Writing Faith

Current digital transformations of information technology have given rise to an explosion of scholarly interest in the history of the book. Although this research has focused predominantly on the rise of movable type after Gutenberg, the second-to-fifth-century-CE transition from scroll to codex warrants renewed attention. Here, a peculiar footnote comes to the fore: Christians were early adopters of the codex for their sacred scriptures.

Jacques Derrida's various essays on writing's materiality in books, scrolls, typewriters and digital displays, briefly touched on the question of religion, at times even directing attention to the mediatic nature of Christianity. However, such comments have rarely been applied to formal aspects of religious texts.

In Writing Faith, Timothy Stanley offers a novel investigation of Derrida's unanswered question concerning the mediatic nature of Christianity. There, the relationship between writing and faith comes into sharper focus. It is in this light that the codex's cosmopolitan capacity for transmitting the written word can be re-evaluated in its scrolled Greco-Roman and Jewish bibliographic contexts. Christian faith is bound up in this technical development, and can inform how religious mediation is understood after Derrida. Stanley's Writing Faith aims to not only recover vital questions for today's digital times, but also reframe writing's coincidence with faith