If You Have a Soul, Maybe Reading Will Save It

READING IS AN act shot through with various forms of power, but because it’s also so mundane these powers are easy to disregard. We all know that power in our society (a position of power and privilege) is rarely accessible for those who aren’t literate. But the powers of reading are greater than that, and irreducible to instrumental calculations. Reading offers us not only a method for tapping into streams of information, but a way to intimately encounter the strange and wondrous worlds of other minds. It expands our imaginations and, some have argued, may even give us access to wisdom, or a portal into the mind of God. Reading is, in many ways, an unnatural thing to do, and a truly incredible human achievement. It’s also something I’ve learned to take for granted as the foundation of my intellectual life.

Lately, though, as it feels like something is shifting in the basement regions where that intellectual life was forged, I’ve been forced to stop taking it for granted. Admittedly it’s been difficult, as a college professor in the humanities, not to be sucked into the doom spiral of discourse on the decline of literacy. And I can’t deny that I’ve watched the reading habits of my students, and even my own reading habits, rapidly change. Since 2020, when everything went suddenly online, I’ve found myself giving fewer (and smaller) reading assignments to students. It’s clear that they aren’t absorbing or metabolizing text like they used to. And if I’m being honest, my own “natural” inclination right now is to read much less than I used to. If I want to stop scrolling through content and read something printed on paper, I have to be very deliberate. I make the effort, but it’s notable to me that it’s an effort.

There seems to be something missing from the dominant conversations about what’s happening to reading, however. Rachel Gabriel recently made the case that, somewhat absurdly, both the people who claim that no one is reading anymore and the people who claim that reading is fashionable again are both right. Fewer people are turning to books (both in school and in their leisure time). And yet, more books than ever are being published, and they’ve become fashion accessories of a sort. It’s a strange knot to untie. But I’ve come to realize that neither of these things are really my central concern. My concerns about reading are baldly existential and spiritual (if not religious). Luckily, my academic field is religious studies and theology, which is uniquely placed to address such concerns (even if it tends not to).

EVERY MAY, as part of my teaching contract, I have to offer a May term intensive course. I have truly mixed feelings about the May term because it’s exhausting and always leaves me completely drained, but it’s also an opportunity to teach whatever whimsical thing I like (last May I taught a course about nothing). This year, I decided to offer a course on reading. I called it “How to Read a Sacred Text”. I designed and proposed the course last year, so by the time May rolled around, I’d already forgotten why I proposed the course, in the first place. Ostensibly, it was for the reasons that you’re probably imagining: everyone seems to be debating about whether or not we’re living through a literacy crisis, or even the end of literacy itself. This is an especially pressing question on college campuses, and in humanities departments like mine. But I had other motives for offering the course, even if I almost forgot what they were.

I had a sudden shock of remembrance as we were reading through the passages I’d assigned, from Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of Text. Writing in the early 1990s (in the wake of Amusing Ourselves to Death), Illich proclaims the death of “universal bookishness”, a phenomenon which had become, he argued “the core of western secular religion” (whose church was the school). Illich cedes the future, as perhaps we all have, to the screen. But he makes the argument that perhaps this is a good thing for reading, even if it means the death of bookishness. Perhaps bookishness itself was more about status and prestige, and less about reading. Perhaps reading has actually been limited by the age of bookishness.

Illich is disappointed by the death of the book and the rise of the screen, as he anticipates his inevitably bookish reader will be. Indeed, it’s the very sense of disappointment and even despair that led me to his book in the first place. But he’s interested in the forms of reading (like contemplative reading, the sort practiced by early medieval monastics) that were functionally squelched by the rise of scholasticism, which eventually gave way to print culture’s bookishness. In this transition reading becomes less frequently an act of seeking out God, or an attempt to interface with wisdom, and instead becomes the accumulation of knowledge. Perhaps now, in this moment when bookishness is dying, Illich suggests, we can finally witness the rise of what he calls houses of reading: particular spaces in which much more idiosyncratic reading practices are cultivated and preserved.

It was this idea—the concept of houses of reading—that had inspired my course on reading, to begin with. This idea, that perhaps even in the midst of what feels like a decline, there could be the renewal of something else felt like one way to combat my despair. When I had my students read James Marriott’s much cited and critiqued essay on the decline of literacy on the very first day of class, one of my students responded as I had when I first read the piece: “OK, so if this makes me feel despair, what do I do?”, she wanted to know. I’d felt the same way, and I suppose my answer had been: build a house of reading and invite people in.

Of course, I had no real idea what that meant. I knew that I wasn’t going to build a monastery. I’d read, with some envy, about the professor at Penn who offers a course where students do nothing but read, in a kind of late night collective isolation. But I have a ten year old to usher to bed: that wasn’t going to be the foundation of my house, either. It had begun to occur to me, however, that the religious traditions I spend so much time teaching and talking about had, each of them, many little houses of reading built up within them in which to cultivate a relationship with their sacralized texts. Even if I wasn’t yet ready to build a house of reading, I could at least offer a bit of a tour into what these traditions had already built, the ones I’d had occasion to wander in.

