Holly Berman: Daniel Radosh, in The New Yorker, offers up everything you ever wanted to know about Bible marketing. To religion journalists — and to many observant Christians — news of the wacky world of scripture packaging — Bibles for surfers! Bibles designed to look like teen magazines! etc. — is old news, but surely some readers will find Radosh’s catalogue/article fascinating. But I read between the lines that deadliest of qualities in a reporter setting out to document a religious subculture: distance disguised as respect. Radosh plays it so straight that even obvious questions — how do all these Bibles (an average of four in every household) really function in peoples’ lives? Is the Bible always a book, or is it also an object? Is it — and I ask this respectfully — ever a fetish? Does “consumerism” really explain the forests of Bibles published every year? Or is there a religious sensibility to be found in the desire for multiple editions, translations, copies? I dunno, but I wish The New Yorker would come down from its observation post and get messy in religion.