Proof Through the Night Released by Vision Video

Oh Say, Can You See...? In the 200 years since Francis Scott Key first wrote those words on the back of a letter they have inspired millions. The hope and joy expressed in the American National Anthem are so moving that more than five million people signed petitions for its official adoption. Yet within those words is an expression of a Christian's faith and gratitude for deliverance.

This moving video is now available from Vision Video.

Oh Rochester

One of the points in our film is that the translation project was driven by political as much as by spiritual concerns. King James had just come to power in a realm divided by very different traditions. On one side were the High Church practitioners who valued stateliness and ritual, and on the other the Puritans who believed in a personal, no frills, sort of religion based solely on the individual’s relationship to God. To James this wasn’t a mild difference of opinion; it was life and death. Guy Fawkes and a small group of Catholic radicals tried to kill him. Later a much larger group of Puritans succeeded in killing his son. The King James Bible was essentially an attempt to combine the best of earlier translations into a single, universal bible that could bring the people together and end the divisions. The effort failed, but it did produce one of the most moving texts in the history of the English Language.

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Bonfire of the Humanities

“What shall we do with him then?” an announcer bellowed into the PA system. It was a particularly cold and wet November evening and I was perched atop a fifty-foot high mound of sticks and branches. Beneath me a few thousand people gathered, waving flaming torches and staring in my direction. “Shall we hang him?” “No,” the crowd replied. “Shall we drown him?” I thought this an odd question to ask people holding torches and staring at a pile of tinder the size of a small battleship. “No,” the crowd yelled. At least they were practical. “Shall we burn him?” “Yes,” the crowd roared. Actually, they were British, so it wasn’t really much of a roar - more like a muffled, “if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

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