Status Updates From Deep Reading: Practices to ...

Bought at regent college bookstore

Rereading texts also remedies the consumeristic urge toward productivity and the desire to gain cultural capital by reading certain valuable books…Although we will never discourage readers from encountering treasured works of literature, philosophy, theology, history…we also firmly believe that reading a text only for the sake of adding it to one’s list of intellectual conquests is not the best way to read.

When we attend to the same text more than once, the contrast between our previous and current reading, not to mention the act of repetition itself, allows us to resist distraction and deepen our insight.

I (Roberts) am a quick reader of the printed page, but I often miss details on a first reading. When I listen to an audiobook, I catch descriptions and details I skimmed over the first time, deepening my attention to the text and particularly to each author’s distinctive style.

Asking questions of the text and of our fellow readers forms us into readers with the gift of inquiry, readers who dig deeply into the text for new insights, and readers who are neither skeptical nor jaded but rather docile, teachable, and open to new and exciting encounters with texts and with other readers.

Learning how to ask and explore questions is an important aspect of practicing exploration and understanding through reading, as questions draw readers’ attention to new, and complex, perspectives.

When our reading experience creates connection with others, we can celebrate that commonality and avoid, or at least resist, judgmental, either/or approaches to texts and people.

Just as important as encountering those who we may find repugnant—or at least who defy easy categorization—is celebrating points of connection and commonality wherever we find them, both in the texts we read and in the people with whom we share this reading experience.

When we approach worldviews, especially those inconsistent with our own, not with hostility and suspicion but with wisdom and charity, we expand our capacity to love our neighbors, develop virtuous habits, and make decisions that honor God.

Expanding our definition of 'reading' to include ebooks and audiobooks as well as communal reading and review creates an inclusive, equitable environment wherein all of us, including those who are neurodiverse or from cultures outside of the Western mainstream, can experience the spiritually formative act of reading.

As readers in the digital age, we can derive many benefits from deliberate attention to our reading processes, including our habits, environment, and tools for access and comprehension of texts.

At the very least, when we talk about texts, we should avoid delegitimizing electronic or audio texts and instead treat those forms of reading as valid. (65-66)

Instead, we must discover—and rediscover—practices that help us attend to what we read the way we want to attend to our friends and neighbors: with the kind of attention that humanizes, that empathizes, that looks like love.

And though our contemporary technologies, particularly smartphones and the types of rapid-fire, constantly updating media they enable us to access, may convince us that distraction is a contemporary problem, fragmented attention is a perennial human one, and the technologies that increasingly distract us are older than our particular moment.

Distraction has always kept us, ultimately, from savoring what is pleasurable and loving what is good.

We need to be proactive about developing our attention spans while learning how to refrain from activities that damage them...The practices we will explore...are reading practices that promote temperance, not abstinence, in order to subvert distraction.

One might think that, after all we have discussed, our primary recommendation for subverting distraction will be to discard our devices completely and return to very low-tech lives...Social media and the smartphone are part of our daily lives, and we must learn how to live with them while also defending ourselves from the distraction they promote. (38-39)

Paraphrasing Postman, we must offer the following observation: when religion, when relationships, when reading and learning are presented in forms that demand little of us except brief bursts of attention, they become very different sorts of things indeed.

As we have noted above, our contemporary problems with attention are not unique to the past few decades of human life as experienced in wealthy, technologically advanced societies.

Technologies that shape our minds in ways that actively discourage us from the type of deep reading discussed throughout this book are, thus, not new developments (or, at least, not limited to the technologies introduced in the past twenty years). However ... contemporary technologies such as social media and the smartphone exacerbate these attention-fragmenting effects to a degree that unnerves even their designers.

Good!