To read is human. Even as literacy rates or the quality of that literacy make us nervous for the future, the act of reading looks like it’s somewhere near the essence of what it means to be human. Because reading doesn’t end, or even start, with books. Reading is this search for meaning. A turning and tuning of our senses outward. Looking for symbols, looking for signs of life. It’s the longing for a message in a bottle, in hopes of discovering, making, and living in a shared meaning together. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) and Matthew J Smith (Hildegard College) join Evan Rosa to discuss the joys and perils of reading, how to make young readers, how to teach and cultivate mature readers in the university context, and the significance of reading as a Christian spiritual practice. Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give or click the link in the show notes to donate today.
To read is human. Even as literacy rates or the quality of that literacy make us nervous for the future, the act of reading looks like it’s somewhere near the essence of what it means to be human. Because reading doesn’t end, or even start, with books. Reading is this search for meaning. A turning and tuning of our senses outward. Looking for symbols, looking for signs of life. It’s the longing for a message in a bottle, in hopes of discovering, making, and living in a shared meaning together. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) and Matthew J Smith (Hildegard College) join Evan Rosa to discuss the joys and perils of reading, how to make young readers, how to teach and cultivate mature readers in the university context, and the significance of reading as a Christian spiritual practice.
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.
About Jessica Hooten Wilson
Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and formerly Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of several books, most recently Reading for the Love of God. Her book Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year in arts and culture award and The Scandal of Holiness received a 2022 Award of Merit. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Other awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague, an NEH to study Dante in Florence, a Biola University sabbatical fellowship funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and the 2017 Emerging Public Intellectual Award. She is a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum.
About Matthew J. Smith
Matthew J. Smith is Founder and President of Hildgard College in Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Southern California, an M.A. from the University of Connecticut, and a B.A. from Biola University. He taught for ten years at Azusa Pacific University before founding Hildegard College. His scholarship is on medieval and renaissance literature and especially the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, and late medieval drama. Dr. Smith is the author and editor of four books: Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame), Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy (Edinburgh), Literature and Religious Experience: Beyond Belief and Unbelief (Bloomsbury), and a recently finished manuscript: Shakespearean Recognitions: Philosophies of the Post-Tragic. He is also an editor of the journal Christianity & Literature and has guest-edited three special issues: The Sacramental Text Reconsidered, Sincerity, a Literary History, and The Future of Christianity and Literature in Literary Studies.
Dr. Smith founded Hildegard College in 2022 with the conviction that higher education needs a reset. Where typical universities are growing ever larger into multi-versities, abandoning the traditional liberal arts and giving students a predominantly anonymous learning experience, Dr. Smith argues that the future of quality education, especially Christian education, is focused, tight-knit, rigorous, and recommitted to the classics of the liberal arts tradition. His vision for Hildegard College is to create an environment where young people can explore the riches of the classical tradition while also exploring and gaining experience in different areas of work—part monastery and part startup incubator. Mentorship, deep learning, and personal formation are the bedrock of a classical education.
Matt Smith lives in Fullerton, CA with his wife and three children. He serves on the boards of Veritas Classical Academy and of the Classic Learning Test. When he isn’t teaching, he cooks, plays soccer, trains in jiu jitsu, mountain bikes, plays with his dog, and writes.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Miroslav Volf: Hello, listeners and friends. Welcome to For the Life of the World. It's me, Miroslav, and before we bring you today's episode, I wanted to interject a brief invitation. One of our fellow listeners and a wonderful supporter of our work at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture has offered a $10,000 donation as a matching challenge, and it's all going to podcast production this coming year.
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Blessings, my friends.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Mary, the mother of God, the way that she's always depicted is holding a book. It's anachronistic for her to be holding a book. The likelihood of a twelve year old in first century Palestine being in Roman occupied territory, holding a book, it wouldn't happen. But the reality of her being someone who was well read, and what that would have meant was she communally received the scriptures every morning, you know, every synagogue, every time she's in a family life in which she knows the word of God so well that her first response is the Magnificat.
She has voice in a society where she wouldn't have had voice, and it had nothing to do with her being able to, you know, sit at home and read a book by herself. She was just part of a reading life and the necessity of a reading life to know the word internally, to have it memorized, to have it filled up, so she wasn't a blank slate.
She was a treasure trove, or the way the scriptures talk about it, she was an ark. And each of us are called to be that ark that carries the words forward. So when I talk about reading for the life of faith, we are people of the book.
Matthew Smith: This is the heart of what I think a good education ought to entail. There's nothing that can replace opening a difficult, maybe intimidating, but beautiful book with people in physical proximity to each other.
People with whom you become friends and then asking authentic questions and exploring the text.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. To read is human. We're all readers. Even as literacy rates or the quality of that literacy make us a little bit nervous about the future, the act of reading looks like it's somewhere near the essence of what it means to be human.
Because reading doesn't end, or even start, with books. Reading is the search for meaning. A turning and a tuning of our senses outward, looking for symbols, looking for signs of life. It's the longing for a message in a bottle, sending out an SOS, in hopes of discovering and making meaning.
And, of course, we not only long to read, but we long to be read. The philosopher Gordon Sumner, who's held a part time job as the basis for The Police and The Bell Boy in the Who's classic scooter movie, Quadrophenia, discusses his shock at the revelation of a hundred billion bottles washed upon the shore.
"It seems I'm not alone at being alone," he writes. So reading is this spiritual yearning for contact, for transcendence, the sheer joy of making contact with another, often across space and time, to discover and make and live in a shared meaning together. Today on the show, I'm joined by Jessica Hooten Wilson and Matthew J. Smith, both are evangelists for reading.
Jessica is Fletcher Jones endowed chair of great books at Pepperdine University and the author of several of her own, including Giving the Devil His Due, Flannery O'Connor and the Brothers Karmazov as well as her recent Reading for the Love of God, which we're discussing today with Matt Smith.
Matt is a Shakespeare scholar who taught for years at Azusa Pacific University before starting his own college. Hildegard College is a Christian liberal arts college of entrepreneurship in Southern California. It uses a new model for college where, in addition to the great books tradition, students learn through immersion, studying strategy, leadership, and economics by working with entrepreneurs and organizational leaders on real initiatives.
Together, the three of us discuss the joys and perils of reading, how to make young readers, how to teach and cultivate mature readers in the university context, and the significance of reading as a Christian spiritual practice. Hope you enjoy.
Now Jessica, it's so wonderful to gather you for a discussion of Reading for the Love of God and the occasion of this gathering, the publication of your new and wonderful book. Jessica Hooten Wilson, Matthew Smith, thank you for joining me.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew Smith: Happy to be here.
Evan Rosa: I wanted to start by calling out what is, I think, a well known, but alarming, maybe kind of boiling the frog slowly kind of problem, which is a literacy stat. And the literacy stat that I most recently found from Gallup is that in the U.S. 21% of adults are illiterate, and 54% of adults have literacy below the sixth grade level. And when you think of literacy as a kind of general index for intelligence or the ability to get along in the world, that's one thing.
But if you really literally bring it back to the question of literacy, the ability to read, and read well, and read for understanding, read for application, and at the perhaps highest level, you might say, Jessica, reading for love and the love of God in particular, this becomes more alarming. And of course there's practical problems, right?
It's, you can tie problems of literacy directly to the U.S. GDP. You can tie it to welfare and poverty. You can tie it to how, you know, the likelihood of ending up on welfare or in jail. These kinds of problems often come with literacy, and yet the question of reading is such a deep element of human life and experience.
You're pointing us in these big broad directions. That all as a preamble for coming at this question starting with a problem. It seems that we're not very good at reading these days. Why is that the case? And I would love for each of you to offer some insight on the question of reading well today.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: I mean, the why is so big, so it's hard to jump into all the different reasons because it's almost impossible to cover every single reason that people aren't reading right now.
Some of the problems that I would pinpoint that are maybe the ones we can solve or the ones we can step into. One, reading has become an individual endeavor. And when it becomes an individual endeavor, it does mean that those who are illiterate remain powerless. Right? Especially in a society where it, I mean, this is, this goes back to 1800s, 1600s, right? Middle Ages.
Anybody who knew how to read was able to have more power in society. They could have, they could be thought leaders, they could be culture makers, they could be those who ruled the government, those who were the aristocrats. So the power to read was really a liberating power and it still is today.
So if it's only an individual effort and we become a more individualized, atomized society, then you're leaving people on the margins. But if we consider reading as communal, then that means those who really know how to read well are constantly in community reading with those who cannot, and that we don't sideline people.
So the reading publicly in churches, the reading in salons at home, where you gather people together from all different stripes of society, and that way everyone is getting this reading as a communal activity. And we don't miss out on that. I know that there's, you know, reading in prison ministries.
There's the Odyssey Project, which does like reading with those who are the underprivileged and who don't have access to the college education. So not thinking of reading as only something that is by yourself in a classroom to get you through to get a grade or to get a job, but instead seeing it more as an activity in which we're really liberating everyone around us.
We're liberating our neighbor and we're liberating our souls.
Matthew Smith: What I love about your book, Jessica, is it really is just a charge for people to read and to read well. And I think that it's pointing out a problem that maybe a lot of people don't realize that we have because literacy rates are certainly a problem.
Accessibility to reading and reading groups and reading well is a problem. But another problem, and I think the one that your book really focuses on, is that we think we read well when we actually don't. And, you know, you and I are both in the world of educational reform, and even in this world of education and higher education, especially, I'm always surprised by how taken aback people are when you suggest that we read together.
You know, we're debating about what to do with this institution or how to draw this political line or the public benefits versus the free choice of learning in certain contexts. And then we say, okay, well, hold on. We're kind of defining these abstractly. Let's read Newman or Frera or Dewey or Aristotle or Aquinas together.
People are kind of taken aback by this. And one of the, one of the inspiring dynamics, and I use that word on purpose that I found in your book was this sense that it's reading is just not neutral. We're, it's not that you can choose to read or not read. If you choose not to read, you're just not doing, that's not your thing.
And you could be fine. Your faith will be fine. Your work and vocation will be fine. Your family will be fine. I'm reminded of the, I'm sure you've seen it in the Duomo in Florence, this portrait of Dante and Dante is holding his book up to Florence and showing them this book, uh, and standing outside the city.
Meanwhile, to the left are depictions of Inferno and Purgatory, and people are either moving up or they're moving down. That's sort of what came to mind as I was reading your book, and I'm, my sense is that you would go a step farther and even say that we've become bad readers, and it is bad for our faith.
It's bad for our spiritual lives. Can you speak to why a kind of atrophy of reading is affecting our faith?
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Absolutely. So you were talking about portraits, and I start thinking of Mary, the mother of God, and the way that she's always depicted is holding a book. It's anachronistic for her to be holding a book.
The likelihood of a twelve year old in first century Palestine being in Roman occupied territory holding a book, that, that's not, it wouldn't happen. You wouldn't even have a book, right? Um, but the reality of her being someone who was well read and what that would have meant was she communally received the scriptures.
Every morning, every synagogue, every time she's in a family life in which she knows the word of God so well, that her first response is the Magnificat, right? And she's able to then turn, she has voice in a society where she wouldn't have had voice. And now it's preserved for thousands of years by Luke, the Gospel writer, showcasing her voice.
And it had nothing to do with her being able to, you know, sit at home and read a book by herself. She was just part of a reading life and the necessity of a reading life to know the word internally, to have it memorized, to have it filled up, so she wasn't a blank slate. She was a treasure trove, or the way the scriptures talk about it, she was an ark.
And each of us are called to be that ark that carries the words forward. So when I talk about reading for the life of faith, we are people of the book. Whether, I mean, even that's Jewish, that's Islamic, that's Christian for sure. And it should be, especially if we consider the Incarnation as the word of God made flesh, right?
So, it is vital for our faith because we rely on being people of the words where we keep the books inside us. And we are the arks through the storms, through the floods, through everything, carrying the life of the church forward as people of the word. And without that, I don't know what our testimony is or what our witness is.
Um, it cannot be solely reliant on each of us self expressing our faiths. It has to be something much bigger about carrying forward into the future.
Evan Rosa: I would love to hear both of you talk about the technological element that is a necessary, you might think of it as a necessary valence. It brings valence to this whole equation that whether it's for a life of faith or for the life of the world beyond the church, there is this question of how do we navigate new technologies as well?
And we don't have to spend the whole time here, but if you think of reading as a technology itself as a kind of, um, practice or tool. And once you bring screens into the question, that's going to impact our abilities. And clearly this is a huge question in and of itself, but I'm curious how you each interact with it in each of your work, as you say Matt, as reformers of education.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: I'm interested too, to hear what Matt has to say. I know for me, yes, reading is a tool, but reading goes back to, I mean, they just found those 2300 BCE tablets of poetry by Enheduanna, where you get to see people writing poetry in praise of the gods and goddesses.
It goes back a very long time. So even though reading has always relied on materials for transmission and transformation. It also relied heavily on the people, that the people would memorize it and pass it forward. So it wasn't only just about the tool and the technology. It was people centric, and the tools and technology were secondary.
I think what happens with our current use of technology is the technology becomes primary. It becomes our default mode of being. In a sense, it replaces what we think about being embodied or being human or being in community. And instead, you know, even I have friends right now coming back in higher education from a couple of years of Zoom.
Students are like, why should I come to your office? Can I just Zoom into that meeting? So it's replaced the primacy of human interaction and human interaction with embodied, with materials. And I, I think the place of technology should always be second to the material and to the embodied and to the communal.
So if it keeps its rightful place and we're able to use it that way, great. If it replaces it, we should start questioning and be wary of the way it replaces those interactions.
Matthew Smith: Yes, and interactions and also actions and the importance of being active as readers. And I don't mean that just in the sense that we typically mean it. No, we're active. I'm asking questions of the author.
I mean, the ways that technology tends to replace things in our lives, and technology is good. It's replacing things, but what it's doing is replacing it with a version of the same activity that makes us passive. So if reading historically at times involved memorization, we don't need to do that now because of our access to texts since the printing press.
If reading involved, you know, the access to information, well, we certainly don't need that now with the advent of the digital age. What's lost there is the activity of the reader simply as a reader. And you touch on this in so many ways in the book, Jessica, and one as an advocate of great texts, education, great books, learning as you are too, we often get questions about online, you know, do you offer online classes?
And online classes can be great. You know, I've been in online reading groups. They can be really good, but they're not a replacement for sitting in physical proximity with other humans discussing something. For in those instances, that other person sitting across from you with whom you are agreeing or disagreeing becomes a literal bearing point for the ethical and spiritual and emotional and aesthetic questions that you're asking of the text.
If you're reading Augustine or Thomas Hobbes or whoever it might be, it's not abstract because you're discussing it with a person, and you still are when it's virtual, but kind of, you're virtually doing it.
So there's something immediate, by which I mean not mediated or less mediated about reading a book. And I love to hear Jessica, you offer your thoughts, some of that, some of that you share in the book already on engagement with the author. I mean, it was refreshing to hear you talk about how part of what it means to read for the love of God is reading charitably and humbly, and these are intellectual virtues really directed towards the person behind the book.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking about classical education that's supposed to have you interact again with books as people, but also interact with nature, with other human beings. I mean, it's just very embodied way, or to be a very embodied way of educating.
And I do a lot of, I go into classrooms and I talk about ways to go back in time with some of our teaching methods. And so there was this one classroom where they were teaching chapel by showing a video of images of the natural world with music playing, you know, so everything again is mediated and this is supposed to be your contemplative time.
Matthew Smith: Sounds peaceful.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: You're contemplative time was just no smells, no real sights, right? Everything's controlled for you. It's, I mean, you're basically being, it's like being experimented on, right? Does this music soothe you? Does the pace of this film, you know, get you into the right mind space?
It just becomes very like consumeristic. Even though the goal of the classroom was trying to be contemplative. And so if I counter that with what reading does, and the reason it can demand charity and humility of you, in the same way that actually walking in Yosemite, demands charity and humility, right?
You have to take care of the place that you are, the space that you're in. You realize your smallness. Books do that too because suddenly you're quiet, and their voice becomes your voice, and you listen to it. And especially if you read it aloud and you hear yourself like reading Ernest Gaines, for example, walking in the role of his characters, seeing the world through his eyes, putting literally your eye into the text when it says, I see, I do.
There's a humility and charity of presence that happens. And the author's words, you're breathing life into them. This is the Ezekiel, right? This is the bones coming to life by the spirit of God. And we're part of that process when we see these dead, brittle letters on the page, and then we breathe them to life by being words and they become something.
