Permit me to ride a hobby horse of mine for a few minutes! I want to issue a plea for an exegetically informed gifted illustrator to produce illustrations for a really excellent children’s Bible story book. I wonder how many children grow up with completely wrong ideas about Scripture simply because of a misleading picture in a story book. I’m not questioning the motives of the illustrators—no doubt they want to produce pictures that are simple and appealing; but how often do they end up distorting what the text actually says?

Happy (belated) St Patrick’s Day! Here in Galway in the Republic of Ireland we celebrated St Patrick’s Day with a huge parade. In Dublin, the capital of Ireland, some half a million turned out for their parade. But no matter where you live in the world, you probably heard something about St Patrick’s Day because it is celebrated in more countries than any other national festival! In fact this year, for the first time in history, it was celebrated on Antarctica! The Irish among that small community of 135 scientists organised a parade that totalled eight floats. One St Patrick’s Day celebration was literally out of this world, when in 2011 two Irish-American astronauts performed a song by The Chieftains on the International Space Station!