Faith In Reading Research Articles

Faith in Reading: Revisiting the Midrash–Theory Connection

In the 1980s there was a brief but intense period of interest among literary critics and theorists in Classical Rabbinic interpretation, and, in particular, the genre of commentary known as Midrash. Interest concentrated around the apparent similarities between Midrash and the commentaries and criticism of Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Barthes and others. This essay examines this connection between Midrash and theory in light of the persistent charge from Foucault and others that all hermeneutics is essentially theological. It proceeds by drawing out the aims and frustrations of the literary critics and Jewish scholars involved, and considers in what ways the questions which arose in these years might be pertinent for contemporary literary criticism, theory and institutional practice.

Investing in Literature: Ernestine Rose and the Harlem Branch Public Library of the 1920s

In 1920, Ernestine Rose, a young white reformer, became head librarian at the branch of the New York Public Library (see fig. 1). Rose aimed to make the an integral part of negro life convinced that access to books would lead to professional, intellectual, and artistic achievements by African Americans (Serving 111). Rose was committed to the idea of books and as a gateway to success, but she was well aware that despite the impressive advances of African Americans since the end of Reconstruction, segregation remained the norm in the US public system. She believed that the separation of people from all whites was the biggest obstacle to her goals for the (109). By the time she published New York's Black in the Library Journal in March 1921, she had hired three colored assistants. In January 1922 she hired a fourth, Nella Larsen Imes, soon to become one of the most promising novelists of the Renaissance. With Rose's help and encouragement, Larsen was the first African American applicant accepted to the school of the New York Public Library and the first black librarian employed by the City of New York (1) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In 1923, after Larsen began her studies, Rose addressed the American Library Association (ALA) at their conference in Hot Springs, Arkansas, stressing the significant fact that the New York school had accepted an African American applicant. For Rose, Larsen's achievements as a student and a librarian were milestones of social justice. For Larsen--as for Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, and others--the branch of the 1920s opened doors onto a vibrant interracial world of lectures, discussions, art exhibits, and books. Rose helped inspire Larsen to stake herself on the transformative power of books, embracing literature as not only a source of personal, social, and aesthetic value but also as a democratizing force, a bridge across difference. Leaving her job after only a few years, Larsen devoted herself to writing; with the publication of the novels Quicksand and Passing she became a rising star. But Larsen's short story Sanctuary, published in the Forum in January 1930, elicited charges of plagiarism, and her career slowly ground to a halt. Larsen's defeat stemmed in part from the stubborn persistence of popular assumptions about the derivativeness of African American achievement. (2) Rose anticipated such attitudes in her address to the ALA, which was subsequently published in Opportunity. Although she was exhilarated by Larsen's acceptance to school, Rose cautioned that a single failure will clinch in many unthinking minds the old argument, that Negroes lack capacity to develop beyond a certain point (Librarian in Harlem 207). (3) Well into the twentieth century, the charge of black imitativeness fueled objections to black higher education. Negro is a facile, even eager, imitator; but there he stops, Lothrop Stoddard commented in his popular book of 1920, The Rising Tide of Color. He adopts; but he does not adapt, assimilate, and give forth creatively again (l00-101). As Zora Neale Hurston put it in 1934, It has been said so often that the Negro is lacking in originality that it has almost become a gospel (837). In Serving New York's Black City, Rose challenges the idea of black imitativeness as a racially inherent trait by emphasizing the agency implied by black practices. Rose's essay reflects the faith in reading that galvanized many people in the late nineteenth--and early--twentieth--century United States, especially members of politically marginalized groups such as women, immigrants, and African Americans.' Simon Gikandi has recently coined the phrase fantasy of the library to describe the experience of aspiring writers who, enamored of literature, develop an inordinate reverence for the institution that makes it available. …

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By Nord David Paul. Religion in America Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. vix + 214 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By Nord David Paul. Religion in America Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. vix + 214 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (review)

