His entry begins:
Like probably any academic, I’m “reading” a dozen books at any one time, with varying degrees of attentiveness and intention (intention to finish, I mean), but I have to admit that the first thing that comes to mind with this prompt is that I just started Woken Furies, the third book in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series. I picked up the first one, Altered Carbon, after watching the Netflix show. These sci fi novels are not high art, and I actually find the Byzantine complexity of the plots perfectly bewildering, but Morgan’s world building is a lot of fun, and there are flashes of real artistry and...[read on]About Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States, from the publisher:
Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "source" of authority in early America, as is often said, but rather a site of authority: aLearn more about Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States at the Princeton University Press website.cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships.
While paying careful attention to early national bibles as material objects, Perry shows that "the Bible" is both a text and a set of relationships sustained by a universe of cultural practices and assumptions. Moreover, he demonstrates that Bible culture underwent rapid and fundamental changes in the early nineteenth century as a result of developments in technology, politics, and religious life. At the heart of the book are typical Bible readers, otherwise unknown today, and better-known figures such as Zilpha Elaw, Joseph Smith, Denmark Vesey, and Ellen White, a group that includes men and women, enslaved and free, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, and Quakers. What they shared were practices of biblical citation in writing, speech, and the performance of their daily lives. While such citation contributed to the Bible's authority, it also meant that the meaning of the Bible constantly evolved as Americans applied it to new circumstances and identities.
Writers Read: Seth Perry.
--Marshal Zeringue
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