Read Aloud!—For Edification: Pedagogical Reflections Inspired by Kierkegaard

In a passage sure to strike many moderns as charmingly quaint, Augustine confesses genuine puzzlement upon observing one of Saint Ambrose’s reading habits: “When he read, his eyes travelled across the page and his heart sought into the sense, but voice and tongue were silent.¹ Almost unable to believe his eyes, Augustine gropes for possible explanations for this extreme oddity: perhaps Ambrose is trying to guard his time, knowing that reading aloud might tempt a perplexed passerby to pester him for an explanation of the text; or maybe he’s simply protecting his easily fatigued voice.² Alas, Augustine ultimately fails to discern Ambrose’s motivation for reading silently. Yet, ever the charitable interpreter, he remains sure of one thing: “whatever his reason for doing it, that man certainly had a good reason.³

The contemporary reader is apt to be more puzzled by Augustine’s puzzlement than by Ambrose’s silence. Indeed, Augustine’s bewilderment seems to come from another world. Sure, we might read aloud to our children, or from a lectern as part of a public gathering. But it hardly occurs to most of us grown-ups to read aloud by ourselves, to ourselves; and it strains credulity to imagine an entire civilization in which silent reading is the exception rather than the rule.⁴ What is going on here?

Margaret Miles provides part of the answer by pointing to Augustine’s cultural catechesis and formal education: “Augustine had been taught to read in a way that maximally engaged the body and senses: reading aloud, seeing and hearing words, simultaneously moving the lips and projecting the words with one’s breath—an expressive art of tone and emphasis.⁵ First as a student of rhetoric, and then as a teacher of the same, Augustine was highly attuned to the ways interpersonal communication depends upon a dynamic interplay of speech and sound. And he and his contemporaries did not see written communication as an exception to this pattern. As Peter Kreeft explains, “For most premoderns, writing was related to speech as sheet music was related to music. Only a Beethoven could hear in his head every sound of the orchestra when he read a piece of sheet music, and only an Ambrose could hear the words in his mind that he did not hear his tongue pronounce.”⁶ On this interpretation, Augustine’s perplexity is rooted not only in his culturally and educationally induced expectations, but also in his considered judgments about both the conditions required for effective human communication and the rarity of a mind that could read effectively without those conditions being met.

Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps interpersonal communication nowadays is less dependent upon rhetoric and sound than it was back then. Perhaps our cultural catechesis and systems of formal education reliably produce readers so advanced in their exegetical acumen and emotional sensitivity that if we want to describe them in a simile, we must say they are as virtuosic as Beethoven. Perhaps we’ve outgrown reading aloud. Perhaps. But in this essay, I’d like to explore another possibility. What if the passage from the Confessions treated above is more relevant than we might think? What if our cultural catechesis and systems of formal education are, in fact, producing radically deficient readers? And what if a revival of a premodern practice might help undo some of the damage?

I’d like to make a case for such a revival⁷ with the help of a postmodern thinker with premodern reading sensibilities. Like Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard is a Christian theologian and philosopher who deeply appreciates the importance of rhetoric.⁸ And like Augustine, his writings are peppered with seemingly quaint references to reading aloud—only in Kierkegaard’s case, the passages take the form of passionate pleas for his reader to buck the by-then-current trend of silent reading. One example will suffice: “My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! If you do so, allow me to thank you for it; if you not only do it yourself, if you also influence others to do it, allow me to thank each one of them, and you again and again!”⁹ When I first read this read-aloud request (silently!), I ignored it, latching onto Kierkegaard’s escape clause—“if possible!” But my mind began groping for Kierkegaard’s reasons like Augustine’s did for Ambrose’s. Happily, Kierkegaard is not silent about his reasons, which center on the spiritual benefits of reading aloud, especially in contrast to other spiritually de-formative reading habits. This paper explores these benefits and these contrasts.

I organize the discussion around two problematic and prevalent inhibitors of spiritually formative reading, which I (following Kierkegaard) call “noise” and “scholarliness.” These inhibitors do their anti-edification work in almost opposite ways: the first lacks seriousness; the second is serious to a fault. But I explain how reading aloud can help us resist both inhibitors in spiritually beneficial ways. Along the way, I offer practical suggestions to Christian scholars—both professors and students—concerning how they might effectively experiment with reading aloud in an academic context, both on their own and in a classroom setting.

Reading Aloud and the Problem of Noise

In a discourse sometimes called “The Mirror,” Kierkegaard guides his reader into a posture for reading the Bible designed to aid personal transformation.¹⁰ A passage from “The Mirror” will do double duty for us, both orienting us to the problem of noise, and serving as a case study in reading aloud. For purposes of the case study, I invite the reader to participate in an experiment. After reading these instructions, take a moment to sit in silence. Then read the passage slowly, out loud. Do your best to perform the text in a way that conveys its meaning and pathos; you might even consider taking more than one pass if verbal interpretation proves challenging. When finished, take another moment to ponder the passage silently.

Here’s the passage:

If, in observing the present state of the world and life in general, from a Christian point of view one had to say . . . : It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me “What do you think should be done?” I would answer, “The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently, the very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God’s Word cannot be heard, and if in order to be heard in the hullabaloo it must be shouted deafeningly with noisy instruments, then it is not God’s Word; create silence! Ah, everything is noisy; and just as a strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses or to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than—rubbish! Oh, create silence!¹¹

The average student assigned to read “The Mirror” would likely relate to the passage above in one of three ways: (1) She would not read it, either because she skipped the reading altogether, or because she read selectively. (The passage is eminently skippable by certain standards, being buried in a sub-point 40 pages into a 44-page discourse.) Or (2) she would read the passage once, silently, at a pace brisk enough that the words blur together in the auditorium of her mind yet slow enough that she could still say she read it. Or (3) she would do what I just described while listening to music and attending to multiple mid-paragraph interruptions from the buzzing rectangle in her pocket. (The above could just as easily describe a professor as a student. Mea culpa.)

