Category: Reading

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“I, too, seek an unreadable book”

The philosopher Robert Nozick begins his book Philosophical Explanations with this wonderful line (p. 1): “I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.” There’s something about this statement that resonates with me as I think on the books that I’ve read. Now, if I happen to finish a book by reading it straight through for a day, or a few days, or a week, while this is rare, I don’t think it says anything negative about the book. In fact, often I would consider this to be a sign that it was a good book. If I begin a book and it finds its way to my bookshelf, it would seem to follow that it was a bad book. But is this the case? Are good books easy to finish and bad ones difficult?

I don’t know why I’ve never thought about this before but when I stop and reflect, I think some of the best books I’ve read are those that I had to stop, though not permanently. I had to stop for a time. On my shelves sit books like John Rawls A Theory of Justice or Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics. These books are partially read but I stopped with the intent of reengaging later. Why? Because I had to stop. I had to reflect. I had to read other authors on similar topics to help me move forward. I needed to consult the history of some idea or the history of some debate in order to have a great context for what I was reading. I was forced into a hermeneutical spiral of sorts.

I learned from Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book that it’s my responsibility to find out whether a book is worth my time and attention. Not all books need to be finished. I think this is why I sometimes look at unfinished books in a negative light. But the “unreadable” book that makes you stop, walk away, and think, may be more valuable in the long haul than the book through which you can breeze quickly! This reframes many of the books on my shelves that are waiting for the day that I reunite with them. They’re good books; they’re just not books for which I was ready when we first met.

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AI, reading, and the humanities

In a recent episode of the podcast “The Philosopher’s Zone” with David Rutledge titled “AI and Reading”, UMass-Lowell philosophy professor John Kaag was interviewed about a new project of his: “Rebind”. For your convenience, here’s a trailer for the product:

I admit, this sounds kind of interesting and I’d be interested in reading some of the books they have ready with the commentary and chat features, just to see what the experience is like.

In the interview, Kaag addresses a few topics that many of us in education know already. He talks about how learning needs to move away from information dumping and regurgitation. He addresses the problem of the perceived inaccessibility of many of the classic texts. He reminds us that the humanities have been in decline for a while now, so the AI revolution—if that’s what’s happening—can’t be blamed for growing disinterest. He’s positive toward AI. He sees it more as a solution than a problem.

As I listened, a few things came to mind:

  1. Kaag talks about how teaching may need to be a little more personal, a little more 1-to-1. The problem with this suggestion is practical. Class sizes are growing. If your institution—public, public charter, or private—isn’t growing, they either have a strong endowment/tax base or they’re dying. So it’s unlikely that class sizes can shrink to the place where teachers can do the type of 1-to-1 educating that Kaag suggests. We’d have to do a complete rehaul of our current system.
  2. Kaag sees the rise of AI’s significance and necessity as inevitable. My response would be that this is likely true but I think that the inevitability of AI’s significance can be embrace in a healthy manner and an unhealthy one. Large Language Models (LLMs) scrape the Internet for their data. We humans created that data. If we collectively become too reliant on LLMs, I fear that this will hinder human creativity. Yes, we learn from others. Yes, our learning is the ingestion and realigning of things we learn. But we do this as embodied creatures with agendas, goals, desires, motives, inspirations, imaginations, etc. We do this with an almost endless variety of purposes, as each of us contributes something unique. Our collective “hive-mind” is what it is because of individuality and uniqueness, in part. I don’t see that in LLM’s. Will LLMs have less and less truly unique and creative insight upon which to draw if we humans outsource of thinking to computers?
  3. Much of what LLMs produce is akin to what the philosopher Henry Frankfurt calls “bullshit” (neither truth nor lies, both which indicate intentionality, but just content that is careless about whether it is true or false). See the recent article “ChatGPT is Bullshit” by Michael Townsend Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater for the journal Ethics and Information Technology.
  4. This may mean that there are stages to our developing skills and postures with regard to learning and learning with AI. My gut says that we should try to create a setting where young people have to develop their own independent thinking abilities in preparation for using those thinking abilities to engage what AI has to offer as active contributors and not just passive consumers. In my classes, students read from paper and handwrite on paper. Hypothetically, let’s say that your freshman/sophomore years, all reading and writing is done this way in class under the supervision of educators. Then as one becomes a junior and a senior in high school, preparing for the independence of their college and/or professional years, we focus on teaching them how to take their own original ideas and interface them with AI? An argument could be made that we have them wait until college to do this and high school focuses completely on reading/writing in a traditional, almost pre-Internet way.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the humanities needs to embrace AI in order to be relevant in the future because this is what current cultural and market forces demand. But I’m hesitant to abandon the boring, laborious parts of learning that lay the ground work for the human brain because I worry that the quicker we outsource our thinking and creativity to AI, the sooner we’re going to realize we’ve placed ourselves in a collective spin where little creativity, innovation, or new thought can flourish.

