Why surprised? We're not an especially literate people, I mean, people don't read much of anything. The Bible itself is hard going and hard to figure out, lots of it is boring -- my very literate son, who, however, is certainly not nearly as bookish as I was at his age, probably a good thing -- gave up on the Good Book in disgust at its sheer tedium when he started with Genesis. I think he may have got through part of Exodus. Moreover, the Bible is a sort of random selection of myth, quasi-historical narratives, genealogies, law, poetry (yeek!), assorted sayings, instructions to various small religious communities.
I know it's not really random. It was assembled by various ecclesiastical commissions. But in a world like ours which is largely secular, even in the US South in the mid 70s or today, it's hard to find the sort of coherence that grips the attention, especially . Moreover not everything reflects the Bible back at you, unlike the worlds of the ancient Hebrews or even diaspora Jews, as well as what used to be called Christendom. So the context that gives the collection meaning has fallen away. Actually it is sort of surprising that anyone reads it at all nowadays.
Unlike Woj, I don't think it's a bad thing to read. As I used to say to friends on other sides of the canon wars of 20 years ago, in practical terms it's good for people read practically anything with some attention. And you could do worse than the Bible, especially in the King James version, a mighty work of English prose and probably the only great work of literature to be composed by a committee. Lincoln, whose writing is a high point of American literature, is said to have read mainly Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Illinois statutes and case law -- given that then and now that Illinois legal writing is no model, and given the, well, Biblical cadences of his writing, it's reasonable to assume that he got a lot out of reading the Good Book. (He also read Coke on Littleton -- a great common law treatise on the land law but also no literary exemplar.)
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 9, 2008, at 8:35 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> >
>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080408/lf_nm_life/reading_survey_dc
> >
> > [WS:] Disgusting, but not surprising.
>
> Back in the late 1970s when I taught a couple of
> sections of English
> at UVa, I was amazed at how little the students knew
> of the Bible. I
> knew more of it than they did. They say they love
> and read the Good
> Book, but, aside from a hard core, I'm not sure they
> really do.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com