If Kierkegaard is onto something in this passage, we have the beginning of an explanation for our imagined reader’s habits: we live in a culture of noise. In addition to literal sound waves, the “noise” in a culture of noisy reading is twofold. First, the reading material is noisy: it tends toward vapidity, lacking the sort of substance that merits deep listening; and it’s designed to agitate. (Kierkegaard seems to have the news media of his day in mind.) And second, the readers’ minds are noisy. We are what we eat; and a steady diet of hastily produced, agitation-inducing rubbish renders a reader so inwardly harried, busy, scattered, distracted, and otherwise preoccupied that she lacks the inner quiet and unity of will that characterizes a spiritually serious reader. In this way, noisy reading not only differs from morally earnest reading, but also undermines it. By hurriedly filling one’s hours and consciousness with noise, one lacks the time, peace, and spiritual appetite necessary to seek and read edifying texts in an edifying way. And, if the noisy reader is presented with an edifying text, “it cannot be heard,” for her cultural catechesis will have shaped her mental habits in such a way that she’ll read it as she reads noisy “literature”—quickly, distractedly, and with readiness to discard after use.

The reading habits of 19th-century Danes might have been noisy, but their hasty consumption of rubbish cannot compare with that of today’s smartphone user. And the trouble is not simply the Internet’s inane, rage-inducing content (as bad as that is). As Samuel D. James has argued, the very form of online discourse—characterized by scrolling, hyperlinks, brevity, instantaneous novelty, etc.—has tremendous (de-)formative power, simultaneously increasing the mental noise and decreasing the reading capacity of those who enact its “digital liturgies.”¹² Consider this description of one purportedly typical 13-year-old’s 12-minute drive home, as published in The Washington Post:

Her thumb [is] on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces on camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home.¹³

Now imagine that same reader at age 19, with six more years of digital habituation under her belt, enrolling in a college course. With what powers of soul might we expect her to approach a text from Saint Augustine, or Shakespeare, or Flannery O’Connor, when her thumb drifts from Instagram to her e-reader?

In light of such developments, some scholars suggest that we overhaul our use of books to fit the culture of noise. Jean Twenge, for instance, advocates the creation of “interactive ebooks to try to keep students engaged,” with fewer pages, simpler prose, and “interactive activities such as video sharing and questionnaires.”¹⁴

But what if we want to be in the Resistance? What if we want to help our students (and ourselves) become the kinds of people who can read with spiritual earnestness?

Well, we’ll need more than a good lecture. We’ll need counter-cultural practices, or “alternative liturgies,” to recalibrate our hearts and minds.¹⁵ Kierkegaard suggests that practices for creating silence, both inwardly and outwardly, will be key here, and surely he is correct. But he also suggests (almost paradoxically) that breaking the silence through the discipline of reading aloud could be strategically significant in this connection. I think he is right, for two reasons. First, reading aloud forces us to slow down (rather than reading with haste); and second, rightly framed, reading aloud impresses us with the fact that the text we are handling is precious (rather than rubbish).

Consider, first, our pace when reading aloud, and the benefits thereof. The physical demands of vocalizing obviously slow us down a bit. But the interpretive demands slow us down even more, particularly if we aren’t just “saying” the text, but performing it. When we read silently, or mumble the text sotto voce, it can become second nature to let the words scroll through our minds without attempting any active, in-the-moment interpretation. But such passivity is harder to get away with when we perform a text. The reader-cum-actor has to make sentence-by-sentence interpretive choices with regard to inflection, tone, cadence, emphasis, and expression—choices that silent readers might not even notice are there to be made. Sometimes, the performer stumbles into a surprising insight, hearing in his rendition an interpretive possibility that wouldn’t have occurred to his silent self. Other times, the performance falls flat, sending him back for a second (or third?) attempt as he fumbles toward a more convincing grasp of the text. Either way, the practice of vocalizing slows us down and aids our understanding.

Especially significant in this connection is the way reading aloud can aid our evaluative or emotional understanding. (And here we begin to consider the ways reading aloud helps us to see the preciousness of what we’re reading.) There’s something mysterious here, which I admit I’m not sure how to explain psychologically. But I’ve experienced it many times: uttering important truths aloud engages our hearts in ways silent thinking doesn’t.

Perhaps your experience matches mine. There’s been a tragic event, and it’s fallen on you to share the news with your loved ones. You mentally rehearse the speech throughout the day without incident; but when the moment arrives, so does the lump in your throat. In a sense, you “know” the news has life-altering significance before you speak; but articulating the words has a strange way of causing that significance to shine forth to your heart in living color. (The fact that some of us avoid such scenes by communicating through email or text message confirms our familiarity with this facet of human psychology.)

A counselor friend of mine reports a similar pattern in her practice. She regularly invites the troubled families with whom she meets into a simple exercise: the parents are to look their child in the eyes and express their love for the child out loud. Nothing fancy is needed—just a forthright pronouncement of affection in a sentence or two. My friend reports that two things happen routinely. First, the parents resist along these lines: “I don’t need to say it; she already knows how I feel.” And second, after some gentle but firm insistence from my friend, the parents comply—and the tears flow on both sides of the table. The resistant parent’s claim that the child “already knows how I feel” might be accurate, in a sense; but we must distinguish “knowing” from knowing. It’s possible to have a well-founded and accurate belief in some proposition without having direct experiential acquaintance with the radiant beauty of the truth expressed by that proposition. To obtain or convey the latter, heartfelt sort of knowledge, sometimes we do, in fact, need to say it.