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Would Plato approve of children reading the story of “Noah’s Ark”?

I’ve been rereading through Plato’s The Republic recently. In Book II, as he has his characters Adeimantus and Socrates imagine the ideal society, they begin discussing what kind of books they would want the youth of their society to read as part of their education. They agree that education should focus on “mind and character”. And that this education should “include stories” of “two kinds, true stories and fiction” (Lee’s translation, p. 68).

But then Socrates asks:

“Shall we therefore readily allow our children to listen to any stories made up by anyone, and to form opinions that are for the most part the opposite of those we think they should have when they grow up.”

Adeimantus replies, “We certainly shall not.” Socrates goes on to say that the ideal society would have to supervise what books are read (p. 69). Now, at a time where our country is debating the banning of books in libraries and schools, this may sound a little fascist. I don’t know if Plato should be read as saying he wants this to happen, or just that this is what it would take to create an ideal society even if he’s not committed to the actions that Socrates floats. Either way, Socrates says, “The greater part of the stories current today we shall have to reject.”

For Socrates, this includes Hesiod (e.g. the Theogony) and Homer (The Iliad; The Odyssey). Adeimantus asks, “What sort of stories do you mean and what fault do you find in them?” To which Socrates responds, “The worst fault possible…especially if the fiction is an ugly one.” He explains this as “Misrepresenting the nature of gods and heroes…” (p. 69).

The Gods Aren’t Good
Anyone who is familiar with Greek mythology knows that the gods aren’t moral exemplars. They’re powerful but often they’re not nice, or honest, etc. Of these stories, Socrates says, they are “not fit as it is to be lightly repeated to the young and foolish” even if these stories were true! He believes only a small select group should be trusted with these stories and their memorization. But this would never include youth.

Socrates says, “Nor shall any young audience be told that anyone who commits horrible crimes, or punished his father unmercifully, is doing nothing out of the ordinary but merely what the first and greatest of gods have done before.” Additionally, “Nor can we permit stories of wars and plots and battles among the gods; they are quite untrue.” For Socrates, young, impressionable minds can’t discern how to interpret these texts. The gods are important. This is how they live. Shouldn’t they be mimicked?

Teaching Children Healthy Theology
A few years ago, I had a friend who said they were generally comfortable with the church they were attending because they knew that their kids were being taught things like “God is love” and “God loves everyone”. Like Socrates, this friend didn’t think his children should learn stories from the Bible where the theology is suspect; where God is violent or behaves in such a way that if humans mimicked the Bible’s God, we’d have problems! Socrates ays, “…we should therefore surely regard it as of the utmost importance that the first stories they hear shall aim at encouraging the highest excellence of character”. In other words, choose good and uplifting theology if you’re going to teach any theology at all (p. 70).

Later, Socrates argues that good theology takes precedent over stories about the divine (p. 71). He says, “God must surely always be represented as he really is…in reality of course god is good, and he must be so described.” Socrates’ god is the source of good and not evil: “…while god must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some factors other than god as a cause of evil.”

What about Noah’s Ark?
A few years ago, I wondered aloud how old a child or adolescent must be to read, say, the story of “Noah’s Ark” with maturity. As I read Plato, this thought crossed my mind again. I agree with my friend, and Socrates, that if you’re going to participate in god-talk with children then your theology better be about love and goodness and all that nurtures, uplifts, and provided security to a child. Some of the trash theology that I heard when I was young—like the idea that the “Rapture” could happen leaving me on earth during the “Great Tribulation” to suffer divine wrath—shouldn’t be taught period but especially to young children. That can be traumatizing! And I know from experience that it harms adolescents as well.

