The pragmatic difference between textual and oral guidance can be overstated (as by Ricoeur), inasmuch as diverse and somewhat free-floating guidances are available in any linguistic community; but the challenge of harmonizing guidances is indeed heightened by the dissemination of texts, especially given the diversely impressive comprehensive perspectives of books. Facing up to this challenge, a meaningful literacy ideal involves critical thinking and historical consciousness. Writers and readers make specifically literate mistakes and must “trust the conversation” to be corrected, whether by tradition or by interlocutors in an open forum. Scripturalism addresses the trust issue by both means. Scriptures are a kind of charter texts, specially powerful in their guidance because of communal commitment to their writing and observance. Despite the effective universalization of the literacy agenda in our world, textual guidance and the ideal of a unified written expression are now deeply suspect among intellectuals, undermining the communicative base of scripturalism. But Blanchot’s conception of the “unworking” in a serious writer’s “work” supports the ideal of an honest text-based relationship with an ultimately relevant Other, so that even by postmodernist reckoning it is too soon to say that “the Book is no longer” (Nancy).