Reading, “if done well,” can shape “the one who reads into a better thinker and a better person.” In her July 31 National Review critique of Reading for the Love of God, Alexandra Desanctis explains, “Reading well forms a habit of mind conducive to sustaining deeper thought, cultivating virtue and imagination, gaining insight into the world and human nature, and learning to see others as they are.”
All this is what author Jessica Hooten Wilson posits in this book. “[S]he demonstrates that we deepen our capacity for contemplation, paradox, perplexity,” Rachel Griffis affirmed in a June 23 posting from Front Porch Republic. And makes “a case for reading…serious works of literature in ways that are nuanced, spiritually formative, and rooted in Christian tradition.”
Wilson “argues for an approach to reading…[that] requires balanced attention to the author, the reader, and the text itself,” according to The Christian Century, which describes the book as “a timely and accessible primer for those wishing to develop skills of literary analysis and interpretation.” The author, who is inaugural visiting professor of liberal arts at Pepperdine University, speaks around the world on various topics, including, as her publisher has it, “Christian ways of reading.”
Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice
By Jessica Hooten Wilson
Brazos Press, 2023