In spite of these concerns, many parents read books like this:

The animals are so happy. Noah is so happy. Yet humanicide occurred and most of the animals are dead underneath those waters. I see no reason to sanitize this story just to share it with children. We can wait until they’re older. As Socrates said about the stories of Hesiod and Homer: even if they’re true, indelible minds shouldn’t encounter them during formative years.

How Old is Old Enough?
Four years ago, I asked these questions in the aforementioned post:

“So, when should children read the story of Noah and the Ark? When are they mature enough? Is it ok to introduce it to them as a happy story about God saving animals when they’re young and then return to it later to discuss some of the more complex, even disturbing aspects of the story later?”

When I consider the kind of media my students consume through YouTube and TikTok, I presume their readiness to read and critically engage stories like this one. But I’m not sure the middle schoolers at my school should be learning about stories like these. Maybe they’re ready. Maybe they’re mature enough. But we must remember that many people who read religious texts presume that the presentation of god in those texts is prescriptive to our theology in some way. If this is so, then maybe they should wait until high school to read Hesiod, Homer, and “Moses”. Until then, we should emphasize positive theology.

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Some inspiring reasons to read the Bible

In my last post (see “Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible”), I outlined four reasons for reading the Bible that used to inspire me but that no longer do: (1) reading the Bible as an inerrant/infallible text; (2) reading the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texts; (3) reading the Bible from an “originalist” perspective because it shows the “original intent and goals of Christianity” that should be pursued to this day; and (4) for professional development purposes. So, if these approaches that used to matter to me are inspiring no longer, what does inspire me?

The Bible as a tool for thinking about history
Much of the Bible is mythology. I don’t say that pejoratively. Myth teaches us truths. It teaches us about ourselves. But it doesn’t stand up to the rigorous demands of critical historical research, or our modern scientific method, etc. That being said, it can teach us a few things about history: (A) it does preserve some historical data; (B) it tells us about the historical roots of Judaism and Christianity; (C) it shows us that the world isn’t static; (D) it reminds us that if history doesn’t trouble you, then what you’re experiencing is propaganda.

Regarding (A), archaeologists and historians have used the Bible to help them discover and understand the past. I’m thinking about say some of the developments in the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Hezekiah. Or how the New Testament when paired with the writings of the historian Josephus give us most of our access to first-century Galilee and Judea. So, the Bible does have historical value, even if other major sections of the Bible, like the Exodus, or Jesus’ resurrection, are inaccessible through the tools used by historians.

Regarding (B), both Judaism and Christianity take and have taken inspiration/guidance from the collection called the Tanakh or Old Testament and Christianity has been inspired/guided by the New Testament. These aren’t the only sources of inspiration/guidance for these religions but they are prominent ones. If we want to understand the roots of these religions, the Bible’s presentation of history is valuable and if we consider how to Bible has been used in these religions, a.k.a. its “reception history,” then the Bible’s continued value helps us understand these religions, whether from the inside or the outside.

Regarding (C), an exercise that I’ll have my student do in a couple of week is a comparison between 2 Samuel 24:1-25 and I Chronicles 21:1-30. Both of these texts are about how King David took a census that upset Israel’s God leading to a plague on the people. 2 Samuel is believed by most scholars to have been written in the 6th century BCE whereas 1 Chronicles can be placed in 4th century BCE. In 2 Samuel, it’s Israel’s God that provokes King David to take the census and then judges David and the people for David’s sin. This is an uncomfortable depiction of divinity: God as both tempter and judge. In 1 Chronicles, a character known as satan (an “accuser” or an “attacker”) is the one who provokes David to disobedience. 1 Chronicles’s theology removes God from being directly responsible for human evil/disobedience which is a vision of God that better aligns with the theologies we find in most forms of Judaism and Christianity today. This exercise shows students that history preserves the evolution of theology because humans visions about “God” are continually changing and in some sense, this provides readers of the Bible with an impetus to continue in this tradition of rethinking what we mean when we say “God”. History and the history of our religions isn’t static.

Regarding (D), the Bible can be troubling. My students find themselves wrestling with God’s command to flood the earth; or the Akeda where Abraham seems willing to sacrifice Isaac to his god; or King David’s violence and sexual abuse. As if politicians in Oklahoma and Texas have their way, the Bible will be taught as uncomplicated history! But again (and I don’t know the original source of this very accurate quote), if what you learn about history isn’t complicated and doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable, then what you’re learning is not history but propaganda. And to be fair, the Bible is full of propaganda: just look at how the Davidic line is presented in Chronicles compared to Samuel.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about literature
The Bible is excellent literature. This is what brings me back to it time and time again at this stage in my life. Have you ever read the Book of Job? The wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes? This stuff is brilliant. The characters are simple (e.g. we don’t see their thought lives or motivations) and yet somehow extremely complicated (maybe because we are responsible, as readers, for providing them with thought lives and motivation).

I doubt many English high school teachers expect their students to return time and time again 1984, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Catcher in the Rye. Instead, these books are used to try to install a love of literature, reading, fictional worlds, narrative, etc. The Bible can be taught the same way. And with this in mind, it relieves me of some of the disappointments I mentioned in the last post, namely knowing that many of my students won’t read the Bible as adults. Most of them will engage the Bible through the filter of a pastor or a priest, maybe through the bubble-wrapped presentation of a devotional, but rarely from the challenging, in-depth perspectives that I try to acquaint them with.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about philosophy and theology
While I’m quite uncomfortable with using the Bible to create normative, constructive, prescriptive theology, especially because the God of the Bible is far to anthropomorphized for my taste, I think the Bible can remain provocative for our thoughts about God. Retiring to the Book of Job: I don’t think the author intended for his readers to come to the conclusion that human suffering can be the result of the Creator God having a petty wager with an angelic being. Instead, there are two message that I find probably: (1) the Creator’s world is full of suffering, pain, death, chaos, and you, dear human, are no freer from this reality than a whale, or an elephant, or a dog, all of which derive from the same creative power as we humans do; (2) most attempts to come up with a satisfying theodicy will be comical, at best, and harmful, at worst, just as the “God-Satan bet” at the beginning, or Job’s friends theologies throughout, show us.

Furthermore, the Bible can help us think philosophically. I’m reading Plato’s The Republic again right now. And while I get there are differences, I do think that just as this book can provoke us to think philosophically, especially regarding ethics and politics, so can biblical books like the Books of Daniel and Esther, for example. In fact, juxtaposing Daniel and Esther can be very helpful as both books appear to be Jewish texts written under Greek rule that look back on previous Persian (and to a lesser extent, Babylonian) rule. Daniel’s message is much like deontological ethics: stay true to your convictions no matter if it leads you to a fiery furnace or a lion’s den. (And maybe you’ll be divinely delivered but you do your duty even if no deliverance comes.) Whereas Esther’s message (at least in the original Hebrew version) leaves Esther making pragmatic decisions for her survival and the survival of her people with no expectation of divine deliverance no absolute fidelity to her ancestral laws and customs if those laws and customs leave her and her people vulnerable to extinction. A reader doesn’t need to share the theology of Daniel or Esther to wonder whether deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics are more valuable in the long run. These are philosophical questions that these biblical books can help us consider.

The Bible as a tool liturgical reflection
Finally, I admit this: the Bible is a book better preached than taught, sometimes. (This can be abused though.) It’s a book that’s better read prayerfully, whether individually or communally, than it is scholastically. It’s a book that’s better suited to get us thinking about the divine than it is telling us what to think about the divine. It’s better read like we read poetry than touches us than it is science, history, law, etc.

Maybe I say this because I’ve been around the Episcopal Church for nearly a decade and this view of the Bible sits well in the tradition that is unified not so much around a shared creed as around the type of practiced Christianity advocated by the Book of Common Prayer. Reading the Bible as a wisdom text, or as resource for meditation, makes sense to me. This means reading it openly, non-dogmatically, and in the vernacular of many younger people, spiritually but not religiously (a dichotomy that I don’t think holds when critically evaluated but a “feeling” that I understand).

