Rules of
feudal warfare were established, the day of rest was observed,
education of clergy and nobility were provided. From the Middle
Ages to the never abandoned missionary activity in Africa, Asia,
and North and South America, the church impacted community life
through actions that sometimes flew in the face of common sense.
The effort was to impose new pragmatics, and new social and
political realities, or at least to resist those in place.
Whether in agreement or in opposition, the pattern of religious
experience was one of repeated self-constitution of its own
entity in new contexts, and of pursuing experiences of faith,
even if the activity as such was not religious. In this process,
the church gained the awareness of the role of scale, and
maintained, though sometimes artificially, entities, such as
monasteries, where scale was controllable. Autarchy proved
decreasingly possible as the church tried to extend its
involvement. The growing pragmatic context had to be
acknowledged: increased exchange of goods, reciprocal
dependencies in regard to resources, the continuous expansion of
the world-a consequence of the major discoveries resulting from
long-distance travel. In recent years the challenge has come
from communication-in particular the new visual media-requiring
strategies of national, cultural, social, and even political
integration.
From the scrolls of the Torah and from the sacred texts of the
Rig Veda and Taoism, to the books of Christianity, to the Koran,
to the illuminated manuscripts copied in monasteries, and to the
Bible and treatises printed on the presses of Fust and Sch”ffer
(Gutenberg's usurpers) in Mainz, Cologne, Basel, Paris, Zurich,
Seville, and Naples-over 4,000 years can be seen as part of the
broader history of the beginning of literacy.
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