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Reviewed by:
  • Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America
  • Aaron K. Ketchell
Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America. Edited by Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2008.

Filling a gap in extant scholarship, Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer's edited volume is the first work to fully explore American religious history and print culture in the postbellum and modern periods. Cohen's opening survey introduces the "brave new world of spiritual and textual multiplicity" (10) that this collection showcases. Boyer's subsequent piece reflects the overall content of the volume with its contextualization and analysis of many genres of religious literature. Within this passing historical treatment, he foregrounds "the centrality of print materials in promoting, consolidating, defending, and sometimes attacking the cause of faith," (15) an assertion that is thesis of the text.

Two themes in this vast collection are of particular interest. Essays in Part 1 and elsewhere deal broadly with religious responses to modernity. As James Emmett Ryan keenly demonstrates, Quakers have often been heralded in novels as exemplars of social ethics, yet their virtue has almost unanimously been deemed incompatible with dominant modes of modern ethical pragmatism in these same texts. Rennie B. Schoepflin explores works from medical missionaries written for Protestant children that offered familiar stereotypes of the non-Western "other" while seeking to validate the religious vantages [End Page 137] and modern healing approaches proffered by American missions. David J. Whittaker examines a turn-of-the-century shift in Mormon print culture that facilitated standardization and bureaucratization of the movement via handbooks that helped the Church revise its structures while still salvaging tradition. Two insightful essays on fundamentalist print culture also broach essential modern debates and issues such as evolutionary theory and female religious authority.

Part 5 analyzes popular print culture and consumerism, another key theme found throughout the collection. Examining the Religious Book Club in the 1920s, Erin A. Smith demonstrates that its titles helped to assuage seeming contradictions between faith and modern, rational life for liberal Protestant readers. Matthew S. Hedstrom skillfully brings together issues of print history, readership, and consumer culture in a piece that examines three 1940s best-sellers that laid the foundation for a later "spiritual but not religious" trend in American faith. In addition, Karyln Crowley offers an essay on New Age best-sellers and seeks to demonstrate how these works contain rhetorical strategies that assist women in navigating power relations despite critiques from feminists. Finally, Paul C. Gutjahr discusses the Bible-zine Revolve, a loose translation of the New Testament in the guise of a young woman's magazine, while situating it within a larger tradition of "culturally relevant" Bibles aimed at niche markets.

The essays in this collection are impressively diverse and thereby reflect increasing religious pluralism during the period covered. One might expect to find the majority of pieces describing the relationship between bibliocentric Protestantism and print culture. While this subject does receive some coverage, the collection also includes interesting discussions of Judaism, new religious movements, and the New Age. Though an essay specifically focused on Catholicism is lacking, the preface confronts this shortcoming while suggesting courses of future scholarship. Although the book would profit from more coverage of post-1950s America, the importance of printed images, and the complicated relationship between writer message and reader reception, it is nevertheless replete with many deftly written, interdisciplinary essays that engage a much overlooked aspect of American history and culture.

Aaron K. Ketchell
University of Kansas
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