So I think there's so much of it that we've lost the ability to communicate, to understand, because we want to quantify it. We want to be more efficient. We want to be more effective for larger masses and larger groups. And therefore, technology seems a better medium. But if, as we're discovering, I think all of us on this call probably agree, and probably anyone listening to this might actually agree, when you slow down, when you're actually in an embodied space, when you take that way of reading, it comes more alive to you. You become more alive.
Matthew Smith: It's so far, Jessica, it's so far what you're describing from how most people experience, and even if they don't experience it, imagine reading. When you're talking about reading aloud, when you're talking about reading communally, when we're talking about the embodied experience of reading, that's just not probably most people read the most on their phones, right?
I don't know, there's probably some statistics.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Really? Is that true?
Matthew Smith: I would imagine most people, I mean, people will sit for forty-five minutes in the evening, looking at their phones, scrolling. What you're describing, Jessica, is a fuller sense of reading. I mean, people might think, okay, well, that's inefficient. You know, we don't want to just go back in time.
We don't want to, we don't want to ignore technology or reject it, but we're not nostalgic, right? We're not being antiquarian for the sake of hearkening back to a good old age. That's not the point. The point is that with the adoption of technology comes the risk that what we used to think were important human activities, not just reading, but you can think of other activities as well that technology has mediated, um, have become kind of atrophied.
And so you, you address this in your book by organizing it through different models of reading. You know, Julian of Norwich as a reader, Dorothy Sayers as a translator and a reader, medieval monastic memorization practices as models for reading, Tolkien's creation of new languages, Frederick Douglass reading as liberating as a model for reading.
And you have this, you have this, I'm going to read this short quotation, especially about Sayers and translation. Where we might not think of translating as a model for reading, that we've lost something in reading, and we can find out what we've lost in reading by thinking about translation.
You write, "Moreover, translators must find themselves at home in another's text rather than a mere stranger trespassing through another's territory. Translators become good models for how to identify with and empathize with authors rather than set oneself against them with either skepticism at best or antagonism at worst."
So when I think of technology, I think of this, the loss of not just facets, but really kind of fundamental pillars of what reading is. So when you charge someone, oh, we ought to read, what they might imagine you're asking them to do is something far less than really what you're asking to join with you in.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Mm. Yeah. Dorothy L. Sayers was a convicting read for me trying to imagine books the way that she does. Even she says when she starts translating Dante, she said, "I'm a cat, but I can recognize a tiger that's like me." Like I can at least get somewhat into the skin of the other thing and try to relate.
So there's both humility there, but also just this recognition of the necessity of bringing the cat to life, bringing the tiger into people's midst again, so that we can recognize with awe of what this is and not lose sight of it.
So the translation effort to me is a big loss. Especially if you think about how many people used to know so many languages. It's a loss of redemptive kingdom work to not be able to do languages anymore.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if this is a a point to ask a little bit about the question of who's reading who, Jessica, you've said this before to me, and you say it in the book with respect to the Bible.
But this is probably a deep aspect of Christian liturgy or liturgical practice, spiritual practice, spiritual uses of reading. And I think you were the first person to articulate the fact that we don't just read the Bible or read a book, that book reads us.
I wonder if you'd introduce that idea in this context because it's suggesting that we're not just reading for information or for power or communication purposes. We're reading to be changed or transformed.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: So Augustine, of course, articulates this really well. And I tell people all the time, I think I'm just a giant footnote to what Augustine and Lewis have done and hopefully trying to translate their material into twentyfirst century ways of understanding it.
But when I talk about the book reading us, I'm going to use Lewis's metaphor because it's probably more closely aligned to where we are now, you know, coming from the twentieth century. He says you could be one kind of reader in which you go into a foreign country, and you're holding yourself back from experiencing it the way the people who live there actually experience it.
So you judge it, if you're a British person in Italy, for example, you're judging the espresso that it doesn't taste like English tea, right? There's this distance that's created and this level where you're standing over and judging them by British standards that the Italian coffee doesn't meet your British standard of tea.
On the other hand, there's the person that walks into that territory and tries to understand, let's experience espresso for what the Italians have to offer. And what can I glean from being an inhabitant in this space at this time? So that when I go back to Britain, right, I have the experience of the espresso to talk about with my experience of tea to relate to, right?
It broadens my perspective rather than limits me to only knowing one way of being. And I think this is how we should think of books. You enter into their time and space and are read by them rather than standing over them. So that when you return to the real world, they have opened your eyes. They have created a more expansive vision versus reading in such a way that you always remain in your narrow vision world.
Lewis says, talks about the prison of the self is the way he refers to it. That you, yes, you can not read, but you will remain in the prison of yourself. Or you can open the doors to all these different worlds and let them read you and let them become part of the way you see the world.
Evan Rosa: One of the questions that the life worth living instructors use at Yale is asking the question, how would your life have to change if this were true, whatever you were reading, to inhabit that.
And when I think about the kind of echo chambers or the way that we insulate ourselves from disparate viewpoints, we might even isolate ourselves because we think those viewpoints are dangerous and would do some kind of violence to us. And yet there's this question of exposure and how those practices kind of form and shape us and in a really complex way.
You can't just be reduced to the simplistic suggestion that whatever you read, you're just going to kind of take on that particular perspective. And so I just want to appreciate the complexities there about reading as a practice that's so intellectually and morally and psychologically formative.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, and it just, they become part of the company that you keep. So, I mean, there's a certain way in which when you're really young, you copy and imitate your best friend. But over your lifetime, you have multiple best friends. If you were acting like Tommy when you were nine, if you're forty and you're still acting like Tommy, like that's a problem.
