The power of words
“Words written 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much…power today as ever they had,” Frederick Buechner avows. They can “come alive for us, and in us, and…make us more alive within ourselves.”
Forty-two years ago, when it published the book here being quoted, A Room Called Remember, HarperCollins told how it “brings together some of Buechner’s finest writings on faith, love, and the power of words.” In it, the prolific author—your church library includes a number of his works—describes “the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate.
“And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy….”
Why then, if this be so, do we disdain libraries and books and reading? Which is what we do. The Globe and Mail, in its editorial this past January 3rd, “The enduring power of a good book,” remembered, “There was a time when books were prized.” But now? “[W]e are not a nation of readers. Not of books, anyway. In 2022, only one-third of Canadians picked up a book every day. And a 2024 survey found that even self-identified readers didn’t read very much. Barely half of them read more than five books annually.”
Others elsewhere are even more likely to eschew reading. “According to YouGov, just 54% of Americans read at least one book in 2023,” Naomi Baron wrote last August in an essay for The Conversation, “AI is making reading books obsolete.” She, professor emerita of world languages and culture at American University, affirmed it’s no better in the U.K.: “In 2024, 35% of adults identified as lapsed readers—they once read regularly, but no longer do. Of those lapsed readers, 26% indicated they had stopped reading because of time spent on social media.”
The Globe’s editors picked up on this: “There’s an important distinction to be made between the sort of browsing done online and sitting down with a book. An artificial intelligence-generated summary can tell a person what happened in The Odyssey—spoiler, he got home—but that doesn’t replace the value of actually reading the epic poem.”
“Why read in the first place?” Baron, who poses the question, finds that the justifications “are endless.” As does The Globe: for one, reading can nurture empathy. “Reading…makes us reflect. It stretches our intellect, even as it nourishes it…. Reading can educate and inspire. …Open-minded reading is the antidote to misanthropy. Books encourage valuable focus in a world trying hard to distract…. Reading is also good for the brain. It improves memory, and…may slow cognitive decline.
“Finally, digging into a book is one of the few remaining socially acceptable ways to be quiet and alone. In a loud and busy modern life that demands connection, reading is a reprieve. It is a licence for solitude. […] Those hours, unplugged from devices, and lost in the written word, are one of the greatest gifts of all.”
Baron ends her essay by presaging, “But if we lose practice in reading and analyzing and formulating our own interpretations, those skills are at risk of weakening.”
Uphold the practice! Avail yourself of SSUC’s Library and its treasure trove of books.
—Ken Fredrick
Sidebar #1
Forgetting how to think
That the editors of The Globe and Mail are troubled by the waning of literacy can be judged by this: mere days after publishing their editorial, “The enduring power of a good book,” they featured an essay, “The power of the printed word: when we stop reading, we forget how to think,” by psychologist Rick Lash. He concluded his tract by challenging us “to preserve the capacity for deep thought itself.”
Just three paragraphs in to his piece, he worries especially about younger readers who are “losing the habit of deep reading.” What results is a “slow erosion of our collective ability to hold complex ideas in mind, weigh evidence, and live with uncertainty”; we become “more reactive, less reflective.” He tells how Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch “wonders whether we have already ‘passed peak brain power,’ at the very moment we are building machines to think for us.”
Here is a trio of Lash’s findings, beginning with this: books, and our reading of them, do more than spread information. They train us “to follow extended arguments, consider evidence, and imagine alternative worlds.” More still, they create “citizens capable of abstraction and debate. In a very real sense, it [the printing press] built the modern mind.”
Another take-away: “Neuroscience backs up what many humanists have intuited. Reading does not simply fill the mind—it reshapes it.” Literacy reorganizes “the brain’s circuity.” It strengthens “connections between visual and language regions,” enhances “auditory processing,” and refines “awareness of speech sounds.” The very act of reading fuses “vision and language into a single circuit for understanding.”
Lastly, “research suggests that regular cognitive activity—including reading—helps build ‘cognitive reserve,’ which is the brain’s capacity to cope with aging and disease.” Why, one major study “reported that people who read books regularly lived almost two years longer than those who did not, with cognitive engagement explaining much of the difference.”
Sidebar #2
How we read matters
So, reading is salutary. And we should do more of it. That’s hardly front-page news. But there’s more to it than that: how we read matters.
In a January posting from The Conversation, a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert spur what they call “deep reading”. “Practicing deep reading,” Jeff Saerys-Foy and J.T. Torres attest, “can open you up to new perspectives and ideas.” This they write after first confirming, “Unfortunately, literacy continues to be a serious concern.” Reading comprehension scores, they report, only continue to decline, as one example.
Saerys-Foy, a psychology professor at Quinnipiac University, and Torres, director of the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University, define deep reading as “the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical, and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives, and questioning possible interpretations.”
All of which you’ll want and need to do when reading the SSUC Library’s religion-writ-large books.
Mind you, “Deep reading does require effort,” the two writers acknowledge. “It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills,” and “meaningfully engage” with the pages you’re turning. Including this one—it’s so simple:
“[I]ntentionally slowing down even just a bit can be beneficial.” Decelerate, they urge, “as needed to wrestle with difficult passages, savour striking prose, critically evaluate information, and reflect on the meaning of the text. It involves entering into a dialogue with the text, rather than gleaning information.”
Imagine yourself being “in dialogue” with the likes of Jack Spong or Gretta Vosper, the prophet Micah or Marcus Borg, Saint Paul or Albert Schweitzer. Their books are there, and more by others just as knowing, in your own church library. For you to pore over, to grasp, to brave, to construe, to master.
Why wait?