Are We Losing Reading?

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Karen, i want to explore witht your thoughts on all three of those kinds of decline. We're reading less and less books a we may be reading a short blog post or tweats, but reading at length, reading books, is clearly declining. And then third, to your particular deep are of expertise, what the statistics also show is the the type of reading that is declining the most and the fastest isReading literature, reading novels, short stories, poetry.

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