But hopefully, by the time that you've practiced acting like Tommy, and then later you start acting like your teacher, you know, Mr. Eggers, and then you start acting like your girlfriend when you're fifteen, and you start collecting and imitating in such a way that you are garnering these experiences to become discerning.
I liked imitating Mr. Eggers better than I liked imitating Tommy at nine, right? This becomes this discernment process of wisdom. If we relate that same kind of building of the person with how you interact with texts. I loved Kate Chopin when I was seventeen. Unbelievably freeing to me to read a book from the perspective of a woman.
Now looking back, like she's an adulterous crazy person, and I don't want to be. I don't want to imitate The Awakening anymore. But it doesn't mean that going through the process of imitating the awakening and thinking differently about women wasn't helpful for getting to be where I am now, where I can read better women writers, such as Julian of Norwich, for example, and take those things into account.
But one opened me up. One began the process. And then I can compare that to other narratives and other things I've read and other people I've known. Then it all expands. So you don't want to say that everything you read you become a parrot of. You become a parrot of maybe in the thirty minutes it took you to read that paragraph, but then you're stepping back from it and discerning, and that's what wisdom is a collection of all those things, or as Alasdair MacIntyre talks about in Three Versions of Moral Enquiry, it's the debate within the human person that you're guiding that process. Rather than just all synthesizing it and making it into one, it's that constant tension of different ways of being in the world that you're practicing through and which ones align with what you believe, which in the Christian world should be more definitive orthodoxy of, does this fit?
Can I take this with me? Am I becoming more like Christ by seeing myself in this character or by acting more like this character?
Evan Rosa: Matt, you're trying to educate young people. How does, how does this land to you?
Matthew Smith: You know, I'm reminded of Jessica and I are in the classical education world and K-12 classical education.
We call it, everyone knows grammar school, that kind of means elementary school, but grammar, logic school, and a rhetoric school, you know, the three ways of the trivium are how we, in the classical world, organize K-12 education before people are adults. And it's learning through language, even if it's mathematics or natural science or music.
Young people are learning by trying on new vocabulary, by reading things that are unfamiliar, by learning about different genres, and it's experiential. One of my favorite genres to teach to young adults, you know, eighteen to twenty-two year olds especially, are tragedies. And I'm a Shakespeare scholar, but I don't mean Shakespearean tragedies, modern or early modern tragedies.
I mean, old, hardcore, very foreign feeling tragedies. What I love about teaching ancient tragedies is that the message of ancient tragedies is enforced in the way that you read them on your own or with students. And what I mean by this, the basic message of tragedies by authors like Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides is slow down, don't be hasty, don't be rash, don't think that you can fix one injustice with another injustice.
Don't try to solve the problems of human law by being impious. Don't allow yourself to stretch out to the outskirts of the great wheel of fortune where you're more vulnerable to changes of luck and changes of tides and changes of fortune. That's what it, that's the message. But in reading it, it's sung, right?
These are ancient plays are written in verse. And they are written to be sung, and we read them now, and it's even in translation, it's very rhythmic and metrical lines are short. The chorus character is always very direct, admonishing, and exhorting, and cautioning. And I simply, in a very simple way, what I find when I read tragedies with students is that we just have to go slowly.
We slow down, and we attend to the text and to the ideas and characters in the book in ways that we never would were we reading a different kind of genre. And I'm aware of the fact that, you know, lots of, some of the popular nonfiction genres right now, you know, personal health and work efficiency and a pop stoicism, these are books that people listen to at two times speed in their car.
And what I think we need, especially in the education of young people, including young adults is the kind of reading that requires time, for which time is really an essential ingredient. And Jessica, in the book, you, you talk about kind of what I would describe as intellectual virtues of reading.
The virtues not only that you can get by reading, but the virtues required in order to read well. Do you need to be humble in your reading in order to learn about humility from a book? Or do you know you need to be, I don't know, just or loving in your reading practice in order to learn what justice or love are while reading? Can you maybe speak to what you think these principal intellectual virtues of reading are, especially as represented in the models that you present to us in the book?
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, I mean, it's going to sound like a chicken and egg problem. Because, you know, Augustine says you have to be charitable in order to read the love of God and get there. So you're trying to read the Bible in order to become charitable, but you have to be charitable to read the Bible well. Do you see the problem?
So the same thing I think happens in reading. And one of the reasons that Lewis just says, just at least lay down your presuppositions, at least empty yourself. And Simone Bay would go even farther. She would say the requirement of the attention is to completely kenosis, to completely empty yourself before the text.
And that's a vulnerable place. I mean, when we talked a second ago about, you know, the fact that doing these texts, are they going to control us? Are they going to manipulate us? And lots of, especially rhetoric for the nineteenth century, is it going to oppress us? Is it going to suffocate our viewpoint if we read an author who's from a place of privilege, especially talking twentyfirst century language?
What does that do to my viewpoint if I'm going to empty myself before it? But the reason they say that is because that kind of charity, that kind of receptivity that you practice, right, when you're going through the imaginative experience of the text, you then fully receive what you've been offered, right? It's a gifting.
The second step is where you then practice intellectual engagement. And that's from a different standpoint. So one, you receive it. You're fully listening. "Do I agree with this? Do I not agree with this," doesn't come up yet. It's like the skepticism is not there yet because if you don't hear what the other person said, how are you ever going to get to the place of arguing with them, debating with them, analyzing what they understood because you didn't ever hear them? You never listened.