Reviewed by: Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America Erin A. Smith Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By David Paul Nord. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii, 212 pp. Index. $35.00. Faith in Reading contributes to the fields of business history, popular religion, and the history of reading in America. Nord argues that the origins of the mass media in the United States were noncommercial and religious. In a compelling, engagingly written account, he narrates how the American Bible Society (ABS), the American Tract Society (ATS), and the American Sunday School Union (ASSU)—founded in 1816, 1825, and 1824, respectively—mobilized modern business practices to get religious texts into the hands of every American. Fueled not by the profit motive, but by missionary zeal, these organizations pioneered a new business enterprise—the modern, not-for-profit corporation. The enterprise was filled with ironies. Although many nineteenth-century evangelicals felt that modern technology and mass media were eroding traditional religious faith, they harnessed these same technologies to win souls for Jesus. Religious publishers were pioneers in the modernization of printing, adopting stereotyped plates, steam-powered presses, and machine-made paper, but they did so in the name of "traditional" literacy—that is, intensive reading of a few, classic texts of the Protestant tradition (Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted). Where profit-seeking enterprises concentrated their efforts in densely populated, well-to-do markets, the flow of Bibles, tracts, and religious periodicals was aimed particularly at poor, isolated readers. The early chapters of Faith in Reading are dedicated to faith in the power of the written word and the idea of salvation through scripture alone that made possible the founding of these missionary societies. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 narrate the birth of the nonprofit business organization through examining the economic foundations, institution building, and attempts to systematize distribution of print at the ABS, ATS, and ASSU. Calling tracts the first mass medium in America, Nord details the noteworthy attempts of these societies to achieve universal circulation in the 1820s and 1830s. Critical to their success was the combination of centralized, efficient mass production and locally [End Page 115] organized and controlled distribution. In the 1840s and 1850s, the organizations focused on improving distribution networks. For example, the ABS sent their local auxiliaries standard forms, record-keeping guides and "helps" detailing the best way to distribute according to differential pricing schemes. Frustrated by the tendency of the market to turn their efforts back toward the populated East, the ATS in 1841 built a national distribution system based on colporteurs (itinerant booksellers) whose salaries mitigated pressure to sell rather than give away religious texts. Nord estimates that half the population received a visit from an ATS colporteur in the system's first ten years (98). He also demonstrates how centralized budgeting and accounting, systematic gathering of statistics, formal recruitment and training of colporteurs, standardized record-keeping, and the circulation of monthly magazines pioneered modern administrative practices. Chapters 6 and 7 take up two central questions in history-of-the-book scholarship—how people were supposed to read, and how they actually did. In the pages of their monthly periodical, American Messenger (founded 1843), the ATS represented how religious reading ought to work. The perusal of a single tract could bring about the conversion of a sinner. Conversely, young readers of either "infidel" (heretical) literature or morally poisonous French novels were often driven to suicide, murder, or madness (116). Moreover, religious reading required study, prayer, and sustained reflection, not cursory skimming. What colporteurs encountered in the field was more diverse and complicated than the accounts of reading in the Messenger. Although most households had a Bible and one or two other religious books, many colporteurs were horrified by the material and literary destitution on the frontier. They told stories of books that had been lovingly repaired or rebound after a community of readers had worn them out through repeated borrowing. Some readers traveled many miles to get their hands on a religious text and willingly spent their last cent for books; others...

David Paul Nord, . Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 212 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

David Paul Nord, . <i>Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America</i>. Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 212 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

:Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America.(Religion in America Series.)

:Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America.<i>(Religion in America Series.)</i>

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America

David Paul Nord's analysis of the large-scale publishing ventures of early national charitable organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society offers valuable insight into the long history of the intimate connection between Protestant evangelicalism and the mass media, and it provides a useful corrective to histories of the book that tend to attribute the sudden growth of print in this period solely to market forces. Nord compellingly shows how voluntary associations, spurred by millennial zeal, pioneered the mass publication of cheap Bibles and tracts and coordinated their distribution to households scattered across remote frontier settlements. Nord observes that these ventures ran counter to market logics even as they provoked the development of techniques we will come to associate with the modern publishing industry. Evangelicals insisted on the mass production and distribution of religious texts despite, or even because of, the lack of demand for such books, and they only cautiously embraced the idea of selling some of their stock (in addition to giving books away) so as to finance the cost of production. Nord delights in the irony of charitable publishers' use of cutting-edge nineteenth-century technology, such as stereotype, steam presses, and machine-made paper, in order to mass-produce and circulate classics of seventeenth-century Protestantism, such as Richard Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted (1658). He traces the idea of mass media to evangelicals' repeated launching of “general supplies” (p. 63), attempts at the universal circulation of identical texts—either a stripped-down Bible, published “without note or comment” (p. 43), or simple stories of Christian conversion that steered clear of doctrinal controversy. In order to achieve this ideal, these voluntary societies employed innovative systems of business administration, such as cost accounting, the keeping of statistics, and the exercise of centralized control over local distribution, well in advance of their adoption by for-profit publishers.

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (review)

Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By David Paul Nord. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 224. Cloth, $35.00.)In this important and well-written book, David Paul Nord examines America's early religious publishing and argues convincingly that this effort was something new: the country's first foray into nationwide mass media. Faith in Reading reflects the growing scholarly attention being given to the influence of economics on religious practices. The monograph also provides greater understanding of the role that national religious societies played in disseminating written material and promoting faith through publishing.Nord, a professor of journalism and associate editor of the Journal of American History, explores the efforts by local and national religious organizations to spread the during the early national and antebellum periods. What began as the distribution and sale of literature evolved into the publishing of tracts, bibles, and books with the goal of putting religious literature into the hands of every American. Through this enterprise, the hope was that Americans would strengthen their faith, move toward conversion, and possibly achieve millennial perfection on earth.The author's well-informed understanding of journalism and the mass media reveals the profound influence that religious organizations and their publications had on spreading faith across America. Nonsectarian organizations such as the American Tract Society, the American Bible Society, and the American Sunday School Union emerged by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, ambitious and bold in their plans to expand and strengthen the nation's faith. They set up offices in the field to attract donors, distribute materials, and hire local agents to canvass urban centers and venture into the backcountry.The conflict between religious idealism and practical necessity was apparent from the start. Initially, religious organizations insisted on handing out free material to deliver the free word as freely as possible (59). But funds were essential to carry out this effort, and soon officials began to reshape the message. An important lesson could be learned if people paid for materials; their value to customers increased if they had to purchase them. Eventually, religious societies created differential pricing schemes, giving free publications to those in need and charging those who could afford their literature.Beyond the desire to get religious messages to every family, officials saw the infusion of religious material as a golden opportunity to teach Americans how to read responsibly, sensitively, and attentively. They often wrote about how to absorb words and savor their meaning. They encouraged people to circulate books they bought and to learn to enjoy reading. Nothing pleased a book agent more than to discover a well-worn volume in need of replacing. An alarming challenge that fueled an even greater commitment to this goal became evident by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The nation seemed to be awash in trashy literature. Wherever one looked, cheap novels had become the books of choice. …