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Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible

In a few days, I’ll begin my seventeenth semester/ninth year teaching classes on the Bible in a high school setting. As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, I’ve struggled at this stage in my life to find motivation for reading the Bible or about the Bible. (Start with “Is Biblical Studies Boring or Am I Just a Fox Now?” if you’re interested.) There is part of me that worries that this will impact my teaching; there is part of me that’s confident that I can continue to find joy in teaching the material, even as I adjust my personal rationale for engaging it. In this post, I want to talk about four reasons for reading the Bible that used to be inspiring to me at different life-stages but that no longer attract me. In a future post, I’ll provide a few reasons for continuing to read the Bible that are valuable to me now.

Inerrancy/Infallibility
When I began reading the Bible, it was because I had accepted the claim that the Bible is a divine book, the “Word of God,” and that it was perfect in all its claims with regard to history, science, morals/ethics, etc. It didn’t take too long to realize that this view was untenable, though in some of the evangelical circles with which I affiliated, it was a necessary “shibboleth,” so I did spend a few years trying to determine whether I could speak about the Bible this way by which I mean, I spent a few years trying to determine whether I had a place in evangelicalism. I didn’t. I can’t argue for the historicity of the Great Deluge. I don’t think the creation myths in the Bible should be held to the standard of our modern cosmologies or even read as doing the same thing. I don’t think there’s justification for the violent and genocidal theology of the Book of Joshua.

Admittedly, in retrospect, there was something very attractive about the doctrine of inerrancy. It’s a proud doctrine. Basically, it empowers people to say, “I may not be educated in [insert one of the many hundreds of fields of human knowledge from biology to physics], but I know the Bible”. This leads to a dangerous arrogance that can be heard over pulpits all across our country every Sunday, as pastors talk about everything from the origins of humanity, to gender and sexuality, to warfare and violence, etc. These preachers, usually men, act as philosopher kings ruling over mini-kingdoms justifying their foundationless claims by citing a random part of the Bible. It can be an addictive drug.

Doctrinal proof texting
Related to the previous motivation is the motivation to read the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texting. I was raised Oneness Pentecostal. According to many in our circles, we were the “true church” with the “whole Gospel”. Since we began with “the Truth” (yes, capital “T”), we didn’t need to learn so much as learn to defend. This same phenomenon can be found in many Christian denominations, to a greater or lesser degree. The Bible serves as a repository of timeless, errorless truth claims, often of a metaphysical variety. Lip service is given to hermeneutics, so it’s acknowledge that interpretation plays a role, but the subtext is that we know the answer is “4” so our only real question is whether we need to use “3+1”; “2+2″; or 1+3” to get there. This is apologetics in a nutshell.

The book that rescued me from this admittedly terrible and boring way of reading the Bible was R. Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design. The realization that the Bible is more narrative than anything else was freeing. We read narrative differently than we read case law. The Bible turns boring really fast when all we’re doing is reading it to confirm that this or that proposition from the Bible is the right and defensible one.

Originalism
When I abandoned inerrancy/infallibility, and the desire to debate using proof texting, the next step was originalism. By this I mean something like “constitutional originalism,” i.e. the idea that the true meaning of a text is the meaning intended by its original author. But I should add that even after I had abandoned the idea that this text was without error, I was shaped by the idea that the parts of the Bible that continued to be normative and authoritative for my life were the parts that reflected historicity, especially around the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I spent many years obsessed with the field of study known as “historical Jesus studies”. It wasn’t a dispassionate interest. Instead, it had more to do with whether we could discover the “real” and “original” Jesus through the biblical text, and once he was found, he could become the hermeneutic tool for reinterpreting the Bible, Christian tradition, and theology.

For many liberal Protestants, this is a way to have the foundationalism offered by doctrines like inerrancy but with a little more sophistication. I’m thinking of scholars like John Dominic Crossan or the late Marcus Borg but also even some more conservative theologians like N.T. Wright who realize inerrancy is difficult to defend but who want to retain some source of authority that’s akin to inerrancy without falling back on “Christian tradition”. My problem is that historical Jesus studies has created hundreds of different Jesuses. We didn’t find the “real” Jesus. We won’t. We don’t know much about him, honestly. (This isn’t the same claim as the mythicists who think there was no historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth; instead, it’s the claim that what we can know about him through our sources is pretty sparse, though a lot more than most people from his social and ethnic grouping in his geographical reason during his time in history.)