And I think that's just very foreign to us, this idea that you have to have this kind of intellectual virtue where you humble yourself before a text, fully receive it, and then try to practice understanding and questioning of it.
And most people just, first thing first, they just go, I mean, as Evan was saying earlier, they go at the text and say, this is ignorant. This is evil. This is wrong. I don't agree with, this author doesn't think like me. This author is not like me. And that place just never allows you to receive anything.
Matthew Smith: I think the critical milieu of our time is such that your subject position as a reader, who you are, where you come from, your demographic, your age, your sex, whatever, and the same of the author, in many ways predetermine your relationship with the book before you even hear it.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: There's two misconceptions that really bother me that you just said. So one, you were talking about the necessity of slowing down. Slowing down works because you do receive it first, and then you can engage it. How many book reviewers do you know take the time to like read the book and then read the book?
Nobody does that anymore. Everyone does it so quickly, they already think they know what the author said because they already started disagreeing with them. The second misconception is the idea that my subjecthood is not a creation of many different people. So you feel as though you're coming to the text as a certain kind of person deciding if the author is a kind of person like you that you would want to agree with or not, forgetting that you yourself have been created by the way your parents raised you, by the kinds of friends that you've had, by the kinds of teachers that you've had, by the kind of books that you've read, the kind of news you've inhaled.
Whatever you've received, there already is a conglomeration in there. And as you read a new voice, you get to decide how that voice dialogues with those others. There is no one single entity that has not been created by a mass of other entities, whether it's marketing or education or religion or politics. There's a mass of voices inside you, not just one. And you should consider that these other voices, if you slow down, where do they fit or not fit?
Where should they fit? What voice should they replace, perhaps, inside you, that you've been listening too much to? And having it more as a dialogic enterprise, this is Mikhail Bakhtin, I'm not a genius, this is him. But like, where does that voice fit or not fit is an important part of the educational process.
Rather than if you are only this like prideful, I'm a single god unto myself judging this text. How do you grow? How do you change? How do you admit that you have changed? Right? If you were born a god and are going to die a god, then you're going to be immune to every force in this world, right? There's no engagement for you.
I get kind of passionate about that.
Matthew Smith: Well, and you give a helpful outline in the book of the history of professional readers, by which I mean people like you and me, people with PhDs and literate literary studies. And succinctly you say there was a time where reading was all about the reader. The meaning of the text was in you.
It's all about, it's kind of egotistical, a reader response theory. But then there was a time in which people treated the text like it were a specimen under a microscope. Uh, and it was too objectivizing of the text as a kind of object. I think maybe a lot of people when they think, you know, how I ought to read are thinking, well, I just need to try to seek out the author's intent.
You do something different. Can you describe this sort of Trinitarian method of reading the acronym A-R-T that you're sort of championing in this book?
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, you know, I, I did a lot of, again, literary critical background, and I did a lot of negotiation between understanding the rhetorical triangle the way Aristotle does where he thinks all these things are always in play in every experience of reading.
There's always the author, he's thinking in terms of theater, so there's always the playwright, the play, and then the audience reception. And that there's this experience at work. And what Dorothy L. Sayers does that I think is kind of brilliant is she writes from the writer's experience. And she says, okay, so when you're writing, you have to think not just how I'm going to hear this as the writer, but how is my audience going to receive it?
Right? And then what is actually going to be on my page? So there's those three parts. Well, then that translates really well into the reader experience. We can't just take one of them. We can't just uplift the author as all knowing, genius, authority on what the text means because the text might betray the author.
There might be places also where the text is more inspired than the author intended. Lots of artists talk about this muse and the way that the author meant one thing and then the character changed direction or the poem became about something bigger. We have to have room for that and space for that.
And then wherever the reader is at a certain point at his or her life, certain community, certain way of reading, they're going to highlight different aspects of it. They're going to find different things there than even the author meant to be there. Or that maybe even the text would speak to another writer, another reader in a different way. So I talk about it more as a trinitarian dance between these three parts that we've always seen throughout the reading experience throughout history.
How can we make it more perichoretic, right? How can it be more of a dance or an interplay of all of these where there's not a hierarchy, but we can constantly go back and forth and, and find a reading in which they're all playing together.
Evan Rosa: It kind of speaks to the enjoyability of it as well, right? Like you talk about reading as a really wonderfully high form of play, and, and of course all our greatest writers that we love and appreciate are also doing that.
I mean, that's the other side of the equation, right? There's reading and then there's writing, and the play aspect, the dancing aspect of perichoresis, the mutual encounter that you find there, it speaks a lot of what's so enjoyable about the process. I think people love getting swept away, but also dancing with, and I'm curious what each of you think about enjoying the play of reading.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah. And I think we have to distinguish again, like Matt said, both of us have studied probably way too much literary theory because you hear play and you think Derrida, right? And so you think of, but that kind of playing is more like I'm going to torture this cat and see what happens.
There's a sense in which, you know, you are still in charge of the play, and it's not going where it should, right. There's a lack of honest intention. And again, you know, I don't know how many Derrida scholars listen to the, For the Life of the World, but they're, they might protest that interpretation.
But for me, it goes back to Jesus's admonition that we become like little children. There's a way of playing in which, yes, you want to know the rules of the game because it helps you play more freely. When people don't play by the rules, the game is lost, and it becomes no fun. It just becomes chaos, but there's also a way of imagining that is very freeing and that is not subscribing to only what is, but what ought to be, what could be, what if, you know, children are really good at playing that way with that kind of freedom.
So I would want us to get back to that kind of enjoyment and not to the, let's stand over it and take it apart and have maybe pleasure in the wrong things, wrong way of playing with it.
