1. Reading with Charity:
Hearing the Voices
of Others
in the
Christian Tradition

2. The following notes are derived from: David I.
Smith, John Shortt and John Sullivan, Teaching
Spiritually Engaged Reading [Special Issue of The
Journal of Education and Christian Belief Vol. 11:2
(Autumn 2007)]

3. Spirituality and Reading (Smith and Shortt, p. 5)
• Relationship between reading, faith, and spirituality
• “There is a long history of Christian concern that learners should read -- for
a faith so bound up with the interpretation of Scripture, the promotion of
literacy has commonly been both a by-product of Christian belief and
practice and an intentional element of Christian mission and education.”
• “Equally longstanding is Christian concern with what learners should read---
once mastered, reading becomes a core way of sustaining and nurturing
faith through the ongoing reading of Scripture and of theological and
devotional literature.”
• “...a third strand in the connection between spirituality and
reading....concerns how learners read.”

4. (Smith and Shortt, cont.)
• “Qualities such as humility, charity, patience, and justice are goals of Christian
maturation, basic ways of approaching the world whose scope and validity
extend to how we approach the written words of others (Schwehn, 1993;
Jacobs, 2001). Encounter with texts can therefore be a place where such
virtues are practiced, and perhaps also where they can be developed.” (p. 6)
• “...as we read, we may enter into relationships not only with the author and the
creatures represented in his or her words, but also with other readers and their
readings of the text that we have in front of us. We become listeners, co-
interpreters, dialogue partners, objectors, judges, encouragers, mockers. Such
relationships stretch further our capacities for humility, charity, and
justice.” (pp. 6,7)

5. Reflection Question:
As a Christian believer, has your
own tradition emphasized that you
read, what you read, or how you
read?

6. “[reading]...is itself a
practice in which the
presence or absence
of the fruits of the
Spirit may be clearly
manifest.” (p. 7)

7. Charitable Reading (Alan Jacobs)
• A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (2001)
• Jacobs postulates that Augustine’s view that charity is the “vital center of
biblical interpretation” “must also govern the interpretation of literature.” (p.
13)
• “The fourteenth-century English theologian Richard Rolle, writing on ‘the
law of love,’ says: ‘That you may love [Jesus Christ] truly, understand that
his love is proved in three areas of your life---in your thinking, in your
talking, and in your manner of ‘working’” (p. 14)

8. “Whoever, therefore, thinks that he
understands the divine Scriptures or
any part of them in such a way that ‘his
interpretation’ does not build the
double love of God and of our neighbor
does not understand [the Scriptures] at
all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful
to the building of charity, even though
he has not said what the author may be
shown to have intended in that place,
has not been deceived, nor is he lying
in any way. (Augustine, Book 1)

9. Charitable Reading as Vocation (Jacobs)
• “Love is productive of knowledge. “There are certain circumstances in which
the ideal of ‘detached’ or ‘objective’ inquiry is legitimate, but in general only
those who care deeply about something can truly know it.” (p. 14)
• Beware of voracity. “Not veracity--veracity is a good thing---but voracity. Love
is attentive, but not all forms of attention are loving. There is a voracious,
consuming, stalking kind of attention: a desire to know a person or an object
not for love of her, him, or it, but in order to dominate, to exert power, even to
consume.” (p. 14

10. Beware of Quixotic Interpretation.
Don Quixote looked around at the
world, and where he wished there
to be giants rather than mere
windmills, there were giants;....He
loved the world, but he loved it
because he had created it in his
own image....I think this is a great
temptation for Christian readers of
literature....: we read books that
we want to love, but we wonder
whether it is okay to love them if
they are not Christian; so we say
that they have a ‘Christian spirit’,
or if that seems implausible, we
say that they are somehow
‘redemptive’.” This is a lack of
respect, a “refusal to
acknowledge genuine difference.”

11. • Practice kenosis. “One must take the chance of humbling oneself before what
one reads, becoming as a servant. This is risky, because not every text will
reward such humility; but it is only this risk that opens up possibilities for
learning from what we read; and it is only a commitment to such humility that
can steer us away from a voracious or quixotic falsification of love.” (p. 15)
• Play. “Much of what we read was written for our enjoyment as well as our
edification, and should be received in that spirit. It is neither necessary nor
healthy to try to extract every last drop of moral uplift from every last thing we
read.” (p. 15)

12. Reflection Question:
• Which of Jacobs’ five reading
practices do you most need to
exercise in your theological journey
and spiritual formation?

13. “I suggest that, in universities, we often use the word ‘understanding’ when we
mean ‘overstanding’. This is connected to relying on limited approaches to
reading, ones that are forgetful of religious ways of reading.” (p. 25)
“Understanding and Overstanding: Religious
Reading in Historical Perspective” (Sullivan)

14. Reading as a journey
which changes us
• “Serious reading prompts us to
reach up to the thought of
another, to clamber onto the
path they offer us, to cross a
threshold, to enter into an idea,
a tradition, a form of conduct or
a way of life....It engages the
personal life of
readers....presses them to
decide, to judge and in light of
this to give themselves, to
adhere to a concept, a skill, a
virtue, a practice. In doing so, it
reveals illusions which are to be
left behind, it exposes bad
practices which are to be given
up and it paves the way to a
receptive openness to
change.” (p. 27)

15. Religious readers of the past would have associated
these phrases with reading (p. 27):
• to remember rightly
• to perceive accurately
• to believe reliably
• to respond promptly
• to relate responsibly
• to interpret justly
• to love appropriately

16. • to belong generously
• to share joyfully
• to surrender willingly
• to pray fervently

17. Paul Griffiths (cited by Sullivan, p. 28)
• “Consumerist Reading” vs “Religious Reading”
• “Religious reading depends on a certain kind of relationship between the
reader and what is read, a relationship that allows the text to address, to
question and to challenge the reader, and at the same time it adopts an
attitude of reverence and obedience towards the text.”
• “Rather than standing in authority over the text, interrogating it with critical
tools, deferring commitment, questioning its authenticity, the religious reader
stands under or in the light of such a text.”
• “This kind of understanding entails a willingness to be vulnerable to the
message contained in a text, submitting to its power, allowing it time to
penetrate one’s thinking and feeling, and appreciating its resonance.”

18. • “Rather than making the text answer our questions and somehow fit into the
categories of our understanding, already arrived at in advance of the act of
reading, the expectation was that readers entered into a moral relationship with
what they read, one where readers are led rather than lead and where readers
should conform themselves to the text as they would to the demands of a
tutor.”
• “Of course, it is legitimate for us to make demands on what we read, but if the
demands are always unilateral, from us to the material being read, we will miss
too much. We will be trying to stand over what we read, but in achieving such
overstanding, we may fail to understand.”

19. Reflection Question:
• What do you suppose are the marks of
standing under a text as opposed to
standing over a text?

20. “A religious way of reading does not treat the
individual as the basic unit; it gives priority to the
religious community.” (p. 29)

21. Factors that influence how we read and interpret
(pp. 35-37)
• Experiences, memories, assumptions
• Knowledge, maturity, intellectual capacity
• Hopes and fears
• Purposes and priorities
• Lifestyle
• “The company we keep”

22. • Attitudes toward and relationship with the ‘text’
• Clarity and quality of the ‘text’
• Unforeseen circumstances and connections (i.e.--disasters, political events,
etc.)
• Character - moral and spiritual dimensions

23. Reflection Question:
• Of these ten factors influencing how
we read and how we interpret texts,
which has most affected how you’ve
read and interpreted this lecture
material?