I want to tell you about a former adult student of mine. I’ll call him Mike.
Mike came to me several years ago. He was a retired professional in his fifties, successful, and genuinely intelligent. He was fairly well read, politically engaged. He kept up with the news. He thought of himself as an educated person, and by every conventional measure, he was.
But he came to me with something he couldn’t quite name. He described it as a sense of intellectual and spiritual restlessness, perhaps a mild state of acedia, but closer to his words, a feeling that for all his education and all his success in life, left him feeling oddly empty. Mike was full of trivia, facts, and information; and yet, he was somehow starving spiritually and intellectually. He could discuss almost any current event or political policy with confidence but almost none of the deeper questions with any certainty at all.
There was more to Mike’s struggle that included his parents’ history and how that influenced his thoughts about his own identity; and so we read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity together. I would have normally started with St. Augustine’s Confessions but due to some of the details surrounding his personal circumstances, we started with someone whom we could still rightly qualify as a native of Old Western Culture but was also more contemporary; and that suited his particular needs.
We read Lewis together—him for the very first time—and every week for nearly a year, we met for a deep and candid conversation. He was transformed by the experience and repeatedly expressed his surprise for the way Lewis’s insights manifested the entire Christian intellectual tradition and somehow touched on just about everything he felt was wrong with him.
What Lewis knew—what the entire classical Christian tradition has known—is that the human soul has a specific shape. That it is ordered toward particular goods. That when the loves are disordered, when the attention is fragmented, when the imagination is malnourished, the result is not only intellectual poverty but emotional disorientation and spiritual malnutrition.
I have to be sensitive with the details for a number of reasons, but Mike became a Christian, was baptized, and continued to pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty inside and outside the Church. It was a marvelous transformation to behold.
Living in this postmodern era, it’s almost certain that you know more than you can use. A lot of people tend to feel more than they can interpret and long for something they cannot name. And what the Christian humanists of the past two millennia knew is that this condition is a perennial human conundrum; and it’s fixable. It takes some deep personal reflection and humility, but it’s genuinely fixable.
What I want to tell you about today is what actually changes in a person who recovers a robust reading life, not just the Greatest Book, the Bible, but also the great books, the best that has been thought and written for the past two millennia.
The first thing that changes is attention. Most of us have lost the capacity for what Josef Pieper called genuine leisure—not idleness, not entertainment, but the receptive stillness in which the soul can actually receive what is being offered to it. When you rebuild the kind of reading habit I’m talking about—a slow, deliberate engagement with the right texts—you recover this capacity. Students tell me, consistently, that within a few weeks of disciplined reading, their ability to concentrate on everything else improves dramatically, including their work, their conversations, and even their prayer life.
The second thing that changes is what Edmund Burke called the moral imagination—your capacity to perceive and respond to goodness, truth, and beauty as real but transcendental things. Christian thinkers from Erasmus to C. S. Lewis have emphatically argued that great literature trains the emotions as well as the intellect: Lectio transit in mores (Reading shapes moral character).
It gives us categories of feeling adequate to the reality we inhabit. When that faculty is cultivated, a person begins to see differently. You read a passage of Scripture and something opens. You hear a piece of music and it means something it didn’t mean before. You make decisions with a kind of clarity you didn’t know you had.
The third thing that changes is perhaps the most surprising: community. The reading life is not solitary. The great Christian humanists, Augustine, Erasmus, Thomas More, and C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings, all understood that wisdom is formed in conversation. When you find yourself in a room—even a virtual room—with others who are asking the same questions, reading the same texts, wrestling with the same ideas, something happens that cannot happen alone. You discover you are not the only one who has felt this restlessness. You discover the tradition is much richer than you knew. And you discover, often with some relief, that you are not too late.
In a few days I’m going to share with you the specific structure—the six weeks, the texts, the assignments, the community—of The Christian Humanist Reading Life. I’m going to show you exactly what we’ll do together, how it works, and why this particular sequence is designed to produce lasting change rather than a temporary burst of intellectual enthusiasm.
Before then, I’d love to know: what would change for you if you had a genuinely ordered intellectual life? What would be different about your marriage, your parenting, your work, your faith?
Leave your answer in the comments. I’m asking seriously; I want to know. I’ll respond to as many as I can. More soon.
