From The Word in the World to More Words in a More Connected and Contested World

Candy Gunther Brown

October 30, 2025

I am grateful for an invitation to reflect back on my first book, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). The Words and Worlds of “evangelicals” (a term that resonated very differently back then), and writing, publishing, and reading practices have all changed so much!

To begin, technological developments have transformed scholarly methods. My research, conducted in the 1990s, took me physically deep, down multiple floors below ground into the bowels of musty library stacks—I can still smell them viscerally. I ruined my eyesight straining to read tri-directional crosshatched scribbles on manually adjusted microfilm readers. On a grad student’s shoe-string travel budget, I availed myself of not-always-safe public transportation and questionable lodgings, exploring major and minor archives. I took notes with pencil and paper, propped open aging books with velvet-covered weights, cringed every time a flake of parchment dislodged despite my utmost care, and raced against the clock to make it through the archive’s holdings before closing time. Once, I actually convinced an archivist to lock me into the building overnight so that I could continue working.

There is no going all the way back to previous research methods. I see this as both a good and a bad thing. I still browse physical library stacks, but more often I smile when interlibrary loan magicians deliver articles to my email inbox, sometimes minutes after I placed the request digitally from the comfort of my home office. Many texts once available only in far-flung physical archives have also been digitized. It is also much easier to locate nondigitized holdings through online directories. I continue to visit physical archives—and I am still frugal and adventurous enough to find creative ways to stretch my travel budget (think city buses and capsule hostels on multiple continents). I still delight in discovering the document that changes everything. But, mostly, my feet, arms, and back ache from hours standing to photograph archival holdings with my digital camera. I also now visit archived webpages, tracing edits across multiple versions of documents that have never been printed, bound, or transported by colporteurs. I’ve saved some time and gotten a few good ideas by asking Claude and ChatGPT for summaries and suggestions of research directions—but I have absolutely zero fear that AI is going to replace human creativity (let alone use human bodies to fuel the Matrix) any time soon.

Word in the World examines a previous era’s disorienting transition from intensive to extensive writing, publishing, and reading—and, one might add, research practices. One lesson we might take from this history is that change rarely eradicates continuities, but change creates opportunities that can be navigated more or less productively. Chapter 4 opens presciently: 

The “special danger” of the times, warned Yale president and Congregationalist minister Noah Porter in 1870, was that “so many books” were cheaply available to the “mass of the community.” (Word in the World, 115)

In Books and Reading; Or, What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1870), Porter argued that because texts exert a powerful influence, both directly and indirectly, readers must learn how to select from among alternatives even more carefully than they select their “friends and intimates.” Porter worried, moreover, that reducing reading and writing to mere entertainment atrophied mental muscles developed through slow, meditative work:

The “natural result of a profusion of books” is that in always seeking “something new,” “an active mind is in danger of knowing many things superficially and nothing well, of being driven through one volume after another with such breathless haste as to receive few clear impressions and no lasting influences. Passive reading is the evil habit against which most readers need to be guarded.” (Porter, in Word in the World, 116)

In practice, the nineteenth-century evangelicals I wrote about intermingled older and newer texts and reading strategies. Even as the evangelical “canon” broadened to encompass Catholic, “secular,” and other texts of increasingly diverse provenance, readers developed new forms of intensive reading. Readers who discovered similar narrative patterns and meanings in unexpected places found common ground with people who had previously seemed totally unlike themselves. Thus, participation in a textual community on the whole eased more than it exacerbated theological feuds, social tensions, and political polarization. Twenty-first-century writers, readers, and media disseminators might profit from studying this past.

As the author of Word in the World, what would I do differently today? I previously reflected on this question while correcting page proofs for my dissertation-turned-first-book a decade after commencing research. At that time, I began to recognize my myopic focus on a particular (Calvinist) strain of evangelical Protestantism and privileging of the United States (and more narrowly New England) as a cultural epicenter if not totally disconnected island. Over the past two decades, I have broadened my research scope and methods to encompass other sorts of Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, SBNRs (Spiritual but not Religious), and others; examine multi-directional, global cultural flows; and add to my methodological toolbox approaches learned from anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, legal scholars, ethicists, theologians, psychologists, statisticians, and clinical scientists. I still luxuriate in the physical archive and curl up with hard-cover novels, but I also enjoy chatting with and learning from people (ordinary folk and scholars) all over the world. I’m still sufficiently old school that my engagement with social media and AI remains much more limited and utilitarian. 

I am now commencing-in-earnest a book—on exorcism—that has been simmering for two decades. I do not think I could do nearly as good a job on this new book if I had not researched and written Word in the World just the way I did. But it will also be a much different—and I trust better—book because I am not wholly the same person, nor do I live in the same world, as back then. Compared with my previous scholarship, this next book will be informed by deeper and broader comparisons—across religious traditions, geographical boundaries, historical eras, practices, methods, and media. And it will be more intentional, yet also more humble, in studying the past to gain insights useful for understanding our present and navigating possible futures.