The basic idea here is that if we can get back to Jesus, or get back to the “original” Christianity, then we can realign ourselves with the right, correct vision that Christianity offers. But this assumes that Christianity in the first-century CE had “arrived”. That the “original, apostolic church” got it and that we lost it and that we need to recover it. This is the inspiration of the Pentecostal movement that I left as well as every “restorationist” Christianity from the Latter-day Saints to the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the Adventists to twentieth-century American Fundamentalism…you get the idea. But what if Christianity has never “arrived” and what is there’s no perfect, correct Christianity to recover kind of like there’s no single, accurate, unified interpretation of the United States Constitution to which we can return? I’m of the persuasion that those of us who remain Christians at this time must (1) try to create a Christianity that makes sense for us here and now and (2) accept that this will never be the “correct” approach to Christianity because no such objective vantage point has or ever will exist.

Professional development
The first three are rooted in an epistemology. They’re rooted in an approach to knowledge and a desire to know, which isn’t bad in and of itself, obviously, but each approach puts more weight on the Bible than the Bible is able to bear. Once I realized this, my main interest in researching and writing about the Bible, attending conferences about the Bible, etc., was for professional development. I wanted to be the best scholar of the Bible that I could be. But this has lost its shine. For now, I’ll remain somewhat engaged with the Society of Biblical Literature but as I prepare to welcome my first child in November, I admit that I’m wondering to myself whether I want to travel during the first part of Thanksgiving Break every year, likely around the time of my child’s birthday, to hear academic papers about this or that bit of biblical minutiae. Not to disparage this field of study. It matters. States like Oklahoma and Texas are trying to shove the Bible back into public school curriculum and they’re doing it in bad faith. They’re not teaching the Bible as part of objective cultural history or to understand this or that aspect of our modern world; they’re doing it to indoctrinate. We need scholars of the Bible who can challenge and check this disingenuous dogmatism. And for those scholars to exist, they need to do increasingly specialized research on a limited collection of texts that has been mined over and over and over again for centuries now. This keeps them adding to human knowledge and making our colleges and university system what they are. But I’m not that person.

I work in a private high school. I rarely get questions about the text that are provocative or new. In a sense, the depth of my teaching remains more like an introductory textbook on the Bible than a monograph about “gender relations in ancient Persia as reflected in the Book of Esther”. I’m providing my students with the very basics and it’s rare that I’ll have any students who will go on to do a deeper dive after they’re left high school. (As I’ve mentioned, out of the hundreds of students that I’ve taught the Bible to, only one has gone on to study the Bible in college and then go to seminary.) This has made it difficult for me to want to do too deep a dive. It has become apparent that there are better uses of my time and intellectual pursuits not because the academic study of the Bible isn’t valuable but because I don’t have much of a professional reason to dive into the nitty gritty of John’s Christology or Paul’s vision of justification. Mostly, I provide general overviews of the interpretive options that my students have and mostly, they’re satisfied with that.

For years, I’ve tried to muster the energy to turn my doctoral thesis into something but I don’t have it in me. I don’t think another book on John the Baptist is a good use of my time since it won’t (A) do much of anything for the world and (B) satisfy my own curiosity. If it would be (A) or (B), then maybe I’d find the inspiration. Maybe this will change but it’s how I feel right now and honestly, it’s how I’ve felt increasingly since finishing my Ph.D.

All four of these reasons for reading the Bible were once my primary motivation. This isn’t the case anymore, so as I said above, I need to reflect on what does bring me back to these texts, which I’ll address soon.

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Reading without comprehending

I’ve been reading Scott Soames’ The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age. As I near the end of chapter 6, I can say that it’s a great book so far and I imagine it will be through to the end. Its main thesis is that in spite of comments to the contrary (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and parents of most philosophy majors), philosophy can be credited with shaping the world we have for the better and with continuing to do so. Soames shows his readers how philosophers have helped birth many other disciplines, including the sciences as we know them, but how it also continues to speak to our politics, our concepts of language, rational choice, mind-body relations, and much more.

