On All My Holy Mountain | Rosenberry Books

On All My Holy Mountain: A Modern Fraktur

Peace Church and Folk Art Revival Editions

fraktur by Diane Katz

reflections on peace by the Rutba House (Peace Church Edition only)

featured in The Washington National Cathedral Christmas catalog

selected by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi for their own special editions

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On All My Holy Mountain revives a richer, deeper past.

Though created by a single artist, the fraktur in this volume reflects the vitality and range of a number of historically known, but mostly anonymous, artists. Fraktur’s cheerful hearts and angels with playful writing might have been the loving expression of a naive hand or the masterful execution of a skilled decorative artist and calligrapher.

A North American folk art, fraktur blossomed in the Pennsylvania German culture from pre-revolutionary times. The Amish simplified and popularized fraktur. On All My Holy Mountain revives a richer, deeper past.

Consider each pair of pages as a visual hymn.

The fraktur-writing in this book is not made for speed reading. The ornate and sometimes quirky writing may slow you down. It may slow you enough to absorb something deeper from the fraktur’s verses and symbolic images.

Two editions — only one difference. Both books contain the same fanciful artwork and Bible verses. The difference is in the secondary text, (which is also a traditional part of fraktur):

In the Folk Art Revival Edition, the secondary text contains interesting tidbits about fraktur, including 18th century schoolmaster Christopher Dock, who created fraktur to teach and reward his students. He wrote that when a child succeeded at learning his ABC’s “his father owes him a penny, and his mother must fry him two eggs for his industry. But when he begins to read I owe him a certificate.”
In the Peace Church Edition, the secondary text contains reflections on peace, by members of the Rutba House, a community of urban hospitality in Durham, NC. For instance, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink,” from Romans prompts the telling of a loving Iraqi gesture of peace towards Americans in war-torn Rutba, Iraq.
Profits from your purchase of the Peace Church Edition go to the work of Rutba House.

On All My Holy Mountain: Folk Art Revival Edition — Deluxe Edition — 9x12 in. hand-bound hardcover — $34.95 Handmade hemp binding, Italian Fiocardi & Japanese Echizen Washi cover, Echizen Washi flyleaves, Classic Laid Baronial Ivory text, archival, 2005.	[wp_cart:On All My Holy Mountain — Folk Art Revival Edition:price:34.95:end]
On All My Holy Mountain: Peace Church Edition — Deluxe Edition — 9x12 in. hand-bound hardcover — $34.95 Handmade hemp binding, Italian Fiocardi & Japanese Echizen Washi cover, Echizen Washi flyleaves, Classic Laid Baronial Ivory text, archival, 2005.	[wp_cart:On All My Holy Mountain — Peace Church Edition:price:34.95:end]

Handmade papers perform an act of peaceful nonresistance

Centuries may have passed since a Peace Church publication has been handbound with handmade papers. Read how the handmade papers of an 18th century hand-bound book performed an act of peaceful nonresistance in the American Revolution! (from “A Note on this Peace Church Edition”)

A “modern” fraktur?

This book presents new fraktur for a modern reader. Fraktur was, in its time, an art like quilting, weaving or singing. Can fraktur-making have a revival such as quilting has had? Learn more about Fraktur.

About Rutba House

Rutba House was named after a small town in war-torn Iraq where a loving Iraqi gesture of peace transformed Leah and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. The gesture of kindness was to them a revolutionary act of resistance to the international politics that caused the war. It was an act they wanted to emulate. With Isaac Villegas, a student at the time—like Jonathan—at Duke Divinity School, they began an inner-city hospitality house in Durham. They named it The Rutba House, where the on-going, international experiment in communal spiritual living called “New Monasticism” began.

Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, director of New Monasticism’s School for Conversion, is the author of Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals; The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture; Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals; New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church; Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line; Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism; and To Baghdad and Beyond: How I Got Born Again in Babylon.

Leah Wilson-Hargrove is a team member of Urban Hope and former director of the Walltown After School Program. Both programs advocate for urban youth in Durham, NC.

Isaac S. Villegas is pastor of the Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship in Chapel Hill, NC, and teaches classes in prisons with Project TURN. He is a member of the Governing Board of the North Carolina Council of Churches, writes a column, “Life of the Body” for the Mennonite Weekly Review, and is the co-author of Presence: Giving and Receiving God with J. Alexander Sider.

Sermons by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Isaac S. Villegas and J. Alexander Sider are included in Rosenberry’s A Word in Season, along with sermons by nine other preachers from the Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship.