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Transcript

Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome once again to the Winsome Conviction podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm a professor of communication here at Biola University, just having celebrated my 17th year. Dr. Rick Langer at Biola University, I'm waiting for my gift. It hasn't quite come yet, but one of my gifts is I get to do this podcast with a good friend, Dr. Rick Langer. We're both co-directors of the Winsome Conviction Project. You can check us out at winsome conviction.com. One of the fun things we get to do is we get to bring on people that we admire from afar, and then every once in a while you actually get to meet them. And we've been having a great conversation with our guest. Rick, I'll let you reintroduce her, and in our third episode, we want to tackle how she's been influenced by her reading.

Rick Langer: Well, thanks, Tim. And yes, Dr. Karen Swallow Prior is here with us from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and she has been an author of several books, articles. We've talked a little bit about her writing and her role as a public intellectual, but one of the books that she wrote particularly intrigued me, not just on its own terms, but also in particular related to the qualities it builds regarding our ability to discourse and engage with other people. And that book is called On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. I was just thrilled when I read that title, and I haven't read the book. I will be the first to confess it, but since you're here, we'd love to have you talk a little bit both about why that issue, why the reading the great books is a thing that you associate with cultivating good life, and also how it might play out in the way we talk and engage with other people.

Karen Swallow Prior: The two earlier conversations we had were about hospitable orthodoxy and being confident and open in dialoguing with others, especially when they disagree with us, and we have strong convictions and yet don't feel like we need to be defensive over them. So, really, these might seem like two completely separate topics, kind of being a Christian out in the public square where everyone's arguing and debating, and then like reading good books. But for me, one flows out of the other.

I grew up reading books. I grew up reading good books, because I had good teachers, but I also grew up reading silly romances and horror stories and all kinds of things. But I just always had my nose in a book, and I think books have formed me more than just about anything else after my faith. I think what reading all these books has done for me is to show me that I can see the world through someone else's eyes; I can experience, oh, things that they experience that I would never experience, but that doesn't make me less me; that doesn't require that I agree with their perspective or adopt their perspective. It just helps me to see their perspective, and from that I can take what is true and learn to reject what is false.

Rick Langer: I would love to have you just give us like two examples: one of a book that you read that you loved, because it kind of gave voice to things that said, yes, that's right, or that's me, or whatever. And then talk about a book that you've read that you love the book, though you disagreed with what the author was advocating for.

Karen Swallow Prior: Wow. Okay. So I'm going to start with the second one. I'm going to start with a book. I think anyone who's read this book will understand what I'm saying, but it's Nabokov's Lolita, which is a story of a pedophile who abuses a young girl. Nabokov is a brilliant writer. He is one of the masters of writing. What he does is to use words in such a way as to get you into the mind of his characters or his narrator. And he does this with Lolita.

It's not a book that I would recommend for anyone to pick up. You have to be aware. And even, I would say halfway through, three-quarters of the way through, I was so devas- I just didn't know, because he puts you in the mind of this pedophile, and it's very disconcerting. Now it does get redemptive toward the end. I'm glad that I finished and read it. But the power of that book is that it shows you just how powerful words are and how we ourselves through words can rationalize the most heinous things. That's what human beings can do. Now, Nabokov was not endorsing that, he was showing us this is what words can do.

Tim Muehlhoff: Look where this goes.

Karen Swallow Prior: Yes. So a book on a more pleasant topic.

Tim Muehlhoff: Before we do that, before we lookie...

Karen Swallow Prior: Sure.

Tim Muehlhoff: So the argument culture tells us that understanding is condoning. If that's true, then reading a book like that could be, in fact, quite dangerous. But we're rejecting that notion saying... And we are called as Christians to empathize, to understand people in different situations. Jesus' moniker was friend of sinners.

Karen Swallow Prior: Understanding is not condoning.

Tim Muehlhoff: Understanding is not condoning. So a book like that can be profound to understand everything that you just said. I just felt compelled to say that,

Karen Swallow Prior: Thank you.

Tim Muehlhoff: That we have to understand, we are called to understand this world as we speak God's love into it, and understanding can be uncomfortable, but we have to do it. Let's get on to pleasant things, pleasant books.

Karen Swallow Prior: This is my go-to favorite. I talk about it a lot. I edited my own edition. It's Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. For anyone who has not read it, it's easy to just assume this is a romantic novel about some woman named Jane Eyre who was looking for love and fails to find it, which, that's true, but it's so much more. Jane Eyre is actually a first-person narrative, again, showing the power of language to the way we tell ourselves stories, the way we interpret what's going on around us, the way we wrestle in our minds with everything that we're facing. But Jane Eyre is really the story of the modern Christian in a nominally Christian world trying to hold onto her faith in face of the hardest temptations that someone in that circumstance could.

Isn't that all of us? Jane Eyre is really the story of all of us. Virginia Woolf famously wrote about Charlotte Bronte, and she rightly pinpoints the way that it's Jane's voice, that narrative voice, that pulls us in and draws us in. It's like we're sitting right next to her hearing her story. And so it feels very much like it's our own story because the voice is so powerful, and of course that voice comes through words.

