Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings - James W Watts

Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings - James W Watts

Being the Bible: Sacred Bodies and Iconic Books in Bring Your Bible to School Day

Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings - James W Watts

Dorina Miller Parmenter [+-]
Spalding University
Dorina Miller Parmenter is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her research interests include material uses of the Christian Bible.

Description

Dorina Miller Parmenter describes the development of a very recent Bible ritual in the United States: Bring Your Bible to School Day. This attempt to counter the appearance of secularization in American schools and culture has mobilized as many as 650,000 Christian school children to carry and display their bibles at their schools. Parmenter analyzes the rhetoric around this Evangelical movement on the basis of traditional Protestant doctrines of scripture dating back to the sixteenth century. She points out how processing bibles and the images of doing so in news media, advocate websites and social media engage both Lutheran and Calvinist theologies of scripture. In the end, it is not the bibles but the children carrying them whom the books index as “showing God” to their schoolmates and teachers.

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Citation

Parmenter, Dorina. Being the Bible: Sacred Bodies and Iconic Books in Bring Your Bible to School Day. Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 51-66 Oct 2021. ISBN 9781781798850. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=38098. Date accessed: 10 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.38098. Oct 2021

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