Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age
By Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts.
Baker Academic, 2024.
Paperback, 240 pages, $24.99.
Reviewed by Sarah Reardon.
I sat in disbelief in front of a computer screen as I observed my freshman-level English class. My disbelief sprung from the content of the contributions that my classmates shared: we were discussing Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest, and all that my classmates—and professor—found fitting to discuss was the “colonialism” and “xenophobia” of the play. They had little to say about its characters and plot, its themes of justice and mercy, its poetry and humor. Rarely did any of my peers reference or quote the play itself.
My classmates at the public university at which I began my education, were, to say the least, not reading well or deeply. They had latched onto a theoretical framework suggested by our professor and thereafter read and discussed the play only through the lens of that theoretical framework, reading it not as a piece of literature but only as a scrap of litter from bygone days of colonialism and racism. After transferring to a Christian liberal arts college, I soon found that not all English majors or professors read and discussed in this way. But what I had seen of shallow reading at a secular university stuck with me.
Christian English professors and authors Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts seek to address shallow reading in their book Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age. As its subtitle hints, Deep Reading recommends habits of mind that counteract the regnant attitudes accompanying reading and dialogue in our culture. The book, as Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts explain in their introduction, aims to “offer formative practices that teach us to overcome prevalent cultural vices and, alternatively, to love virtue and desire good character.”
Deep Reading succeeds in offering practical and virtue-oriented insights both for teachers and for individual readers. However, while the book’s authors claim to give a Christian account of countercultural habits of mind, they fail to fully recognize and reject the “vices” of our age and instead repeatedly intertwine otherwise helpful advice on reading and teaching with the anti-Western language of liberal ideology rampant in our secular culture and its literature classrooms in particular.
The authors confront the vices of distraction, hostility, and consumerism by devoting a section to each. Part 1, “Practices to Subvert Distraction,” explores the havoc wreaked by media technology upon human attention by drawing on the work of Josef Pieper, Neil Postman, and several contemporary writers. The authors recommend temperance, not blind discipline or mere “techniques,” as a response to such havoc. Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts here offer several “practices of attention” that “enable us to order properly—to temper— our desires” and therein reap the benefits of reading—practices such as journaling on literature, rereading, exploring a text’s history, taking field trips, reading communally, and employing audio versions and various editions of a book.
Part 1 provides the most substantive content as regards reading deeply, and its practices could easily be applied in a variety of contexts. However, the authors already begin in Part 1 to tilt towards the anti-Western bent that later bemires their work: they advocate for audio versions and reading aloud not only on the basis of attention but also on the basis of “equity,” claiming that “an overemphasis on silently reading written text can perpetuate oppressive social structures. Reading aloud and using audiobooks can dissociate reading from oppressive Western modes of textual encounter.” The authors, as Christine Norvell noted in her review for Front Porch Republic, do not specify how such Western modes are oppressive. Inserting oppression into this section of the book clouds its argument, and unnecessarily so—as any teacher knows, overemphasis on any particular method of reading may hinder any kind of student from textual understanding. Different students learn differently. Some students are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and such has been shown by scientific studies and considered by education experts without the undue baggage of “equity” and “oppression.” Although nodding towards varied learning styles would have sufficed for this section’s argument, the authors of Deep Reading seem to feel a need to incorporate resistance against an ill-defined oppression into Part 1, perhaps to set themselves and their readers up for Part 2, “Practices to Subvert Hostility.”
The authors commence Part 2 by maintaining that “the classroom, the book club discussion, or the small group meeting can, with the judicious and humble application of inclusive practices, become spaces that do not reinforce hostile norms but rather cultivate attitudes of listening, humility, hospitality, and community.” The authors could well have recommended these practices without unnecessarily referencing “inclusivity” and nebulous oppression: practices such as viewing voices from books as “neighbors,” attending to common values despite different worldviews, pairing older texts with new ones, pairing two authors that disagree with one another, reading a wide variety of literature. There are many good grounds for many of these reading practices—C.S. Lewis recommends similar practices in his essay “On Reading Old Books.”
In my own education in English literature, I have seen how the above practices, such as attending to shared values, can promote understanding and appreciation of a text where apathy or distrust might otherwise arise. For instance, when reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays in college, I made an effort to notice the classical influences on Emerson’s writing (particularly the influence of Platonism) and the values that Emerson does share with Christianity when I might have otherwise been overwhelmed by his Unitarianism and transcendentalism. The above practices have indeed prompted me to be “neighborly” in my reading rather than hostile.
Yet I’m not sure that the authors of Deep Reading and I share the same understanding of hostility. Hostility, like oppression, is not defined clearly or well, if at all. The authors link an apparent “institutional bias that treats the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and neurotypical student as the default,” which “Christian institutions, with an emphasis on a Christian intellectual tradition full of white writers” apparently reinforce, with hostility. I would hope that Christian professors do not wish homosexual students to be the default in our country’s classrooms, and I would hope that Christian institutions do emphasize their own intellectual tradition, regardless of the race of its writers. But for Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts, hostility includes attitudes such as “the insistence that my list and my tradition deserve the place of privilege”—in other words, an insistence like that of Great Books scholar Mortimer Adler on the significance of the Western tradition or like that of respected Christian academic Leland Ryken on the significance of Christian standards of truth. Deep Reading in fact criticizes both of these scholars and practically equates their arguments with, in the case of Adler, an arrogant aversion to difference and, in the case of Ryken, a simplistic aversion to non-Christian literature.
The authors of Deep Reading correctly maintain that an excessive focus on ideological purity in choosing and interpreting what we read prevents us from growth in understanding, yet they incorrectly identify both a commitment to the Western tradition and a concern for truth and goodness in literature with hostility. While Deep Reading urges its readers to avoid such hostility on the grounds of Christian charity and virtue, its authors fail to reconcile their argument with the fact of Christianity’s intimate relation to the Western tradition and with the fact of Christianity’s claim to objective truth. Though Christianity today spans the globe, the Christian tradition and the Western tradition have historically walked hand-in-hand. Likewise, though Christianity teaches love of neighbor and humility, the Christian faith does not disconnect love from the objective truth found in Christ and his Word. Rather, “love delights in the truth.”
Discernment and prudence should allow Christians to read material with which they disagree, as the authors of Deep Reading recognize, but discernment and prudence should also allow Christians to call attention to skewed worldviews presented by a text. Deep Reading overlooks these complexities and instead uses Christian language to baptize a rather fashionable distrust of the Western canon and to flatten the Christian calling to true discernment.
Part 3 of Deep Reading, “Practices to Subvert Consumerism,” follows the pattern of the rest of the book, presenting uplifting insights and yet intertwining them with insights drawn from “antiracist” Ibram X. Kendi and Marxist Paulo Freire and other liberal scholars. Consumerism poisons community, the authors recognize, and they offer meaningful conversation as an antidote: when we view conversation through the lens of gift-giving and hospitality, instead of through the consumerist lenses of “acquisition and competition,” we may nourish community. The closing chapter of the book also offers leisurely reading as an antidote to consumerism. Again drawing on the work of Josef Pieper, the authors rehabilitate reading for the sake of enjoyment and commend practices such as keeping a commonplace book and giving room for humor in discussions of literature. All the same, the authors also here advise conversation leaders to “think carefully about how they can bring diverse voices into conversation even when those voices may not be predominant in the classroom or group” and cast worldview criticism and teaching as a commodification of Christian faith that “reinforces[s] both white and evangelical modes of living and thinking in ways that cast other cultures or perspectives as unfamiliar.”
After reading the book, I found myself uncertain that Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts would have been as unsettled as I was during the “colonialism” discussion of The Tempest. Would they have interpreted such a discussion as one plagued by distraction and hostility towards the past, by shallow reading? Or might they have understood it to be a “justice-oriented” conversation? I’m not sure, but, after reading Deep Reading, I do believe that Griffis, Ooms, Roberts, and I are operating under somewhat different understandings of virtue and vice.
Nonetheless, I can agree with the authors’ conclusion that to “retrain our attention” and to “deepen our regard for leisure and connection” is to approach “deeper and healthier relationships with God and others.” Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts offer practices of thought and attention that those eager to read deeply would do well to implement. Yet those eager to learn how Christianity ought to inform their reading and thinking would do well to consult other writers less concerned with rehearsing the language of our milieu, such as C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Dana Gioia. Even Leland Ryken and Mortimer Adler might help.
Sarah Reardon teaches at a classical Christian school. Her writing has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere.
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