Biblical Storytelling and recognizing rhetorical devices in Mt 20
I recently participated and presented at the Network of Biblical Storytellers International Conference, August 2025. If you are interested in the study and art of biblical storytelling, this is a great conference to attend. It is held annually (recently) at the Maritime Conference Center in Linthicum Heights, MD. I've been attending since 2007 along with my wife who is also a biblical storyteller and scholar. (see nbsint.org ) This year I presented on recognizing rhetorical devices and oral features in biblical storytelling. I could say recognizing rhetorical features in the text, but that is only part of the task. When we add the layers of storytelling as a live performance we must include multimodal communication and the five modes: spatial, linguistic, visual, gestural, and aural. Usually when scholars look at the text for identifying rhetorical devices they are only looking at the linguistic mode of communication. In this workshop, I told the parable from Matthew 20:1-16 of th...