Torah to the Moon

The Washington Post reports plans to send a Torah scroll to the moon. "The Torah on the Moon project, based in Tel Aviv, has been courting private firms to deliver a handwritten Jewish scroll called a sefer Torah to the lunar surface. Later flights would carry Hindu scriptures called the Veda and the I Ching, an ancient Chinese philosophical work. Each document would be housed in a capsule designed to protect it from the moon’s harsh radiation and temperature changes for at least 10,000 years." The Post article concludes by noting, "The texts would join a Bible left on the moon in 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. The red leather Bible sits on the control console of an Apollo moon buggy."

Ambassador takes oath of office on e-reader

The Wire reported that Suzi LeVine, the new U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, "was sworn in ... by raising her right hand and placing the left on a digital copy of the Constitution. ... LeVine, a former Microsoft executive ...  used a non-descript "off brand" e-reader, so as not to stake an official U.S. government position in the Kindle vs. Nook wars."

Call for Journal Articles on "Religion and the Book"

The online journal, Mémoires du livre  / Studies in Book Culture, has issued a call for articles on the theme, "religion and the book." (This same theme is being used by the SHARP Annual Meeting in Antwerp this coming September.) Scott McLaren, the editor of this special issue of the Open Access peer-reviewed journal, "invites submissions in English or French that explore the relationship between religion and the book, broadly defined, in either historical or contemporary settings and from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Articles concerned with print culture and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Asian and African religions are most welcome."

SCRIPT panels at SHARP

SCRIPT will present three panels of papers at the SHARP annual meeting in Antwerp, Belgium, on the theme "Religions of the Book: 

September 18, 8:30-10:00: Canonizing and Scripturalizing Iconic Books

• James Watts, Syracuse University, “Iconic Scriptures from Decalogue to Bible.” 
• Michael Como, Columbia University: “Canon, Ethnicity and Kingship in Ancient Japan" 
• Kristina Myrvold,  Linnaeus University, “Entextualization of Sikh Texts in Religious Historiographies and Performances”

September 19, 8:30-10:00: Literary and Iconic Canons

• Jonas Svensson, Linnaeus University, “The double Scripture: explaining diversity and conflict in Muslim perceptions and practices in relation to the Qur’an” 
• Rachel Fell McDermott, Columbia University, “When a National Poet is a Heretic: The Collision of Literary and Religious Canons”
• Karl Ivan Solibakke, Syracuse University, “Mimesis and Poesis: Walter Benjamin’s and Vilem Flusser’s Translational Approach to Script” 

September 20, 8:30-10:00: Scriptures as Icons and Talismans 

• Dorina Miller Parmenter, Spalding University,  “Saved by the Book: Exploring the Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object.” 
• David Ganz, University of Zürich, “Clothing Sacred Scripture: Books as Holy Objects in the Western Middle Ages.”
• Bradford Anderson, Mater Dei Institute, "'This booke hath bred all the quarrel': The Bible in Seventeenth Century Ireland"

The Bible in American Life

Coinciding with their national study on The Bible in American Life, The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis is soliciting paper proposals for a conference to be held August 6-9 on "how Americans past and present have used the Bible in their daily lives."  This seems like a great opportunity to talk about iconic uses of the Bible in America, adding to the "historical, cultural, sociological, and theological" approaches that the conference claims to highlight.

Andrew Hayes' Book Art

Robert Bolick on Books On Books presents an interview with book artist, Andrew Hayes, along with many pictures of his works, such as this one (Wry, 2013).

Brolick observes:

Book art can easily fall off into mere craftwork. On the one hand, the book artist requires the freight that the book’s content and form carry, .... But the degree to which the freight weighs down the treatment, or the handling does not take the material beyond itself, that is the degree by which the work is closer to handicraft than to art. 

 And then quotes Hayes:

The book pages are a loaded found material. Other materials I use like steel that I find at the scrap yard come with built in history as well but it may not be as universal as the book pages. 

ABS survey on "Bible-Minded" cities

The American Bible Society has published rankings this week for the most and least "Bible-minded" cities in America - complete with helpful infographic.

Top of the list (the most) is Chattanooga, Tennessee. At the bottom (the least) is Providence, Rhode Island.

An article about it is here.

Jim Watts adds:
And here is Brent Plate's critique, requesting a survey of "Bible-bodied" cities instead.

Book Shelves in Snow

My second New Year's gift comes from Emma Brodeur, who took this picture in the Cazenovia, NY, art park:

Bookish Iowa Rest Stop

My New Year's gifts included new photos of iconic books in art and architecture. First, from Cordell Waldron, come these pictures of a rest stop on an Iowa high way (I-80 Westbound near Tiffin). Cordell notes that, "The rest stop theme is Iowa's education history, so the columns of the building are books."

A Book and the Founding of the United States and Its Religion

UPDATE: The book sold for $14million

A little old Psalm book has stirred some small controversy in Boston. According to the New York Times, a Bay Psalm Book from 1640 will be auctioned off at Sotheby's, and may fetch tens of millions of dollars on the 26th of November. A hefty sum for a church, like Boston's Old South Church, in need some building repairs. But the book is part of the church (and has more history than the well-known image of the Italian Gothic steeple from the nineteenth century), and the majority vote by the congregation to sell off the book caused the church historian, Jeff Makholm, to resign.

Michael Inman, curator of rare books at the New York Public Library, said this book is one of eleven existent of the early American Psalms. Since it was one of the first books ever printed in the colonies, the workmanship was not great, with some sloppy layout and misspellings. Hebrew characters were inserted with wood block cuts, while the rest of it was done with metal type. Nonetheless, Inman says,

“These 11 copies symbolize the introduction of printing into the British colonies, which was reflective of the importance placed on reading and education by the Puritans and the concept of freely available information, freedom of expression, freedom of the press. All that fed into the revolutionary impulse that gave rise to the United States."

Religious history also suggests how this "freely available information" and the book's small, hand held size, helped lead to the great mythology of the single individual, both as a citizen and a believer.