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. In Writing Faith, Timothy Stanley begins with a novel investigation into Jacques 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. Writing Faith aims to recover vital questions for today’s digital times.