Theologian David Dault’s faculty web page at Loyola College states that his scholarship “resists easy classification” in that it “draws together philosophy, theology, hermeneutics, ethics, interfaith spiritual studies, legal studies, material culture studies, literary criticism, and media studies.” After reading The Accessorized Bible, readers may better understand the origins of this description. Dault’s new work speaks intricately but at times convolutedly about “how we treat each other” and how we need “to turn the analysis [of the Bible] back on ourselves, to name and examine—in a manner that is morally serious [his emphasis]—the ways in which our relationships to these objects lead us to things like bind up the broken (or not), welcome the stranger (or not), or kill the infidel (or not).” As a companion piece to his other new work, The Covert Magisterium, Dault here attempts to make a distinction between the Bible as bible—i.e., an object—and the Bible as Scripture to explore “the ethical implications of how we use scripture as an accessory, whether as an accessory to our fashion choices or as an accessory to our crimes and violence against one another.”
What can sometimes happen with books like The Accessorized Bible is that the goal, which is undeniably altruistic and rooted in faith, gets lost in the at-times confusing theoretical language used by the author. With Dault, who is no doubt a brilliant interdisciplinary academic, there is no exception, in that he uses such technical concepts as scriptural reasoning, the Iconic Books Project, and cultural materialism as contextual material to get to the crux of his argument: the need to ensure that the Bible is not being used as a weapon of choice by Christian fundamentalists who interpret the Gospel as a treatise for hate and intolerance.
The book is divided into two parts, the first providing the theoretical aspects of the above claim (“Context and Methods”), and the second providing four different theses that one can glean from the commentaries of the first part. Dault’s theses deduce that: 1) a bible is a book; 2) a bible is a platform; 3) a bible is a community; and 4) the Bible is an accessory. By following these truthful deductions, he makes “the objects we call bibles visible and clear” so that we do not “become vulnerable to idolatrous forces, to distractions masquerading as Truth, and gods masquerading as God.”
Dault occasionally employs passages from Scripture to help explicate his arguments, but more often crosses “disciplinary boundaries” by using theory, philosophy, and humanistic commentary from the likes of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and others who understand that we need to follow a more materialistic view of the Bible than a deterministic view. As a strategy, every one of us “is and can be engaged in the process that shapes and moves culture in creative, unexpected directions,” he writes. He adds that this very real process can make all of us more apt to give birth (the term he uses is natality) to “new and unexpected situations and processes into the world,” a world that will always have tension and be tempted to deride the marginalized.
Natality, in other words, is about making changes—and, more importantly, about reforming our minds and our hearts. All of us have the ability to see Bibles as bibles, and not as accusatory objects with words that can be manipulated to ensure our selfish understanding of the world is the correct one. Bibles are not firepower and fodder for the justification of verbal and physical violence; they are objects meant to be used for secular and spiritual analysis to help us understand history and humanism in an ever-changing world.
The Bible is just a bible. Its words are not meant to scold or to promote hatred, intolerance, and division, and we cannot blame the Bible for these sins of the mind. The Accessorized Bible is a truthful text, and Dault’s heart is certainly in the right place (anyone who loves Steve Martin’s film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is good people in my book—he mentions his love for the film in one of his later chapters). However, a less academic commentary might have gotten his point across to a more general audience looking to make necessary changes to broken systems and discordant communities. ♦
Dr. Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. is an associate professor of composition and communication at SUNY Cobleskill. He has written multiple book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book reviews throughout his almost 20-year career as an academic and teacher. Recently, he has had essays published in Childhood and Innocence in American Culture: Heartaches and Nightmares (Lexington Books); Holocaust vs. Popular Culture: Interrogating Incompatibility and Universalization (Routledge); and Film as an Expression of Spirituality: The Arts and Faith Top 100 Films (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, Patty.