Park yourself with a good book

Many on this blog have noted the ways in which books are presented in various ritual and statuary fashions in our culture.  Here is one example that has been making the rounds of facebook this week.  The photo, attributed to Jonathan Moreau, shows the side of a Kansas City parking garage, adorned to look like a shelf of books.

What struck me, when I saw it, was not just the "larger than life" depiction, but also the choice of books to be depicted.  I can't make out all the titles, but clearly visible are The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities, Charlotte's Web, and Invisible Man.

So I find it interesting that books would be depicted, but also that these books (in many ways, a list of "usual suspects"--an accepted canon) would be chosen.  Not even the books, but the book spines, hold an iconic status in this case.

(JW: For another view, see Book Architecture)

Stephen Prothero on America's Iconic Books

[Note: Cross-published on the Material Scripture blog]


A few weeks back Boston University's Stephen Prothero wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, "Memorial Day and the American Bible." For Prothero, the notion of the "American Bible" has less to do, ultimately, with the texts of Scripture, and much more to do with the texts of our identity.  The "American Bible" is comprised of those texts that help to answer the question, "What is (and is not) American?":

Americans [share] a collection of core texts that "we the people" regard as authoritative and a long-standing tradition of debating what these texts have to tell us about the meaning of "America"... This unofficial canon includes founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as well as songs such as "God Bless America" and speeches by Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan. It also includes novels from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Atlas Shrugged."

 For Prothero, it is the constant state of debate over this canon, and what it means, that is the most constant marker of what it means to be "American."  Not the adherence to a certain political position, so much as the commitment to the struggle of pluralism among political positions.  "Look Lincoln in the eye and tell him that liberty, not equality, is America's founding proposition. Tell King you have a different dream. But as you criticize these men, know what you are doing. You are not opting out of America; you are opting in," writes Prothero.

Prothero's hypothesis about the "American Bible" is much akin to what Jim Watts and Dori Parmenter have been saying for the past several years about the status of "Iconic Books" in national (not just American) consciousness.  Indeed, Prothero's observation that "What makes these texts American scripture is not so much that Americans call them sacred or treat them like sacred objects (though in many cases we do both). What makes them scripture is the fact that Americans use these texts like Christians use the Bible," resonates strongly with Parmenter's work and Watt's "The Three Dimensions of Scriptures."  

I find it especially interesting that this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  I think it is a wonderful forum in which to raise the questions Prothero is pursuing.  Unfortunately, from my glance at the comments section, the readers seem unwilling or ill-equipped to engage the issues Prothero has presented.  Instead, there seems to be a preoccupation with the "atheism" of Obama and the "socialism" of our current policies, with little in the way of evidence or grammar in support.


But, at the end of the day, I suppose this only strengthens Prothero's main point.  In abundant amounts, disagreement seems to be the quality we, as Americans, most universally share.

Heyman, "Canon Law and the Canon of Scripture"

George Heyman, in “Canon Law and the Canon of Scripture,” Postscripts 2 (2006) 209-225, charts similar developments in Roman Catholic teachings about the Bible on the one hand and canon law on the other. He argues that using the common term “canon” for each betrays their common interest in social control. On the basis of M. B. ter Borg’s theory of canon, Heyman argues:

The success of a canon follows not from the assent or agreement of the populace, but rather from the embedded quasi-personal relationship that produces a sense of belonging and identity. The objectified canon takes over this quasi-personal feature, which guarantees a canon’s sanctity. Calling scripture or law “canonical” thus transcendentalizes a text and allows it to retain a sacred quality that in turn effects social control through a shared sense of belonging. This thesis is confirmed and elaborated through a review of the conceptions of canon operative in the Catholic Church during the thirteenth, the sixteenth, and the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In all these periods, the Catholic Church modified its conception of the canonical nature of both its scriptures and its laws in order to strengthen corporate identity and to establish order and control within and without its perimeter. (p. 209)

The full article can be read here in .pdf from Equinox publishing.

Uneasiness over Non-Canonical Texts

April DeConnick, on the Forbidden Gospels Blog, has raised the question, “Why do non-canonical texts make us uneasy?” As a scholar of Nag Hammadi texts and other early Christian writings, she has repeatedly run up against the desire among fellow academics to keep such materials marginalized.

The issue is not new, though the publication in accessible form of “Gnostic” materials in the last several decades has brought it home to students of early Chistian history. One hundred years ago, it was the publication of the Gilgamesh flood story that threatened to relativize the Hebrew Bible’s account of origins by placing its materials within a wider and older historical and religious context.

The cultural standing of Jewish and Christian scriptures, however, seems not to have been dented much by such discoveries over the last one-and-a-half centuries or by the two-centuries of historical-critical scholarship on their origins and development. I suggest that resilience is due to the fact that the Bible’s reputation depends as much on the inspiration it produces through performance in sermon, song and dramatization (now frequently on film) and on the legitimacy conveyed by its iconic representation in ritual, art, and mass media as it does to the textual authority conveyed by interpretations of its message by scholars.

If anything, the main effect of biblical scholarship on public perceptions of the Bible is to emphasize the scripture’s importance precisely because so much attention and effort is devoted to controversies over its meaning and origins. Here may lie one source of anxiety about non-canonical texts: the intuitive suspicion that more attention to these other materials raises their status and dilutes claims to the unique importance of the scriptures.

The history of the actual religious influence of such scholarship suggests that Christians and Jews have little reason to worry. The net effect of comparative scholarship is probably to draw even more popular attention to scriptures whose status is, at any rate, well protected by the ways in which Jews and Christians ritualize their iconic and performative dimensions.