We're Not Just Reading Creatures, Right?

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We use a different part of our brain when we're scrolling a social media fed verses holding a book in our hand and reading it for an extended period of time. We are over extending the frontal lobe of the brain and under using the deep recesses of the brain where we store long term memory. The more literal we become, the less we read, the less able we are to tap into the deep resourcesd and gifts that words and language offer us.

This week David and Curtis are joined by Karen Swallow Prior, writer, thinker, and research professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Karen talks to us about the current state of affairs in social media, particularly Twitter, and compares its impact on culture and the church to another critical technology, the printing press. She discusses how these modern technologies are impacting our brains, and how we can push back against this through the simple act of reading, especially the (necessarily slow and contemplative) reading of literature.

Show Notes:

-National Endowment of the Arts - “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America”

-Caleb Crain (The New Yorker) - “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited”

-Sign up for David’s French Press newsletter

-Follow Curtis’ work at RedeemingBabel.org