The same dynamics can come into play when we read aloud, particularly if the author has a sense for the poetic and the reader contributes a bit of expressiveness. Consider just one example. For a lecture on the vice of vainglory, I wanted to help my students appreciate some ways that giving and receiving glory can play a wholesome role in a well-lived life, and it occurred to me that a particular scene from The Lord of The Rings might be of service. A quick re-reading confirmed my suspicion, so the five-page narrative entered my lesson plan. To read such a long passage well requires practice, so I gave voice to Tolkien’s story in the privacy of my study—until I was too moved to continue. Thinking that this less-than-dry-eyed dry run had gotten it out of my system, I trooped into class to perform the text. As it turned out, my in-office catharsis wasn’t enough to stave off a few unplanned dramatic pauses as I attempted to recover from the glimpse of Samwise Gamgee’s glory that confronted us as we, together with all of Middle Earth, endeavored to “praise him with great praise!”¹⁶

I have been suggesting that part of the good that accrues to those who read aloud is that their nobler affections are activated. In so doing, I’ve written of “significance shining through to the heart,” of “heartfelt knowing,” of “glimpsing glory.” This is because I share with Kierkegaard a view of human psychology according to which the emotions are not just bodily feelings, but potential bearers of spiritual insight.¹⁷So, when I say that reading aloud can aid our emotional understanding, I don’t mean we get a better sense of the author’s intended emotional tone (though that’s true, too). I mean, rather, that we gain immediate experiential acquaintance with the significance of the ideas expressed in the text, seeing them in their proper colors with the eyes of our hearts.

That’s one way reading aloud can attune us to the preciousness of what we read. Let me point toward another. If we know something is precious, we tend to handle it with care. (Think of our treatment of delicate family heirlooms.) But it’s also true that we can come to appreciate an object’s preciousness by handling it with care. For instance, a congregation of worshipers can come to a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the Gospels by regularly enacting a liturgical ritual in which the Gospel Book is ceremonially marched into the center of the congregation, flanked by flames, enveloped in incense, and greeted with a kiss.

Performing a text aloud—giving effortful attention to tone, emphasis, and inflection—is one way to handle it with care. And by handling it in this way, we communicate to ourselves (and to anyone listening) that the text matters. This is especially so if we wrap it round with a bit of pomp and circumstance. Earlier, when I invited you to vocalize the paragraph about noise, I asked you to flank it not with candles, but with silence. This is not how one treats a social media post. And it’s difficult (though not impossible) to receive the paragraph as though it were a social media post when we handle it as though it’s precious. By honoring the text behaviorally, it becomes more natural for us, attitudinally, to receive it for what it is: a carefully wrought masterwork intended for our spiritual edification.

Of course, not all texts are created equal, and I don’t mean to suggest that every text should be treated with equal care. As Francis Bacon famously noted, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”¹⁸ To chew and digest a book that merits mere tasting would be a waste of effort. And, much more seriously, spiritual dangers attend chewing and digesting texts that could be said to merit such treatment, in terms of aesthetics or historical influence, but which embody moral or spiritual errors. Such works amount to palatable poison, delighting the reader while potentially undermining his or her spiritual health. So teachers and readers must use discretion when assessing the preciousness of texts—in terms of both degrees and kinds of preciousness—and tailor their assignments and reading practices accordingly. For purposes of edification, Christians will obviously want to privilege texts embodying Christian wisdom; but not every Christian text equally merits deep personal engagement, and not every book that merits such reading is explicitly Christian.¹⁹ Discernment here, as in most matters, requires prudence, rather than a set of simple rules.²⁰

Let me sum up. We live in a culture of noise, where much of what we read isn’t worth much, and our pace of life and of reading tends toward haste. One result is that many of us are catechized to treat even wonderful texts as though they were hastily produced twaddle. But reading aloud is one “counter liturgy” that can help us resist this problem, both by slowing us down (physically and interpretively), and by giving us a sense for the preciousness of what we read. As a result, reading aloud can aid our edification, for it aids the tranquility of soul needed to understand what’s important in the text, and to see why it’s important for me.

To get a little more concrete, let me describe a read-aloud practice my students and I have used to fight our noisy habits. In my courses, I call this “the spiritual exercise of study.”²¹ The assignment’s title serves as an incipient invitation to spiritual seriousness, and its instructions make that invitation more explicit. There I welcome the students into what we’re doing together by providing a brief rationale, and situate reading aloud within a suite of practices that makes noisy reading more difficult.

Here’s part of those instructions, designed for a course I teach at a Christian college. (Explicitly Kierkegaardian and Christian language could be adjusted for other contexts.):

Over the next three weeks, I’m inviting you to treat one assigned reading per week (your choice) as an experiment in the spiritual exercise of study. Here’s what I have in mind:

1.  Find a quiet (or better, silent) place to study. Silence your phone and place it out of sight. (Why? Here’s Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the present state of the world: “it is a disease.” And here’s his remedy: “The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence.”)²²

2.  Spend one minute in silence (not prayer, just silence), attending to the fact that you are in the presence of God. (Again, here’s Kierkegaard: “You must see to it that you take time every day to collect yourself in the impression of the divine.”)²³

3.  Spend a moment praying that God would use this time of study for His glory and your good. (Here’s a brief sample prayer from Kierkegaard: “Lord, give us weak eyes for things of little worth, and eyes clear-sighted in all of your truth. Amen.”)²⁴

4.  Read the assigned text out loud, slowly and actively, in one continuous sitting; pausing for reflection is encouraged, but please don’t interrupt your attention to the reading. (Again, here’s Kierkegaard: “My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! If you do so, allow me to thank you for it.”)²⁵

5.  Spend another minute in silence (not prayer, just silence)

6.  Spend a minute or more praying (and perhaps taking notes) about anything in the text that relates to your life.

Students typically engage this practice as individuals. But we also experiment with similar practices in class (see below); and some students find special joy in reading aloud together outside of class. Whatever the head count, though, the goal is to acquaint students with an unfamiliar but helpful form of reading, so that they may both reap its edifying benefits and acquire a taste for it (and perhaps a distaste for noise).

