.org
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from the author.
Image altered from the awesome work of Earnest Graham. Check out his site http://earnestillustrations.com/
