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The Trouble With Bibles
12 December 2006Holly Berman: Daniel Radosh, in The New Yorker, offers up everything you ever wanted to know about Bible marketing. To religion journalists -- and to many observant Christians -- news of the wacky world of scripture packaging -- Bibles for surfers! Bibles designed to look like teen magazines! etc. -- is old news, but surely some readers will find Radosh's catalogue/article fascinating. But I read between the lines that deadliest of qualities in a reporter setting out to document a religious subculture: distance disguised as respect. Radosh plays it so straight that even obvious questions -- how do all these Bibles (an average of four in every household) really function in peoples' lives? Is the Bible always a book, or is it also an object? Is it -- and I ask this respectfully -- ever a fetish? Does "consumerism" really explain the forests of Bibles published every year? Or is there a religious sensibility to be found in the desire for multiple editions, translations, copies? I dunno, but I wish The New Yorker would come down from its observation post and get messy in religion.
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