Reading Aloud and the Problem of Scholarliness

If noise nurtures unseriousness, “scholarliness” fosters the wrong kind of seriousness. (I do not say it fosters over-seriousness, because the issue is qualitative, not quantitative.)

A passage from the preface to Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death distinguishes scholarliness from another kind of scholarship.

From the Christian point of view, everything, indeed everything, ought to serve for upbuilding. The kind of scholarliness and scienticity that ultimately does not build up is precisely thereby unchristian. . . . It is precisely Christianity’s relation to life (in contrast to a scholarly distance from life) . . . that is upbuilding, and the mode of presentation, however rigorous it may be otherwise, is completely different, qualitatively different, from the kind of scienticity and scholarliness that is “indifferent,” whose lofty heroism is so far, Christianly, from being heroism that, Christianly, it is a kind of inhuman curiosity.²⁶

An example helps clarify the differences between the approaches. It’s one thing, Kierkegaard says, to be “taken in by the idea of man;” it’s another thing altogether “to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being . . . alone before God.”²⁷ The example is not randomly chosen. Sickness is itself a text about what it is to be human, written in the hopes of helping its readers become deeper specimens of the species. But it’s “inhuman,” Kierkegaard thinks, to read such a text simply to develop a theory of humanity, or, worse yet, to discern what Kierkegaard’s theory of humanity is. Such reading is an exercise in missing the point. “All Christian knowing,” he says, “however rigorous its form, ought to be concerned. . . . Concern constitutes the relation to life,” and “this concern is precisely the upbuilding.”²⁸

In proposing such “concerned” reading, Kierkegaard explicitly challenges the “scholarliness” common in his day, according to which detached objectivity is the pathway to the deepest, most important kinds of knowledge, and attention to the personal is derided as vain subjectivity. The “scholar,” it was thought, must check her passions at the door, and scour the text for its objective meaning—period. On this model, “serious reading” (or “lofty heroism,” as in the passage above) might consist in rigorously analyzing a text’s aesthetic form, or systematically delineating its theories, or mapping its place within the author’s oeuvre, or tracing its impact on later thinkers, or exploring any number of other “objective” issues—all aided, no doubt, by careful consideration of “the literature.” But in Kierkegaard’s view, labeling such reading “serious” is a confusion of language. It isn’t that he opposes exegetical rigor, or the search for objective truth. Each has its place. What he opposes is (at least) twofold: (1) the lack of moral earnestness in such scholarliness, and (2) the way such scholarliness actively undermines and replaces moral earnestness by cunningly redefining ‘earnestness’ in terms of objective rigor. As Kierkegaard puts it elsewhere, we “honor [objectivity] with the laudatory name of scholarly and profound and serious research and pondering,” while reading for edification is, “as we scholars say, the subjective, and the subjective is vanity, this vanity of not being able to read a book . . . without thinking that it is about me.”²⁹ In sounding this alarm, Kierkegaard tells us that he does not mean to “disparage scholarship, no far from it.”³⁰ But he does want to put it in its place. As Brian Gregor puts it:

According to Kierkegaard, critical scholarly work has a legitimate place in reading. But if the text must at times be read objectively, this scholarly detour is teleologically oriented toward the subjective reading of the text. . . . The existential danger is that the detour of scholarship turns into a cul-de-sac from which one never emerges³¹

Now, even with the clarifications just given, we scholars might complain that Kierkegaard is a bit hard on the tools of our trade. Moreover, we might wonder whether his diagnosis even fits our context. Sure, readers in Kierkegaard’s day might have been long on scholarly rigor and short on subjectivity; but hasn’t the balance shifted since then? If anything, don’t our students need to tamp down their subjectivity and learn the scholarly ropes?

Perhaps. But if that’s our attitude, we need to listen all the more closely to Kierkegaard’s warning. It may be that our students (and we) could benefit from an increase in objective rigor. But when we emphasize such rigor, the temptation to confuse scholarliness with earnestness increases. And the temptation is already strong. Without denying that subjectivism is on the rise, we must recognize that students have been catechized since grade school to think about “reading for class” in the terms of (unsophisticated) scholarliness: read the book to learn the facts; learn the facts to pass the test; pass the test to get the grade; get the grade to get the honors.³² Such habits die hard. Plus, even if our students do have a “subjective” bent, their “subjectivity” hardly resembles the sort Kierkegaard commends. So it seems to me that we need to find ways to shepherd our students (and ourselves) toward wholesome subjectivity, and away from both scholarliness and the malignant subjectivity of our day.

Reading aloud can help here, in at least two ways. Kierkegaard gestures toward the first in a preface: “My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! . . . By reading aloud you will gain the strongest impression that you have only yourself to consider, not me, who, after all, am ‘without authority,’ nor others, which would be a distraction.”³³

In other words, vocalizing a text helps us attend to its relevance to our lives—rather than fixing our attention on the author or some imagined crowd (including the crowd of scholars)—and it does so by deeply impressing us with the fact that that is what we are doing. Let’s unpack this thought.