Matthew Smith: And to be fair and transparent, your book is primarily about narrative driven literature and fiction. You're using, I mean, many different genres.
There's a radio drama, there's biography, there's a memoir, but many of your examples are turning to what we might call artful literature, imaginative literature, fiction. And you have a whole kind of, you know, it's a whole section on fiction. One might argue the book could be reading fiction for the love of God.
Although I believe that, I surmise that what you're doing is using an aspect of fiction as a way of kind of stretching out and describing other kinds of reading. However, I do want to ask, I mean, is the sort of reading, reading for love that you're describing, is it more powerful or maybe more accessible in reading narrative literature, fiction, poetry, drama, than it is I mean, I'm not comparing it to just technical literature, you know, user's manual, but nonfiction, generally speaking?
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Depends on the kind of writing, for sure, because I'm also, I talk a lot about poetry and I use poetic examples and poetic language. And as you mentioned, I also talk about theater. So I am talking about imaginative literature, but there are some people who will write sentences that by themselves can take us there.
They can have multiple meanings in the diction that can have ways of accessing beyond the empirical that they're describing, right? Some of the best literary reviews can do this. I think Clint Smith's, right, in his How the Word is Passed. So that's more memoir, nonfiction, and he's able to kind of take something that you would think would be historical and empirical and make it imaginative, give it access beyond itself.
So there is literature with aims beyond just the story or beyond just the, the literal of the sentence. And so it really is a matter of kind of looking and digging into the language and seeing what the language is capable of and maybe what the author was trying to do too.
Matthew Smith: Yeah, so there's a poetics of all good writing. At the same time, you know, one of your central arguments in the book is that some people just use literature, just use reading. Some people just enjoy it. We ought to both use and enjoy it. This is taken from the ancient Roman author Horace and, you know, this central idea to classical poetics that literature always delights and instructs, right?
It's something that we learn from and enjoy, you know. And this is what, uh, you know, a figure like Sir Philip Sidney writing in the sixteenth century, they'll make an argument that this makes poetry, poesy as you would call it, the magic of literature writ large, potentially more powerful and important than philosophical writing or historical writing, or you might even say theological writing. I don't know, but the argument is because it both teaches and delights, right?
There are some risks that come with that because it affects our emotions, but, but for that reason you say we should both use and enjoy literature at the same time, and that seems I think can be optimized in lyrical or fictional imaginative literature.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. And I, one of the things I would want to caution that that kind of happens around Sydney's time is that if it didn't instruct, people didn't understand its value.
I would say that there's something that happens with high delight, something that's like enjoyable and not just entertainment, because entertainment can, you can kind of hit a, a low mark in which, you know, a carnival ride or cotton candy is entertainment. Do you enjoy it? Does it bring joy within you that you want to share outwards?
It's a bigger word when I'm talking about enjoy, but there is some literature that you enjoy, and you don't even know what it had to teach you yet. And you might not find out till way later in life. I was just reading Agatha Christie, again, so more like the entertainment kind of novel. I was reading Murder in Mesopotamia, and she has a moment where she recalls a Keats poem from her childhood that she was forced to memorize when she was little.
And she hated it. It didn't even entertain her, let alone instruct her, she thought. And now she's in a crisis situation, right, in the middle of southern Iraq, and all that's coming to her as she sleeps is this Keats poem, right?
It's able to speak to her in a way that it never had before when she needed it. That's what I mean by the possibility of literature that you can use and enjoy. It can stay there, it can become part of you, and then when you need to use it, it's there, right? It's available, even if you don't know the exact instruction or the exact meaning or interpretation of it.
Evan Rosa: Toward the end of the book, in fact, in the conclusion, Jessica, you know, I want to just read here, "Christians are called to be the most human among us: readers. Those who have not forgotten what it means to be a bookish people, for in the beginning was the word, and in the end is the book of life."
So you do a good job bookending that. And I want to ask about the sort of normative aspects of this or the teleological aspects of it, reading for the love of God. I think we would be missing something if we didn't discuss a purposive or meaningful aspect of what you're trying to do here.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, this is probably where I would get the most pushback is this idea, right, that you can read for the love of God. It's, that's a big claim. I did notice when I taught it to people who love Flannery O'Connor, they also hear the, for the love of God read. So I'm reading my title that is purposeful there.
Evan Rosa: The title would be served by a comma and an exclamation point, you know.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: I just, I think it's, it allows itself to be read in multiple ways that I'm hoping people pick up on. But when I am intending first and foremost, the teleological, right? We read for what reason?
If we are not books that he is writing, if we are not, as it says in Psalms, you know, the stories that he's telling where really the days of my life are laid out like a book upon which you write, if that's not what we are, then maybe reading doesn't have a purpose? If he's not telling a story with our lives, if he didn't create us to be poetic creatures, if he didn't reveal himself to us in words, if he didn't speak creation into being, right, the way he creates the thing is with the words, if all of that's not real, then I don't know a whole lot of the points of reading.
It becomes self improvement, which ends when you end, right? The purpose of reading can be whatever you want it to be if all of that isn't true. If everything is true about the Judeo-Christian God and the way that he insists on the necessity of the word, that we are created in the image of the word, and we are meant to imitate the word, then suddenly the Christian life is that responsibility to be living words.
And to lose that and to lose that place in the church and to say, well, it's reading is good for some people; it's not really my thing. I just don't know that we can. We have a God who revealed himself through the words. It's so impossible for me to imagine that. Let me give you one clear example, or at least I hope it's clear.