There are two chapters that I’m confident are good ones but also that I found humbling: Chapter 5, “Modern Logic and Foundations of Mathematics” and Chapter 6, “Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age”. Admittedly, much of chapter 6 left me lost, not because of anything Soames did wrong in writing it, but because I struggle with these concepts. I’ve struggled with mathematics since high school. As soon as they introduced “x” and “y” in the equations, my brain became allergic. There’s a reason why my primary philosophy/theological/historical interests have to do with things more social-science-y!

Gottlob Frege receives a lot of attention in both chapters; Kurt Gödel receives a lot of attention in chapter 6. These men seem brilliant. I understand the gist: their work in logic, and the logic of mathematics, laid the foundations for computability. The modern digital world owes them a ton. But the details escape me as Soames mentions this formula and that formula. My poor “it took me two attempts to pass Algebra I” brain tries to comprehend what I’m reading but I must admit, I’m lost most of the time.

This humbling experience has a dual silver lining though: (1) it reminds me to be patient with my students who try and fail to understand the material in which I have expertise; (2) it functions sort of like Umberto Eco’s “Antilibrary” reminding me that there’s still so much about our world that I have to discover and better understand. Let me say a little about each point.

Regarding (1), I’ve been reading the Bible since I was young. I’ve been around religion for the same amount of time. My undergraduate, two graduate, and doctoral degrees all focused on religion and theology. I’ve been teaching on these subjects for over a decade, including eight full years in a high school setting. (I began my ninth year this week). It’s the water I swim in daily. And it’s easy to see a student flailing and think, “Why is this concept so hard to understand? It’s simple, really!” But is it simple, really, or is it really simple for me? I have students in my class who can go to another classroom and take a physics or calculus exam who would do way better than me if I were put in the same situation. It’s not that they’re not smart enough; it’s that they lack familiarity. I need to be patient and provide them with the tools to make my discipline more familiar to them.

Regarding (2), I won’t say much because Maria Popova at The Marginalia has an excellent post on this topic that’s worth your time: “Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones”. But in short, the intellectual Umberto Eco argues that it’s actually good to have a library with books you haven’t read/won’t read. Those books sit there reminding you, “you don’t know everything; you have so much—so much!— to learn”. The aforementioned chapters are having a similar effect on me.

As I flip ahead to Chapter 7, “The Science of Language,” in Soames book, I feel like I’m on more secure ground already. I’ve thought about some of this. I can follow the argument. There are less formulae! But I’m glad I struggled through chapter 6 and that I’m doing my best to walk in complete darkness through the end of chapter 7. Maybe someday I’ll be able to understand this stuff but it’s the discipline of trying to learn, reading even when I need help comprehending, that eventually strengthens the mind to understand. But not to understand everything, and that’s ok.

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Reading as an act of listening

Last year, a colleague of mine said something to the extent that he doesn’t enjoy reading non-fiction books from cover-to-cover anymore. Or, he may have been describing a life-stage. In his opinion, you can get the gist of a book by reading the beginning and ending. This is sort of true. I remember reading Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book a while ago and if my memory is correct, he advocates that you do something just like this to determine if a book is worth your time. While this is a different goal than that of my colleague, the idea is similar: you can get what you need from a book, quickly, if you know where to look.

Other than a chapter here, an article there, and my doctoral thesis, I haven’t been a long-form writer. Most people in academic circles know me because I used to have a relatively successful “biblioblog” (i.e. a blog on the Bible). When blogging became popular, I know many senior scholars disdained the medium because of the brevity and the lack of gatekeeping. I’ve come to see their point to some extent. Many of my students “do their research” online and anyone can post anything online. There’s a place for editors and publishers. In our effort to democratize knowledge, we’ve flooding the Internet with information and we haven’t provided people with the tools that help them discern good information from bad information. For this reason, I prefer reading books from reputable publishers, even if I’m not someone who has produced much writing this way.

I may sound hypocritical but I think reading books, specifically, still matters, for a variety of reasons. I want to highlight one here. In an era where we’ve stopped listening to each other, instead preparing to respond, books force us to listen. On Twitter/X, Facebook, “older” media like blogs and news website comments sections, and newer media like TikTok, speech is brief. We don’t have to listen for very long. We can respond quickly. In fact, we can respond without reading.

