I’m considering getting one of the adult Catholic Education DVD series and want to hear reviews from people about which one they liked. The Amazon reviews were not very helpful - either gushing or devastating.
The ones I’m considering:
Epic
The Great Adventure Bible Timeline
Symbolon
Chosen
(I already have Catholicism).
Thanks
PoorKnight for Christ
It depends what you are looking for.
The Bible Timeline is a great overview of Scripture. It gives you the big picture of salvation history in a way that is easy to remember and will greatly assist personal Scripture reading. Jeff Cavins is a Steubenville alumn and worked with Dr. Hahn on some precursor programs back in the day (e.g. “Our Father’s Plan”). So I like to think that Cavins took Hahn’s covenant approach to salvation history and made it colorful.
Epic is like “The Great Adventure” for Church history. I have enjoyed the bits of it I have seen, but I’ve heard from someone I respect (who teaches Church history) that the series makes some blunders in terms of content. I never received any feedback more specific than that, so I couldn’t say what those errors are.
Symbolon is a great overview of the Catholic faith as a whole. It was originally developed for use in RCIA, but the creators realized it has much wider applications. Some of the content could be over the heads of certain catechumen, but it has worked well in my parish RCIA. The sponsors and even most of the RCIA team learned a lot from the series, too.
Chosen is similar to Symbolon, but is geared towards a younger crowd (junior high/high school). It was originally conceived as a Confirmation prep tool, but—again—the creators realized it had wider potential. You can actually purchase two separate versions: one for Confirmation prep and one for general instruction. The content of both sets is 98% identical. They basically just edited out the Confirmation references from the general purpose version. I think it could still work well with certain adults, too.