When People Read the KJB, They Often Found God: They Also Found a Grand Narrative and a Foundation for Individualism
Location
Room B
Start Date
1-10-2011 9:15 AM
End Date
1-10-2011 10:30 AM
Abstract
For a period of four hundred years, English-speaking people learned about the Creator of the universe with the King James Version of the Bible. Illiterate farmers and nobility read the KJB in church. The highly educated and the poorly educated flipped through its pages to find deliverance from their sins and to find a personal walk with God. This Bible shaped the vocabulary of millions of people, but it also shaped the mental landscape of those people. It gave people a grand narrative or a meta-narrative. One function of that narrative was the development of Western individualism.
When People Read the KJB, They Often Found God: They Also Found a Grand Narrative and a Foundation for Individualism
Room B
For a period of four hundred years, English-speaking people learned about the Creator of the universe with the King James Version of the Bible. Illiterate farmers and nobility read the KJB in church. The highly educated and the poorly educated flipped through its pages to find deliverance from their sins and to find a personal walk with God. This Bible shaped the vocabulary of millions of people, but it also shaped the mental landscape of those people. It gave people a grand narrative or a meta-narrative. One function of that narrative was the development of Western individualism.
Comments
Dr. Mark Schmidt is a Professor of English at Liberty University and has been the editor of three anthologies.