Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings - James W Watts
Books as Sacred Beings
Books as Bodies and as Sacred Beings - James W Watts
James W Watts [+]
Syracuse University
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James W. Watts is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. His publications include How and Why Books Matter: Essays on the Social Function of Iconic Texts (Equinox, 2019) and Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History Culture and Religion (Wiley, 2021).
Description
The tendency of books to be ascribed agency like people and deities leads James Watts, in the last chapter, to explore why that is. Books manifest interiority like people: we speak of both as material containers for immaterial ideas. Books also generate common out-of-body experiences, they can be reproduced in multiple copies, and encountering them often changes us. Books are therefore material artifacts whose common use generates analogies that reinforce widespread hopes for bodily transcendence, resurrection or reincarnation, and theophany.