It’s possible to perform a single action in more than one manner, some of which can make it seem to us that we’re doing something other than what we intend to do. For instance, when a father disciplines his daughter, one way to describe the action is this: he’s seeking his beloved’s welfare. But if he engages the child angrily—perhaps using harsh language designed to bring home to her the gravity of her wrongdoing, or looming menacingly over her in a way that makes it clear (to her and to himself) that she is in the dock and he is both judge and jury—he won’t have a strong impression that he is helping his beloved, even if he is motivated by love. This is because he is not treating her in a way that makes her loveliness manifest to himself; instead, his manner heightens his sense of her moral turpitude, thus making her (for the moment, at least) look unlovely. This feature of angry discipline can make it difficult for the disciplinarian to carry out his task in a way that actually contributes to the beloved’s welfare, as many a repentant parent (and wounded child) can attest. In such a case, the manner of action undercuts the action itself. By contrast, if the father were to express the same ideas in a different manner—perhaps kneeling down to his daughter’s level and addressing her gently as “Sweetheart”—his correction will more obviously look to him like an attempt to bless his beloved. Why? Because, in and through his manner, he is presenting her to himself in the terms of love.³⁴ And this behavioral-emotional feedback will help him actually seek her welfare when disciplining her. The point here is not to say that either mode of discipline is always called for. (Perhaps, at times, sternness is best.) The point is that diverse ways of doing the same kind of action can vary in the strength of the impression they provide that you are, in fact, doing that action; and the stronger impression can help sustain the action.

Kierkegaard is saying something similar about the link between reading aloud and reading with spiritual earnestness. Even if we can read silently with an eye toward spiritual growth, reading aloud “gives the strongest impression” that we have only ourselves to consider—not Kierkegaard, and not the others. It helps us pay less attention to Kierkegaard because we are the ones saying the words. Even if we know the words are his, his authorial identity is deemphasized when we experimentally and literally make them our own by uttering them.³⁵ Kierkegaard doesn’t want us to do what the text says because he said to do it. (Thus, his disclaiming of “authority.”) And he doesn’t want us to fixate on scholarly questions like, “What is Kierkegaard’s view of the matter?” Instead, as another preface suggests, the discourse seeks a reader “by whom it wishes to be received as if it had arisen in his own heart”³⁶ —that is, as if the reader’s own conscience had brought these ideas to mind for consideration. And it will seem to us more like the words are ours if we speak them.

Reading aloud also keeps our attention off of “others, which would be a distraction.”³⁷ “Others” can distract in several ways, but the most relevant for our purposes is this: we can be distracted by the critical crowd of scholars, and thereby become members of that crowd, happily passing judgment on the text rather than judging ourselves by the text’s lights. But when we read aloud, it becomes harder to imagine ourselves as members of such a crowd; for as the words fall on our ears, the fact that we are being directly addressed becomes more salient.

In a discourse sometimes called “Purity of Heart,” Kierkegaard unpacks the foregoing ideas by way of a striking image. If we were to compare the reading of texts to a theater performance, some of us would assign the roles as follows: the author is the actor, and the readers (plural) are spectators whose collective job is to criticize the actor.³⁸ But Kierkegaard says this construal of reading is secular foolishness, as it ignores God and puts our attention where it doesn’t belong: on the author and the crowd. In its place, he offers an alternative analogy, which takes seriously the role of a yet unmentioned person: the hidden prompter who feeds lines to the actor. As Kierkegaard sees it, when a morally earnest individual reads, the author serves as this whispering helper: “He is concealed; he is the insignificant one; he must be and wants to be overlooked.”³⁹ The reader, then, plays the parts of both actor and listener: “The prompter whispers to the actor what he has to say, but the actor’s rendition is the main thing,” wherein he “speaks in himself, with himself, to himself.”⁴⁰ In this twist on the metaphor, “the stage is eternity,” and there is no crowd of human spectators; rather, “in the most earnest sense [God] is the critical spectator who is checking on how it is being spoken and on how it is being heard, and for that very reason there are no spectators.”⁴¹ To read in this way is to read with true earnestness. And when we read aloud, our roles as both actor and listener are impressed upon us, thus encouraging us to read in that spirit, rather than with the spirit of the scholarly critic.⁴²

Here’s a second way reading aloud can help heighten healthy subjectivity without sacrificing objective carefulness, especially in a classroom setting. As noted above, reading aloud is a demanding interpretive task. Thus, when a professor reads aloud, she can bring her interpretive skills and understanding of the text to bear in her performance. By way of her inflection, emphasis, rhythm, and so forth, she acts as a living, breathing commentary (and, as a side benefit, provides an imitable model of vocal reading for her students). Moreover, she does so in a way that potentially enlivens everyone’s appreciative understanding, rather than deadening it. As many of us have experienced, submitting a text to scholarly dissection can have the same effect as explaining a joke, sapping it of its spiritual vitality and its power to confront us. Indeed, for this reason, some scholars intentionally avoid welcoming students into friendship with their favorite texts, for fear that lecturing on the text would ruin it for them. Performing the text provides a more hospitable alternative.

Such performance can be a challenge. It takes a surprising amount of work to understand a text well enough to perform it excellently. (Even those who haven’t prepared a text for performance probably grasp this fact, if only from the frustrating experience of combing through tepid audiobook after tepid audiobook.) And it can be emotionally draining to get into character, so to speak, and pour out your (and the author’s) heart. But it can also be life giving. Indeed, it’s freeing to know that, rather than saying a whole lot about the text, one can simply show it to the students in some (I dare not say “all”) of its glory, trusting that each person is likely to hear things that we miss when reading alone, silently.⁴³

Let’s take stock. Scholarliness haunts certain sectors of the academy, where objective rigor is honored and “subjectivity” isn’t. And even where genuine earnestness is valued, it can be undermined in practice by the psychologically enervating effect of the scholarly apparatus. But reading aloud can help, by impressing us with the fact that we are being morally confronted by the text, by keeping us from fixating on the author and the scholarly crowd, and by providing a mode of reading that is both interpretively demanding and subjectively gripping.

