"Give the people what they want."- Timothy Beal

I found a video of Timothy Beal speaking about different versions of the Bible, at around 30 minutes he starts to speak about Biblezines and his thoughts on their popularity and role in modern Christianity. I find it particularly interesting that 'The Way' was a nonprofit magazine targeted at high schoolers and was hugely successful, and that this initial success is what created the enormous surge of Biblezines. These later, for-profit magazines realized two things; first, the more specific they could make their markets, the more money they could make. Rather than just having a Biblezine for men and a Biblezine for women, or simply a single Biblezine like the format of 'The Way', for-profit producers of Biblezines came up with as many different niches as they could in order to sell as many different Biblezines as possible. Second, they realized that average American Christians have been raised to believe that the Bible holds all of God's answers for living, and that the actual content of the Bible might leave many people with questions. So, as Timothy Beal puts it, they give the people what they want by including content related to their lives, for example the executive men's Biblezine titled 'Align' that recommends how to grill steaks, along with scripture and in the package of a Bible, essentially giving readers what they want- answers to life's questions that are understood to be Biblically inspired. Beal and Kaell make the argument that Biblezines have a more serious place in American Christianity than one might originally assume, and I would have to agree with that after this week's readings.