Post #5 in the series Reading Faith and Culture

“More than half of modern culture depends on what we shouldn’t read.”   – Oscar Wilde.

 

I know that when I sit down to read, I want to read something that will satisfy. Satisfy what, however, is another matter altogether. Satisfy a cultural curiosity (i.e. just what is that bestseller or persistently trendy book about)? Satisfy a desire to learn, an itch to be challenged or a longing to relax? Satisfy a pleasure principle? Or embark on a sincere quest for spiritual, educational or moral edification?

But what if, after reading book after culturally recommended book (and the Rolling Stones sings up here in my mind) I try and I try and I try but I can’t get no satisfaction?

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Holy Trinity - Rublev, 1410

Post #4 in the series, “Reading, Faith and Culture”

Back when I first began to take seriously the claims Jesus made, I thought the key to making a reliable deduction as to whether I should believe them or not lay in reading the “right” materials, and plenty of them. That is, if I could get my hands on enough points of view, on enough apologia of the Christian faith, as well as enough attacks upon it, I should be able to strategically weigh things and make up my own mind on the matter. And quite nicely, too, thank you very much.

After all, as a graduate student in literature studying at Oxford University at that point, I came from a training long steeped in the adage that one must “verify one’s sources.” Absorbing vast amounts of history, criticism, literature, and, well, a conscientious pursuit of the “history of ideas” should put me in good stead, I felt convinced, when it came to deciding on which side of the line in the sand I stood.

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Post #3 in the series: Reading, Faith and Culture

In her preface to The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers writes:

“The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense – that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats than an irresponsible writer may choose to print – nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name. And particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading.” (pp. xi-xii)

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Post #2 in a new series entitled Reading, Faith and Culture

I watch my sister’s 18 month old son with amazement renewed as he speaks his world into being.

I see this world now through his eyes: connecting dots between words. A new, exciting world … worded.

My nephew toddles around the house, pointing at something here and touching something there. At each gesture, he tries to speak what the items around him “mean”.

At first this may seem so simplistic, but then I remember – again – how through the eyes of seemingly unsophisticated and small children we are led into the incomprehensible wonder and immensity of the Kingdom of God.

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