Practically speaking, in-class read-alouds can take many shapes. In terms of content, the most obvious way to proceed is simply to assign a text dripping with earnestness and perform it. (For instance, my students and I have benefited from luxuriating in lengthy portions of Plato’s dialogues, Seneca’s letters, Augustine’s Confessions, Pascal’s Pensées, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and, of course, Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses.) But in other cases, we might supplement a less-than-lyrical text with one that sings. (For example, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is infamous for its turgid prose; and the case studies he employs in arguing for the importance of dutifulness lack vivacity. So why not provide our own case study that forcefully confronts us with the moral sublimity and existential demands of a well-honed sense of duty by performing a lengthy scene from Jane Eyre?⁴⁴ ) In still other cases, we might want to help students enter more deeply into an edifying text by showing how it relates to other texts by the same author—but without devolving into scholarliness. So we perform the related, unassigned text. (For instance, if we’ve assigned C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, rather than simply telling students that Lewis addresses similar themes in his sermon, “A Slip of the Tongue,” we could earnestly preach that 15-minute sermon to the students—and to ourselves.⁴⁵ ) And every so often, we might try something a bit more elaborate, where we meditatively read several texts in mutually illuminating juxtaposition. (See the next section for an extended case study of this sort.)

In terms of format, the immense range of options requires professorial prudence. Sometimes a bit of “scholarly” framing helps students receive a difficult text; other times it’s best to avoid confusion by leaving the most perplexing parts for another day. Sometimes it works well to perform a text before the students read it at home; other times, it’s better to let them have a crack at it first. Sometimes involving students in the read-aloud brings it to life (especially if the performance can become a reader’s theater, with several students taking different roles); other times, a solo performance is best. The way forward here, I think, is trial and error.

An Extended Case Study

Before closing, I’d like to offer a case study in reading aloud that’s a bit more elaborate than those mentioned above, which draws on multiple texts and utilizes a format inspired by the spiritual practice of lectio divina.⁴⁶ The example is designed to allow us to revisit the main themes of this paper in an experiential mode, while also helping the reader to imagine additional ways to craft his or her own in-class read-alouds. Of course, I hope it also proves edifying.

The focal text in the script is a passage from the Gospel of Luke, which is recited three times, preferably by different readers (each of whom is sure to bring out something unique in his or her rendition). Each iteration is surrounded by silence and followed by a brief “contemplation.” The contemplations provide some “scholarly” material, aimed at edification, delivered in a non-scholarly mode. Much of the script consists of quotations and near-quotations. I will leave out the quotation marks, though, because my alterations would require many distracting square brackets and ellipses; but I’ll cite my sources in a final footnote. (Hopefully this will keep “scholarliness” at bay, while maintaining academic standards.) I originally crafted the exercise when teaching Kierkegaard’s “The Mirror.” As such, it not only embodies the Kierkegaardian reading advice mentioned above (e.g., read slowly, read repeatedly, read aloud; create silence; etc.), but also incorporates aspects of his advice found in that text that I have not had opportunity to explain (e.g., attend to the personal significance of the text by imaginatively placing yourself in the story and addressing yourself with the phrase, “It is I;” act immediately on whatever pressing moral imperatives you encounter in the text; etc.). Rather than explaining those pieces of advice, I’ll let Kierkegaard speak for himself as part of the exercise.

I invite the reader to read the script aloud, slowly and meditatively. If you can find a few friends to join you, all the better.

*  *  *

Brief Silence

Student #1:

On the way to Jerusalem [Jesus] was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Brief silence

Contemplation #1 (Professor):

Let me describe the grammar of gratitude in a somewhat philosophical way, drawing on an account from a recent philosopher.

The conditions for gratitude are as follows: There are two parties, and a good thing. One of the parties is the beneficiary, the other, the benefactor; and the “good thing” is a gift from the one party to the other. The emotion of gratitude happens when the beneficiary tastes and sees, with the eyes of his heart, that he has been blessed, and that the blessing comes from a benefactor who cares for him. In this way, gratitude is triple-goodness-vision: it sees the goodness of the benefactor’s attitude, the goodness of the blessing, and the goodness of my having received this benefit from this benefactor. The reception of the blessing creates in the recipient a debt to the benefactor, and thus a situation of the recipient’s dependency. The grateful recipient feels this debt and dependency, and does so happily. (Gratitude is, among other things, a deep sense of happy dependency.) But the debt is not a debt of justice—something to be paid off. Rather, it is a debt of gratitude—a debt that binds the recipient spiritually to the giver, and which the recipient “pays” (without paying off) by acknowledging the debt, and by feeling and expressing gratitude in a way that befits the situation.

Brief silence

Student #2:

On the way to Jerusalem [Jesus] was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Brief silence

Contemplation #2 (Professor):

It is I to whom it is speaking; it is I about whom it is speaking.

I am not to say: “It is not I; after all, it was ten lepers, and I am no leper; I do, however, find it admirable of the Gospel to have it be lepers, because ingratitude in people like lepers is the worst.”

No: the lepers are I myself.

(Pause)

One leper asked Jesus to heal him. And Jesus did heal him. But somehow the leper failed even to recognize what had happened. Such depth of blindness perhaps seems unbelievable. . . . Alas, it is I.

(Pause)

Another leper was healed, and was not so blind as not to notice it. But he attributed his good fortune to, well, fortune. And he went away glad, but not grateful. . . . It is I.

(Pause)

A third leper was healed, and was not so blind as not to notice that Jesus had healed him. But he reasoned in his heart: “It’s about time. I’ve been asking for healing ever since I fell ill. And I’ve done all I could to follow God’s Law. Finally, I’ve received the healing to which I’m entitled.” And he went away with the joy of self-satisfaction, but not the joy of gratitude. . . . It is I.

