What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth‐Century AmericaErin A.Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Abstract

What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America Erin A. Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.Most readers will recognize in the title of Erin Smith's What Would Jesus Read an echo of Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897). Scholar of American popular literature and historian of print culture, Smith acknowledges wide and diverse audience as contributing the long process of writing book described as a historical examination of selected twentieth-century popular books and the communities of readers and for whom they were (1). What Would Jesus Read? makes compelling by demonstrating that religious reading [in secular age] continues shape the ideas and assumptions of millions of modern and contemporary Americans (2). Smith locates What Would Jesus Read? at the intersection of three field of scholarship-the history of the book, lived religion, and consumer (3). She seeks to contribute more representative history of reading in America, one that includes the entire reading public, not just self-consciously literary readers and writers (3). Smith argues that these much-loved (and much maligned) books [selected titles spanning long twentieth century] illuminate non-literary ways of reading that assume that literature and life are connected and that the right kind of reading can inspire the faithful build better world (3).What Would Jesus Read? presents case studies of important books, the communities for whom they were important, and the literary and institutions that made them available audiences (5). Smith structures her book into five chronological sections that focus on specific kinds of books and readers-the Social novel (1880s-1910s), best-selling life of Jesus from the 1920s 'religious renaissance,' self-help books of the post-World War II revival, popular account of the apocalypse from the 1970s and early 1980s, and books for the seeker in the 1990's 'decade of the soul' and beyond (5). The selected books for each of these eras connect along the lines of consumer culture and reading (use of advertising and innovative marketing, transition from emphasis on salvation self-realization), relationship the academy (differentiating from abstract literacy mingling of literature and life), and relationship organized religion (challenging church leaders and filling spiritual vacuums); Smith contends readers read these selected books for usefulness, their erasure of history and historical context, and their scandalous intermingling of sacred and profane, culture and commerce (9,11).Smith presents the following studies as representative of each of the above chronological sections: Humphrey Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888), Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897), and Winston Churchill's Inside of the Cup (1913); Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows (1925), The Book Nobody Knows (1926), and What Can Man Believe? (1928); Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick's On Being Real Person (1943), Rabbi Joshua Liebman's Peace of Mind (1946), Bishop Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul (1949), Rev. …