Using picture of Bible in intra-Christian polemics

Religion Dispatches reports that eight "traditionalist" churches have joined forces against their progressive Christian neighbor church in Phoenix. The effort is clearly part of their concern over the liberalization of marriage laws in the US.

What fascinates me is the iconic old book on their banner. Presumably a Bible, it nevertheless appears less like an iconic Bible than like an old book. Never mind that it looks nothing like most evangelical bibles sold today--either glossy or leather, floppy or paperback. The picture answers the banner's question definitively: the old book is the opposite of progressive. 

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. 

Franzen's fear of e-books

Jonathan Franzen made headlines in January by announcing the he fears the effects of e-books. The acclaimed author of the novels, Freedom and The Corrections, both available as e-books, lamented digital texts' lack of permanence:

I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.

“Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball.

“But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

This blog has frequently documented the desire for the preservation  of cultures and values in the form of material books.

Relic Torah

The problem with relics has always been verifying their authenticity. This is no less true of relic texts. The New York Times reports that once questions were raised about the whether a particular Torah scroll survived the Holocaust or not, the donor felt constrained to provide another with a better attested Holocaust lineage:

... after The New York Times published an article about the Torah and the Maryland rabbi, Menachem Youlus, questions surfaced about how it came to be discovered.

As a result, David M. Rubenstein — a billionaire financier who had bought the Torah from Rabbi Youlus and donated it to Central Synagogue — sought to confirm the scroll’s authenticity. Mr. Rubinstein ... hired Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust historian and former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Research Institute.

“What I found is the claim for the origin of the Torah could not be verified,” Dr. Berenbaum said last week.

... Dr. Berenbaum had him find a Torah “whose Holocaust provenance is not in question” — it was the one placed in the ark on Monday. That Torah had remained in the Romanian Jewish community through the Holocaust and was later taken to Israel.

The significance of using a genuine Holocaust torah scroll was expressed by both the donor and the synagogue's rabbi:

Mr. Rubenstein said he had donated the Torah to Central Synagogue “so its congregants could have the sacred experience of reading Scripture from a scroll that had survived the Holocaust.”

“As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust,” Rabbi Rubinstein said at the time, “this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

UPDATE:

The Washington Post reported on October 11, 2012, that Rabbi Menachem Youlus pleaded guilty and was convicted of selling fake Holocaust scrolls and defrauding investors.

Youlus, the self-proclaimed “Jewish Indiana Jones” ... spun cloak-and-dagger tales of “rescuing” sacred Torah scrolls lost during the Holocaust, but those tales were lies. ... Despite Youlus’s claims that he found holy relics at concentration camps, in monasteries and in mass graves, passport records show he never traveled to Europe. ... More than 50 of his purported Holocaust Torahs made their way to congregations in the Washington area and beyond. Synagogues held emotional ceremonies to rededicate the scrolls for worship — a symbolic show of Jewish triumph over Hitler.

Youlus was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $990,366.05 in restitution.