(Pause)

A fourth leper was healed, and was not so blind as to think it his “just ­deserts.” But he always was a bit uncomfortable having to depend on others; that’s one reason he was so glad to be rid of his leprosy! And the thought of having to express gratitude always seemed beneath his dignity. So he muttered a quick and begrudging prayer of thanks as he walked along, trying to shake off the sense that any debt remained (without really letting himself notice that that’s what he was doing). . . . It is I.

(Pause)

A fifth leper was healed, and went to show himself to the priest. (The local priest had the responsibility to declare when people were healed from such diseases.) But he was afraid to go back and identify with Jesus, who by now was a marked man. . . . It is I.

(Pause)

A sixth leper was healed, but was so eager to get back to his family, whom he hadn’t been able to live with since the disease’s onset, that he simply didn’t think to return and look for Jesus. . . . It is I.

(Pause)

Three other lepers were healed, and they intended to return and thank Jesus. But their to-do lists were exceedingly long, and their lives so busy, that—well, you know how it is: one thing leads to another, and then where has my day gone?. . . It is I.

(Longer pause)

Another leper—he was a Samaritan—responded differently. Perhaps he was aided by his double lowliness: despised foreigner and untouchable, a perpetually ceremonially unclean outsider. Perhaps such lowliness doubly awakened his need for mercy, enabling him to perceive his blessedness with the eyes of his heart, and to respond with undignified abandon.

Lest I grow weary of incessantly saying “It is I,” for a change here I say: “The grateful Samaritan was not I—ah, no, I am not like that!”

Brief silence

Student #3:

On the way to Jerusalem [Jesus] was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Brief silence

Contemplation #3 (Professor):

If you want to look at yourself in the mirror of God’s word with true blessing, you must not promptly forget how you looked; you must not be the forgetful hearer (or reader) of whom the apostle says: He looked at his bodily face in a mirror but promptly forgot how he looked.

The best thing to do is promptly to say to yourself: I will promptly prevent myself from forgetting. It is far better to do that than to bite off more than you can chew and promptly say, “I will never forget.” The next hour is critical. If you let it pass by and say, “I have promised never to forget; consequently, my whole life is dedicated to remembering—how petty, then, to be so scrupulous about the very next hour”—if you say that, then it is virtually certain that you are going to be a forgetful reader.

Perhaps we will go back to ingratitude tomorrow. For now, let us give thanks, joining the Psalmist in instructing our own hearts to “forget not God’s benefits” by naming some of them now, either silently or aloud.

(A period of thanksgiving is observed.)

Gratitude is, of course, more than a mental exercise, more than a formula of words. We cannot be satisfied to make a mental note of things which God has done for us and then perfunctorily thank Him for favors received. To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us—and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is grace. . . . Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

(Pause)

In this spirit, let us close in prayer, saying in unison:

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen.⁴⁷

*  *  *

Concluding Invitation

To conclude this paper with a summative overview might give the misleading impression that the paper is a scholarly artifact presenting “a Kierkegaardian theory of reading aloud.” But it isn’t. So instead, let me end by issuing once more the invitation we heard in the introduction, and which I’ve been trying to extend on every page, Kierkegaard being my prompter: “My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! If you do so, allow me to thank you for it; if you not only do it yourself, if you also influence others to do it, allow me to thank each of them, and you again and again!”⁴⁸ 

