My latest: on pastors’ reading habits, in Sapientia
I’ve got an essay in Sapientia called “The Reading Lives of Pastors.” The prompt was to reflect on Pope Francis’s “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation” and, more broadly, on why pastors should (if they should) include fiction and poetry as part of their regular reading diet. After clarifying at the outset that literature does not per se make you a better person, I write the following:
The fact of literature is in general a human good, in the sense that it is a sign of an advanced culture: symbol, narrative, myth, technology, writing, literacy, communication—these are to be celebrated, granting their capacity to be bent to any number of ends. But the act of wide reading in literature in and of itself entails nothing at all about a person. The voracious reader may be either selfish or selfless, vain or humble, vicious or virtuous, religious or secular, joyful or melancholy, full of life or obsessed with death, a treasured friend or a despised enemy, a cosmopolitan or a provincial, a sage or a boor. Hitler and Stalin may not have been men of letters, but they had men of letters for followers and apologists. The list of wicked writers and artists—who abused women, abandoned children, and passed in silence over the suffering of countless victims—is too long to recount.
It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. More of one does not necessarily lead to more of the other. They are neither directly nor inversely related. The desire for a cleaner, clearer correspondence between them is understandable, but utterly belied by the facts. Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?