I went with some really good friends to an art museum, and it was contemporary, so it was a brand new exhibit, you know, like a 2023 exhibit. And I was horrified. I mean, I was mad the whole time. It was not art. It was ugly. It was blasphemous. Like, I had to get out of there. Like, that's how bad it was. And they just kind of laughed at the whole thing, and they're like, eh, it wasn't your preference. It's just kind of funny. Like, this is just bad art.
I'm like, no, you can't just say that. You can't just say that it's ugly. What has happened is you took a gift that God gave us, the ability to create beauty, and you subverted it and exploited it to make ugliness. That's, it's not funny, right? There's something that's completely lost for like what we were designed for and created for that is exciting and is adventurous and is beautiful and glorious.
And when we mistreat that or give up the gift, I'm so afraid sometimes that we're going to become like the creatures of Narnia who lost the ability to speak because we stopped doing it, you know, and they, they all end up dumb at the end, and they can't recognize Aslan. And when I think about The Last Battle that way about Lewis's short, you know, his last novel, I think that's what we're doing.
We, we have given up the ability to read because we lost the gift. And it's going to make it so that we can't hear the language of God, which is poetry, and it's going to make it so we can't hear the voice of God. That's what I'm afraid of, and that's why I wrote the book.
Matthew Smith: I, I, uh, I though Jessica really appreciated the way that you described in the book and just now reading like receiving a gift.
And at one point you, you call reading an act of gratitude. And I think that is one way to get at what you mean by reading for the love of God. It's not, not simply reading as an act through which we express our affection to God, though it can be, but it's also receiving the gift from the one who lacks nothing to, to create for one another and to share in that together.
It's an act of, I mean, this is, it's gratuitous, and it's therefore gracious. When I think about what you're getting at reading for the love of God, I think more of that reception as an act of God's love and therefore our, our response to it than I even do reading as a way of practicing the love of God.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: That's a really good way of explaining it.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if we could end by just getting a little practical. And at moments, the book is practical, but I think Matt, you would have some good practical suggestions as well. We've kind of contextualized the normative charge of it, that if it's that significant, then we really need to receive from it.
So I wonder if you have suggestions about how daily practices might shape our habits and characters to inhabit the kind of reading that you're describing. And Matt, in your case, the kind of programming, the kind of pedagogy of reading that is present in your vision for higher ed, but broadly construed for all learners, lifelong learners.
Matthew Smith: I mean, I'm unapologetic in my opinion that the best use of a young person's time in college, if they choose to go to college, is in reading the original sources that have influenced civilizations, what we call the great books or great texts as kind of a living canon. And it's not just because these are great works.
And Jessica, in the book, you describe these as kind of institutionalized great books. These are classics. They have abiding truth. We can reread them. Yes, that's true. They're valuable. They're powerful. They're important, but it's also the practice of reading an original source instead of a textbook that is akin to me to slowing down and going, you know, reading a tragedy or seeing a play or reading some poetry instead of listening to a book at 2.5 speed on your phone or something like that.
It's analogous. It's deeply formative. It's not just for information, but it gives you better information. I think young people are better served by finding a program, Hildegard College, but many other programs around the country that, that still teach the great books.
And these programs can be, I think, under fire, but under fire, in my opinion, by people that aren't reading that material. So it kind of goes back to my first point, people getting taken aback or kind of feeling stunted when you say, well, let's read it together. And this is the heart of what I think a good education ought to entail is reading on top of everything else that it is.
There's nothing that can replace opening a difficult, maybe intimidating, but beautiful book with people in physical proximity to each other, people with whom you become friends. And then asking authentic questions and exploring the text.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: You know, I feel like people always think this sounds snobby when you start talking about good literature because this false assumption that whatever I think is good, I mean, it's false.
Like you can think something is good, and you're wrong. And that's such a hard pill for people to swallow because you just assume that you know what is good if you like something. And when it comes to these great texts through all time, a lot of them you're not going to like the first time you read them.
That doesn't make them not good. And much of our taste is cultivated by the bad habits that we start very early on, or even start as parents, by not trying good things or choosing better things. It's something as simple as cartoons. I have, you know, a ten year old, eight year old, a five year old, and one on the way.
So I'm in the world of choosing cartoons, literature. What are my kids going to watch? If I think it's inane, like if I think, like after I've read all these hundreds of great texts, and I don't want to spend my life, even fifteen minutes of it, watching this with you, then we probably shouldn't be watching it because I'm cultivating a taste in them that they're going to inherit.
And it's going to affect whether they like Augustine's Confessions when they're twenty. It just is. And I think that's the trajectory that people don't see is that a lifetime of reading and choosing the great text means beginning very young, and it means continuing until you are dead. It's really not something that only happens in the classroom. It's not something that is only the responsibiity of college or higher education.
Higher education is a part in a story in which those experiences are curated for you, you have the community classroom, you have the guidance of those professors who've spent years and years and years studying this and loving this material.
But it's meant to build on something that came before, and it's meant to contribute to something later so that those people that I teach at twenty to twenty-two, when they're parents, they know how to pick the good stories for their kids when their kids are little and thus the process continues.
So we really just need to think more in terms of what are the habits that make my life a life of someone who reads things that are good and true and beautiful, not just how am I going to practice that during this one season of time of four years or whatever it looks like? Um, but what is the whole lifetime of a reader would look like?
Evan Rosa: And Jessica, this has been so fun. It's inspiring me to pick up, take and read, and I know it's doing the same for everyone who's listening.
Jessica Hooten Wilson: Well, I sure hope so.
Matthew Smith: Thank you, Evan. Thanks, Jessica.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Jessica Houghton Wilson and Matthew J. Smith. Production assistance by Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.
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