Not so with books. When I read a book, I can stop before I finish. I can write notes in the margins. But I can’t truly “respond” quickly. This doesn’t mean that someone can’t hastily misread a book, as many a book review evidences. It does mean that it’s very difficult to do anything with a book other than listen to an author’s long-form argument. In our era of debate-style cable news, mob-mentality tweeting, etc., books force us to really consider what someone else is saying. This is a virtue in and of itself in our time.

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Pre-knowledge and reading

This morning I’ve been reading, slowly, through Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and I’m reminded of something: pre-knowledge impacts how you read. I can hear you say, ‘Duh!’, but here’s why this matters to me. Every year I wrestle with what type of reading to assign to my students in class and as homework. Every year I reform both sets of reading banking on the ‘less-is-more’ approach. In other words, I’d rather lower the page count and keep wrestling with ways to make the shorter reading more meaningful. My rationale is pretty simple: for my students much of what I teach them is brand new. Even when students take my Bible-related classes, they may come knowing basic stories and characters, but it’s rare that they think of reading the Bible in ways that is academic in nature (rather than liturgical, devotional, etc.). Since almost everything they are learning is brand new it would be a mistake to try to introduce a ton of content.

Why do I argue this? Well, because of experiences like the one I’m having today. I know almost nothing about AI other than what I’ve seen in YouTube videos or heard on podcasts. Every page is filled with a ton of new information. Since I lack pre-knowledge, this means that there are many times when I have to stop and look up things I don’t know. Now, while this makes for great learning, if I had to read large chunks of the book every day I wouldn’t be retaining much.

In fact, when I try to speed read through books like this (where I’m unfamiliar with the content) I catch my eyes glazing over and moving without purpose. I’ll have ‘read’ a paragraph without actually having read the paragraph. If I do this as a teacher with years of academic training and experience doing research…then I’m guessing my teenage students are doing it too. Therefore, my own experience reminds me that while it may be easy for me to read ten or twenty pages on religion or Biblical Literature because I’ve been swimming in these thought-worlds for years, for my students it’s all new, and therefore they need more time to digest what they’re reading.

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Slow reading with J.Z. Smith

A few days ago I wrote about how I’ve realized that guided questions aren’t doing what I hoped they’d do. By this I mean I would assign reading homework for the week (it’s my tradition to do a single homework assignment per week) that would be accompanied by a document that asks questions about the reading. These documents served as checkpoints to make sure my students weren’t just reporting that they had read but were showing they had done so. Unfortunately, there’s a dual temptation for students:

  1. Scan (not skimming which is like speed reading but scanning which is just looking for key words or phrases) for the answers in order to hit the checkpoints without actually reading the textbook/article.
  2. Since guided questions have a limited range of answers it’s easy to ask a classmate for their responses, alter those responses a little, and then submit your stolen answers.

Neither of these approaches pushes the student to learn from the reading. Now, part of my problem may have been that while I give students a week to do the reading, we know students don’t spread that work across a week. Instead, they wait until a couple hours before the deadline. This puts pressure on them to hurry meaning that if I assign 20 pages with 15 questions and they wait until an hour or two before the deadline they’re going to be tempted to take one of the aforementioned shortcuts.

Jonathan Z. Smith (Photo by Chris Salata/Chicago Maroon via uchicago.edu.)

I’ll be discussing some of the solutions I’m testing in the next few posts. I begin here with the first couple assignments I’ll be giving to my ‘Religion in the United States’ class in January. I’m asking them to read the famous essay by Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’. It’s about 13 pages long. The first week they’ll read 6 pages and the second week they’ll read the last 7. I’ve divided each week into small sections. As they read a section (their homework tells them where to start, stop, and resume) they’ll be asked to write a two-sentence summary in their own words. Since a page to a page and a half being summarized in two sentences can take many different shapes, it’ll be hard for student B to ask student A for their answer because their answer will be unique. Additionally, when you’ve got to read, write, and explain, it’s not wise to wait until the last couple hours before a deadline, even when the reading load is light.

Each of the weeks that Smith’s article is being read have class periods set aside for my class to discuss what they’ve read. This will mean (1) they’ll share their summaries and (2) they’ll try to answer each other’s questions. How exactly I’ll conduct this process over a 45 minute class period is TBD.

If you’re interested in the Docs themselves that my students must complete and turn-in, here they are:

Homework (Week 1)Download
Homework (Week 2)Download