That was the idea for the course: it was a way to wander into different houses of reading, to see what we might find there. And the hope was that it would also be a pathway out of a kind of despair (for me) and an adventure for my students, who might suspect that reading opens a small door into a wild interior cosmos, but had probably gotten lost in the drudgery of what reading has become in the dying gasps of bookishness, and its increasingly decrepit and derelict schools.

YOU PROBABLY WANT to know how the class went. I haven’t read the evaluations yet, but I really loved it. It’s where this whole idea of the powers of reading came from (though I suppose it’s not especially novel, coming from someone who grew up with Reading Rainbow). It’s one of those ideas that surfaced, in one of our conversations, and just seemed to efficiently capture something about what we were all trying to get at. Despite the fact that I teach in the field of theology, I am not a sermonizer. I seek to open up worlds of ideas for my students, to convince them to get on a spaceship to the outermost regions of thought. I’m a fellow traveler, and sometimes an eccentric tour guide. But I don’t typically sermonize. I did find myself sermonizing this May, however. I couldn’t help it. I would get caught up in the gospel of the book, of reading, of the adventure of ideas, and I couldn’t stop. In part, it’s because I could see that my students were listening, and they started to adopt the language of these sermons, and make it their own.

What did we actually do? We read a lot, naturally. We talked about the decline of literacy, we talked about AI and digital reading and audiobooks, we talked about Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. We also looked back into history so that we could talk about reading in monastic settings, about the printing press and the Protestant Reformation (they loved discovering Martin Luther’s disdain for the theological slop he hated to see emerging all around him, in print), about the way that reading enables political resistance, and about censorship. We talked about lectio divina, about the ritual performance of texts in bar and bat mitzvahs, and about the people who memorize the Qur’an. One of my students, who is a practicing Christian, told me that she finally felt like she knew how to read the Bible by the end of this semester. She could understand how different that sort of devotional reading is from the reading she does for school.

We also spent time thinking about, and engaging in, reading practices. They all checked a book out from the library, and I challenged them to finish it before the end of the month (3/4 of them did!) I asked each one of them to memorize a poem, and recite it for us on the last day (everyone pulled it off!) I brought in a stack of picture books from my daughter’s shelf and we read them to one another, while sitting in a circle. I asked them each to host a meeting of a “reading club”, where they would meet in a random location and read together, silently. One of the most memorable activities was a visit to our campus archives, where our archivist had pulled together some of the oldest texts in our holdings. There was a small corner of an ancient Egyptian papyrus with an interesting acquisition story, medieval manuscripts adorned with gold, polemic tomes from the 17th century, ostentatious 19th century family Bibles. Students kept referring to this visit as the moment when they really began to understand how much care, and effort, goes into the production of a text. Or how much used to go into this sort of production.

One of the surprises, for me, was the role that orality and oral traditions ended up playing in the course. Walter Ong wouldn’t have been surprised, perhaps, but this was about more than the way that orality enables literacy. Part of what I wanted to them to see was the way that reading can give us the ability to think and speak differently. This is why I gave them an oral exam, as the final, rather than asking them to write something down. And it’s probably also one of the reasons why I found myself so often adopting what Robert Bellah called the most American form of public expression: the sermon.

During their oral exams, every single one of the students talked explicitly about the powers of reading. And each of them had their own unique take. They talked about that certain kind of freedom that opens up, when you see that interpretation is yours for the taking, the text’s power to hold up an invisible mirror so you can see another reflection of yourself, the power to become an individual in the first place, the power to think against the social and political structures that might otherwise dominate you, the power to feel connected to the thin thread of a God who often feels so absent, the power to stand up in front of a community and speak to them in a language that’s more ancient than any of you and that binds you together, the power to situate yourself in a story until you can feel it in the marrow of your bones.

I’ve always believed, sometimes only subliminally, that there’s something sacred about the kinds of conversations that we have in a classroom, and about the particular sets of texts we assemble to help us have that long conversation we call a course. But I’ve never really spoken about it this way. It’s seemed out of line, somehow. I was recently in conversation with someone who teaches literature, who was despairing over how to convince students to connect with books, and texts, in this moment we’re living through. “Just tell them how sacred it all is!”, I said flippantly. Of course, they laughed at me, and listed off all the reasons why they would never be able to say that in their classroom, even if they believed it.

I suppose that’s the odd privilege I have, in my particular discipline. I can use that word with something like a straight face. What do I have to lose? Perhaps they won’t believe me. And perhaps history (or my contemporary colleagues) will judge me as a charlatan or a quixotic fool. Or perhaps there will be a historical gaze that looks back with a strange sort of reverence on the reading practices that we’ve managed to develop, and protect, and continue to cultivate. And I suppose it’s that flickering possibility that makes me feel as if I have nothing to lose, if I can convince my students that there’s something sacred in reading practices. That, if they have something like a soul, it might have been so deeply shaped by reading that the matter of this soul itself would all but disappear without a text to read it against.