The Lost Practice of Reading

By Jessica Hooten Wilson, PhD

We have a problem with reading in the 21^st century.

When we discuss reading as a society, we are not merely talking about a pastime disappearing such as kids no longer collecting baseball cards or playing marbles, we are talking about the loss of access to the treasures of wisdom from our shared tradition. We are—without fully understanding the ins and outs of the reality—lamenting the loss of reading as a loss of virtue in our culture.

Reading affects every part of our society.

If you have government leaders who do not read, what does that mean for how they live their life? Or, what does a culture look like when its artists, entertainers, and producers are not readers? They spin like tops in the current moment, unable to draw from the past and speak into the future. Without what Flannery O’Connor would call prophetic imagination, these artists of the moment cannot make anything worth lasting.

For our purposes, as Christians dedicated to education, what does it mean for schools and churches when a society does not read?

Schooling becomes impossible without reading. A truism in grammar education is that in K-2 grades, children learn how to read, whereas 3^rd grade on is reading to learn. Too many high schools now push students through the system without ever asking them to read books in their entirety. One college president recently dismissed books as passé because Google has access to all the information that you need. These students arrive at college eager to download information into their heads and spew AI-produced material into professors’ inboxes as though that suffices for education.

In churches, once upon a time, we could have said “Christians are readers. [And] We are ‘people of the book,’” but today such a “vision of what it means to follow Christ…falls short,” writes Brad East, arguing that reading has no hold on churchgoers anymore in a postliterate culture.[1] Pastors use AI for sermons. Congregations not only do not read history or philosophy or fiction, but Christians do not read the Bible itself.

We do not look to reading to save us, but can we all acknowledge that a world without reading has become grimmer? That perhaps, just like a world without prayer, a world without faithful Christians fasting and feasting, or a world without art or generosity or music, that a world without reading is a darker one.

Reading as spiritual practice

Instead of pushing reading into the slot of harmless or fun or escapist or whatever, see reading as it is—a spiritual practice. For reading to be a spiritual practice, the activity must be formative. We should be reshaped by grace into Christ-likeness more. How might reading do this?

In reading Scripture, the spiritual practice becomes obvious. When Christians imagine reading nonbiblical literature, the query about spiritual practice becomes more hazy.

First, attention as self-emptying.

Simone Weil, in her reflections on the right use of learning with its end in the love of God, advocates a posture of kenosis or self-emptying before the text before you. When one abandons him/herself of all preconceptions, false ambition, or vain uses of the text before the object, then true attention to it becomes possible.

When we approach books (or math, in Weil’s case) with an objective to use what is before us, then we have lost all possibility of a spiritual practice. It sounds very mystical, but we are describing a mystery that is true. The whole Christian life should be an imitation of Christ, and this process of letting go of one’s agenda before a book and receiving what the book has to give may be a starting place.

This practice of attention aids us in reading in such a way that we will read God, our neighbor, and the world around us better. We will see and imagine better. Our attention has been transformed from consumption or self-seeking to ego-less and altruistic. If we read regularly with this posture, reading itself becomes a spiritual practice.

Second: In addition to attention, reading may be a spiritual practice because it forms in the reader humility, generosity, patience, perseverance, and so many other virtues. To listen to an author rather than yourself for so many pages increases your humility. It decenters the self. To sit before a poem and have no idea what it means increases your humility. To wonder at the beauty of a sentence. To pity a villain because he or she resembles you more than you cared to admit extends generosity to a fictional character that might become practice for you granting that same open-ended care to the person next door.

Third: Reading a book is meeting a person. CS Lewis said that in “Reading great literature I become a thousand persons and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, yet it still I who see.” Our eyes are not enough by which to see the world because we are so limited. Reading gives us the opportunity to walk a while in someone else’s shoes—whether fictional, historical, or even the point of view of a self-help author. We practice loving the book the way we would love our neighbor—tiny exercises in admitting our misunderstanding, our subjective views, our blindness and accepting others’ provision. When we end a book still disagreeing, we can practice that dialogue of civility and courageous stance for truth.

Conclusion

I could go on and on about the benefits of reading—in fact, I have. I’ve written a couple of books on it. I’m an evangelist for reading because I believe that books are a valuable resource for discipleship and forming us into God’s image. I believe that biblical literacy matters for the health of the church and each Christian’s soul. I love to go running and watch Netflix as much as the next American, but when I talk about reading, I am not simply promoting my favorite hobby. And I am not talking about an elitist activity meant for the few. Weil insisted that “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. The need some light from eternity.”

There is a reason that all dystopias depict a world where books are banned or burned and the people in these apocalyptic universes are enslaved not by chains but by not having access to reading. For the God who created light with a word, for an incarnate Lord who called himself the word and revealed himself in a collection of pages of those words, the enemy is the liar who convinces you to do anything else but attend to words. Reading may not save our souls, but thank God that it was the Word who did. Perhaps we should respond by turning the page.