Why Does Literature Matter?

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% of adults that claims to have literature in the past year. Went down from 56 % in 19 82 to forty six percent, just in ten years. By reading these things, we are going through something through athe words that are presented on a page,. That gives us an experience, a vicarious rience which forms us. And so reading literature is not only informative but also formative.

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