What is it about?
The Bible can be accessed in many ways: different languages, different print editions, different electronic formats, different narrative adaptations... This paper explores how a small group of Catholics experience reading the Bible in their lives. What is reading the Bible like for these people? How do these experiences impact their lives?
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Why is it important?
We take for granted that a book is a text, and that's all there is to it. But so much more comes into play in a person's experience of a book: the material, the cultural setting, the practices built around it, the person's perspective... This paper sheds some light on that complexity in the particular case of Bible readers. It also offers some insight to publishers of Bibles and other religious texts, as religious information sources in particular need to respect the experiential aspects of information.
Perspectives
I grew up Catholic, and I've long been fascinated by the sacred texts of the world's religions. This study was a way for me to explore how people experience deeply meaningful texts in our modern time, which seems to want to digitize everything. In part, I was responding to the question: Is a smartphone Bible the same thing as an elegant leatherbound Bible? If we assume book=text, as our public mindset seems to, then yes. But of course any individual would answer no. This is, of course, a paradox. This work taught me that the issue of digital vs. physical is not binary—nor even valid. The world is rich indeed.
Dr Tim Gorichanaz
Drexel University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Experiencing the Bible, Journal of Religious & Theological Information, April 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10477845.2016.1168278.
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