1. Augustine, Confessions, ed. Michael P. Foley, trans. F. J. Sheed (Hacket, 2006 [397–400]), book 6, section 3, 97–98.
2. Augustine, Confessions, 98.
3. Augustine, Confessions, 98.
4. For a fascinating account of some of the technological and cultural changes that underwrote the transition from vocal to silent reading in the West, see Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
5. Margaret R. Miles, “On Reading Augustine and on Augustine’s Reading,” Christian Century 114, no. 17 (May 21–28, 1997): 510.
6. Peter Kreeft, I Burned for Your Peace (Ignatius, 2016), 133.
7. The revival is already well underway in some circles. See, e.g., Sarah Mackenzie’s website, www.readaloudrevival.com, and her book, The Read-Aloud Family (Zondervan, 2018). My project is in kinship with Mackenzie’s, though my sources, arguments, audience, and recommended practices differ from hers.
8. On Kierkegaard’s use of rhetoric, see Robert C. Roberts, Recovering Christian Character: The Psychological Wisdom of Søren Kierkegaard (Eerdmans, 2022), chapter 7.
9. Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourself!, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1997 [1851]), 3.
10. Søren Kierkegaard, “What Is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?” in For Self-Examination, 7–51. Incidentally, this text would be great to assign as a way of inviting students into the practices described in this paper. For additional pedagogical and formative benefits of the discourse, see Brian Gregor, “The Text as Mirror: Kierkegaard and Hadot on Transformative Reading,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 28, no. 1 (January 2011): 65–84; and Matthew T. Nowachek, “Teaching How to Read Ethics Texts With the Help of Kierkegaard’s ‘The Mirror of the Word,’” Teaching Ethics 16, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 103–120.
11. Kierkegaard, “The Mirror,” 47–48.
12. Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies (Crossway, 2023). See also Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (W. W. Norton, 2020); Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (Crossway, 2017), especially chapter 4; and Jean M. Twenge, iGen (Atria Books, 2017), especially chapter 2.
13. Quoted in Twenge, iGen, 55–6.
14. Twenge, iGen, 64–65.
15. Again, see James, Digital Liturgies.
16. For those who’d like to revel in the passage, it can be found here: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (HarperCollins, 1999 [1955]), book 6, chapter 4, pages 272–77.
17. On this theme, see Roberts, Recovering Christian Character, especially chapter 6, with applications of the idea in many of the chapters of Part Two; see also Robert C. Roberts, Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially chapter 3.
18. Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” in The Essays (Project Gutenberg, 2008 [1625]), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/575/575-h/575-h.htm#link2H_4_0050.
19. Even within Kierkegaard’s own authorship there’s a spectrum here: some of his edifying texts are explicitly Christian, but not all of these are his best work; some of his finest texts embody a Socratic form of spirituality that is compatible with Christianity, but lacks Christianity’s theological distinctiveness; and some of his pseudonymous texts are aesthetic masterpieces that embody anti-Christian outlooks, and so could be downright harmful if read with the wrong kind of openheartedness. For an example from the last category, see “The Seducer’s Diary,” in Either/Or, Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1987 [1843]), 301–445.
20. Thanks to Adam Pelser for helping me clarify these issues.
21. On the use of spiritual exercises in philosophy, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Blackwell, 1995). For a fruitful comparison of Hadot and Kierkegaard, see Gregor, “The Text as Mirror.”
22. Kierkegaard, “The Mirror,” 47.
23. Kierkegaard, “The Mirror,” 50.
24. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1980 [1849]), 3.
25. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, 3.
26. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 5. Officially, Sickness Unto Death is attributed to Kierkegaard’s “ideal Christian” pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. One must take care in attributing the words of any pseudonym to Kierkegaard himself; but as Steve Evans notes, even if Anti-Climacus “is a real pseudonym in the sense that he embodies a standpoint that is not Kierkegaard’s own . . . this does not mean that Kierkegaard would disagree with the views found in the book at all, but only that the standpoint expressed in the book is one that he is personally ‘striving’ to achieve.” See C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 167–68.
27. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 5; italics added.
28. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 5; italics added.
29. Kierkegaard, “The Mirror,” 26, 36. In the same text, Kierkegaard’s critique goes one layer deeper, suggesting that scholarliness sometimes serves as a self-deceptive scheme of self-protection, in which we actively seek to avoid letting a text “gain power over us” by making the reading of the text merely academic: “Take Holy Scripture, lock your door—but then take ten dictionaries, twenty-five commentaries, then you can read it, just as calmly as you read newspaper advertising” (32). And again: “I cunningly shove in, one layer after another, interpretation and scholarly research, and more scholarly research (much in a way a boy puts a napkin or more under his pants when he is going to get a licking) . . . I shove all this between the Word and myself and then give this interpreting and scholarliness the name of earnestness and zeal for the truth, and then allow this preoccupation to swell to such prolixity that I never come to receive the impression of God’s Word, never come to look at myself in the mirror” (35).
30. Kierkegaard, “The Mirror,” 28.
31. Gregor, “The Text as Mirror,” 76; italics original.
32. I do not know of an Honor Roll for moral earnestness. But that may be for the best; such a phenomenon might muddy the motivational waters for students.
33. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, 3.
34. For further discussion of these psychological dynamics, see Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions (Eerdmans, 2007), 27–29.
35. I suspect that some readers experienced this phenomenon when voicing Kierkegaard’s paragraph about noise above.
36. Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1992 [1846]), 5. Notice that the text does not say “Kierkegaard seeks” such a reader, even though he does. This personification of the discourse is one of Kierkegaard’s rhetorical methods for taking our eyes off of him; see Roberts, Recovering Christian Character, 196–97.
37. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, 3.
38. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 124.
39. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 124. We might wonder: To what extent does this description also fit the best of teachers, or ourselves in our capacity as teachers?
40. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 124
41. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 124.
42. The foregoing has focused on the psychological dynamics of reading aloud by oneself. When reading aloud communally, the reader will naturally be most strongly impressed with his role as actor, as the listeners will be with their role as listeners. With such a distribution of senses of identity, some group members may need to fight the temptation to become aesthetic critics of the reader’s performance, vigilantly attending to the actual task at hand.
43. It’s worth emphasizing here that, more often than some of us would like to admit, an excellent text performed well can (and should) speak for itself. Indeed, that’s part of what makes excellent texts excellent. As C. S. Lewis once pointed out, reading Plato is both easier and more enjoyable than reading scholarly books about Plato (see his introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation [St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993 (1946)], 3). Might not Lewis’s point apply equally to other great authors, and to some of our scholarly lectures about them?
44. See, e.g., Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin Books, 1996 [1847]), chapter 27 (volume 3, chapter 1), especially pages 354–58.
45. See C. S. Lewis, “A Slip of the Tongue,” in The Weight of Glory (Harper, 2001 [1956]), 184–92.
46. For a guide to lectio divina, see Eugene H. Petersen, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Eerdmans, 2006).
47. The Gospel passage is Luke 17:11–19 (ESV). The description of the grammar of gratitude closely follows Robert C. Roberts, “Gratitude,” in Spiritual Emotions, with several quotes and near-quotes from page 143. The second contemplation is modeled on Kierkegaard’s treatment of the parable of the Good Samaritan (“The Mirror,” 40–42) and borrows and adapts some of his language. The descriptions of the fifth and sixth lepers contain quotes and near-quotes from N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 2001), 206. The beginning of contemplation #3 contains quotes and near-quotes from Kierkegaard, “The Mirror,” 44–45. The passage that follows the period of thanksgiving is from Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999 [1956]), 33. The closing prayer is from The Book of Common Prayer (Church Publishing Incorporated, 1979), 101.
48. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, 3. For their very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this material, I’d like to thank Brandon Dahm, Anna DeGraaf, Steve Evans, Chris Franklin, Josh Mayo, Adam Pelser, Brayden Peppo, Bob Roberts, Evalyn Summers, and audiences at meetings of the Baptist Association of Philosophy Teachers, the Grove City College Faculty Scholarship Workshop, and the Society of Christian Philosophers.