Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age
Given its title, Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age is unexpectedly narrow in its target audience and goals. Yet even more surprising is the power, richness, and far-reaching value of the vision at its heart.
This book is a guide for “Christian practices for teaching reading”1—a guide by Christian university English teachers, pitched primarily for other Christian university English teachers, bristling with new ideas for classroom instruction, assignment design, discussion leading, and private reading. It also reexamines many tried-and-true approaches, “consider[ing] how these practices can be more effectively and intentionally harnessed” (4) for not just deeper engagement with the text, but—this is key—for becoming deeper and more faithful people.
Thus, with all its academese and pedagogical hustle, Deep Reading casts a bright and exciting vision for seeing the act of reading itself as intentional practice at being the kind of people our society needs. Whether in the classroom or in one’s personal leisure, “reading widely and charitably with the intent to listen” (10) can become one of those small and powerful “rituals of our intellectual and spiritual formation.” As the authors say elsewhere, deep reading “forms us to be more humble and charitable to [the] texts [we read]—and, hopefully, to each other” (103).
The introduction situates Deep Reading in relation to recent Christian scholarship on reading and spiritual formation. Three major sections (subverting distraction, hostility, and consumerism) each contain two chapters, divided by teacher-centered and student-centered concerns. In each chapter, a cultural and theological analysis of the problems we face is followed by suggested reading practices.
Thus, the first section, “Practices to Subvert Distraction,” includes a first chapter on ways to help media-bombarded students learn to pay deeper attention to the texts they read: entering imaginatively into a character’s world; reading for an hour without switching tasks; approaching reading as an encounter with a potential friend; practicing embodied presence by taking a field trip to a relevant site, learning to stitch pages together, or attending to the physical sensations of reading out loud. All of these help us practice the kind of full and attentive presence we ought to give to anyone. The section’s second chapter considers how teachers can be more attentive to the needs of students themselves: allowing different modalities of text–cheaper editions, audio books, and e-books–which can be a boon to neurodiverse students or those for whom money is tight; modeling high-quality reading responses; helping students reflect on their own reading experiences of enthrallment or distraction; and so on.
The subsequent sections follow the same pattern. Part 2, “Practices to Subvert Hostility,” suggests we think of an old-fashioned or potentially offensive text as a guest, someone we should welcome and seek to understand. Part 3, “Practices to Subvert Consumerism,” shows how reading together lets us practice deep human community: a climate of kindness and mutual care, an openness to questions and multiple voices, the gift of conversation, and the simple human pleasures of empathy and humor.
Each chapter ends with a helpful half-page “Summary of Suggested Practices” and a short list of “Reflection and Discussion Questions.” In a brief conclusion, the authors reflect on how the regular rereading of familiar texts can be approached as a form of liturgy. Thus, with its seven full-length chapters, its consistent chapter organization, and its questions for discussion, Deep Reading has the ideal length and structure to be used for a semester-long, every-other-week faculty reading group aiming to grow as teachers.
Authors Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts join the recent lively discussion about spiritual formation. They engage an outstandingly thorough collection of other Christian scholars of reading, pedagogy, moral philosophy, and spiritual formation, but they build squarely upon the thinking of Christian scholar-teachers James K. A. Smith, David I. Smith, and Alan Jacobs—all three of whom they quote frequently. These scholars call Christians’ attention back to the everyday, embodied, and even aesthetic aspects of faithfulness. They hope such a shift could balance out our over-fixation on intellectual doctrines (the “brain on a stick” model of Christian faithfulness, in James Smith’s phrasing),2 giving space for a fully flourishing life of faith: not only orthodoxy, but also discipline, empathy, care. Such habits might even help us escape from the trenches of culture war, where entrenched evangelicalism is matched by the equally entrenched rationalistic skepticism of our secular “opponents.” Our capacity to build loving relationships with our ideological enemies is the measure by which the church’s faithfulness is being tested.
And maybe, the authors hint, that capacity can be expanded by the way we read.
The book’s terminology and conceptual framing assume a Christian scholarly audience, and this might feel off-putting to non-scholarly or non-Christian readers. Nevertheless, any teachers (not only Christian ones) of any humanities field (not only literature, but also history, Bible, philosophy, or art) at any level (not only college, but in middle or high school as well) would benefit from reading this book. Even readers with a hardened distrust of Christianity would be intrigued by the authors’ thesis that reading lets us practice habits that can help heal our inflamed and nauseated public sphere. Indeed, Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts are stepping into a much wider but just as lively current discussion than the one among the Christian scholars they explicitly cite. From Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (2010) to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024), secular voices, too, are noting the loss of ability to engage openly and freely in relationship with others, and the loss of the “play” mindset that enables discovery.3 And the authors’ ideas are powerfully resonant and intellectually fruitful if engaged with those ongoing discussions in the secular public sphere.
Those on every side, politically, agree that some of the worst systemic problems we all face are the general fragmentation, overload, and hostility pervading our culture. That these general evils could be undermined at the grass-roots level by something as simple as reading, which millions of us have enjoyed—by a refreshing, refreshed deep reading, one many of us can remember from childhood, our flashlights under the blankets making the pages shine as we devoured them, or from our student days when a book really caught us up, philosophically or emotionally, so that we were pulled head-under by an experience alien, yet so alive, a painful sweet sympathy with a life we otherwise would have never known—a deep reading so unlike the shallow skimming and scrolling that has crowded even into the corners of our weeks and evenings and holidays: Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts’s core idea is exciting and inspiring. And their numerous practical suggestions for the classroom are effective and easy to implement.
The practices against hostility are particularly brilliant. They show a nuanced understanding of students’ mix of gut-level responses to literature. Students might assume they should reject a text because of its ideological stance; or—this is an especially insightful point—even when they admire a text, they may only be agreeing with their own assumptions and still failing to really listen. As the authors say,
The former students so resonated with the texts, the latter so distanced themselves from them, that ironically neither were willing to listen to Murray and Wollstonecraft [two proto-feminist writers] in their unlikeness to themselves. . . . For very different reasons, neither group gave the text any authority over how they might consider their own circumstances or the purpose of education, an idea at the pulsing heart of Murray’s and Wollstonecraft’s arguments (98).
But by “a profound act of listening,” by “silencing neither their misgivings nor their warm responses,” students can learn to practice “wrestling with the text as one might with a friend with whom one strongly disagrees but to whom one nonetheless extends charity over a meal or coffee” (97). The authors model how to help students “understand our responses to texts as part of an ongoing series of conversations rather than a final arrival point at a particular ‘correct’ ideological perspective” (99), thereby rehearsing “how connection and disagreement can coexist without heightening into hostility” (100). The authors’ balance between discerning critical judgment and charitable empathy, both for writers of the past and even for the most objectionable characters in a literary work, is invigorating.
In the end, the book’s tight focus on Christian college English teachers sounds a rousing call to those of us who do stand within the target audience. The last few years have been demoralizing, for many of us: attacks on the liberal arts, economic rationalization pressing in from all sides, dwindling demand for our courses, skepticism about the value of what we teach. And all of this chaos and collapse has been suffered against a wider social backdrop of tension, scarcity, and overload. Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts insist that we, we few, who know how to open ourselves up to a book as if it were the Lord himself coming to us in a stranger’s disguise, are ones equipped to lead the way.
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Footnotes
- Julie Ooms, “Bio,” Julie Ooms, PhD, accessed 16 September 2024, https://julieooms.com/bio.
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016), 3.
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford University Press, 2015); Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 2024)