Tim Muehlhoff: As you were talking, it made me think of a study that came out of the University of Michigan, where they took the interpersonal reactivity index. It's a questionnaire that asked individuals to respond to statements to see how much they empathize. And the researchers came out and they said that the group that they were working with rated themselves 75% less empathetic than students from the previous 30 years. Now, the researchers were like, okay, why are you rating yourself so low when it comes to empathy? They linked it to reading habits. That the less these people read, the less empathetic they were. So I love the fact that the two were linked to each other, and that opens up a bunch of interesting questions, but reading broadly and exposing yourself... Now, let me get your reaction to this. I think that can be done via Netflix as well, in a different kind of way. I wouldn't want to pit the one against the other. Does that make sense?

Karen Swallow Prior: It does make sense. And I want to say yes and no.

Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, we'll edit out the no. [inaudible].

Rick Langer: Let's come back to some Jane Eyre [inaudible] go ahead.

Karen Swallow Prior: I'm so glad you brought this up. I love film, and I love some good Netflix series, so I'll use sort of the best film to think of an example. There is a way that film does enlarge our experience and develop our empathy I think, because all story does, but I think that film is a more viscerally aesthetic experience unmediated by words. So I do think as a good Protestant that there is something about words and narrative. Because words are a form of mediation, so we have to translate the words. We have to interpret them in a way that we don't have to interpret what comes to the eye. And so it's that interpretive act that's required of words that does something different to us. We're interpretive creatures, and interpreting words just gets at something about us being made in the image of a God who is the Word, that seeing images doesn't.

Tim Muehlhoff: We're going to get to Jane Eyre in a second, but Rick...

Karen Swallow Prior: Jane, she's been around for a long time. She'll wait.

Rick Langer: She's not going anywhere. Sure enough.

Tim Muehlhoff: What you said was so interesting, because Rick turned me on to this group that takes movies and reinterprets them based on music. Do you remember this, Rick? You mentioned The Sound of Music, the trailer, that they make it into a horror story, and they simply do it by the music they play, and they do these really quick cuts. And they also took Silence of the Lambs and made it into a romantic comedy simply based on music.

Karen Swallow Prior: I need to see these things.

Tim Muehlhoff: You have to see it. It is downright creepy.

Karen Swallow Prior: But the fact that it works.

Rick Langer: You got it. It totally works.

Tim Muehlhoff: I do agree with that point you're saying, that that's not there when you're reading a book, but music... Rick, I laughed out loud watching The Sound of Music as a horror story. And it absolutely works based on the music cuing you.

Rick Langer: This was out of anxiety for a thing where I had done some filming for a thing we were doing here at Biola for a project. I had spent almost my entire day being filmed by this film crew. And in my mind, I know they are not going to use more than three minutes of what I said. And somebody asked me how did it go, and I said I have no idea. Did I make a horror film? Was it Silence of the Lambs or Sound of Music? I have no idea. And that's partly this issue of the power of sound, the visuals, and all this. I had full control over the words I said, but by the time you put them and edit them together, all bets are off.

Karen Swallow Prior: Well guys, I'm here for two days to give a series of talks and attend a conference, but my trip here just peaked. This is the stuff I came for. I am so excited to know about this.

Rick Langer: Let me pick up Jane Eyre. I teach a class called Money, Sex, and Power here as an advanced integration seminar, so thinking biblically about these sorts of notions. I spend a fair portion of time in the sex part of that, talking about marriage. And one of my concerns is that we seem to have a very, very contemporary notion of what marriage is that is tightly tied to the ultimate validating force of romantic love. And it strikes me that a novel like Jane Eyre actually pushes back against a notion of marriage and helps us realize that people in another generation simply conceived of marriage in a profoundly different way, and it isn't at all clear to me that we're right and they're wrong. So I wonder if you might, I don't want to try and misquote or miscount the plot of Jane Eyre when you're sitting here with us, you're way better at doing that. But talk to us a little bit about that kind of a notion and how a fictional [inaudible] may help you enter into understanding a thing like that.

Karen Swallow Prior: Well, I teach the English novel, and I teach it specifically in the context of the history of the novel. So this is actually something... I'll try not to teach the whole course here. This is one of the values of studying the novel during its first two centuries of existence, because we start with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, in which, spoiler alert, a young servant girl wins her reward for remaining virtuous by marrying the man who tried several times to rape her, and that's considered like a reward. He's wealthy.

And then we move to something like Jane Austin, where it's a much more pleasant world, and yet these women in her novels are very constrained by money more than anything else in their marriages. And then we move to Jane Eyre, where we're getting a little bit more of the influence of the previous romantic period, and yet it still is with a tempered view of marriage. It's all a little course in the different views of marriage, just in two centuries. I mean, human history is much longer. And the truth of the matter is, this is something else that I touch on in my classes and have written about, and I think I write about it in On Reading Well, the evangelicals really were the purveyors of what we call companionate marriage, this idea that marriage should be based on compatibility and friendship, not just property and politics.

Now, I think that's really good. I prefer that model of marriage, but it also has some pitfalls in the sense that if we think we've married our soulmate and then after a few years it kind of runs out, then we think that the marriage is a failure. I have counseled a number of my friends and peers and students who are younger, along these lines who have... because they have thought that their husband or their... Usually I'm talking to the women, that their husband should be their best friend, and he turns out to not be a person who likes to do every single thing that they want to do, they think that the marriage is a failure, and it's like, no, the idea is a failure. Marriage is for something.

And to go back to On Reading Well, which we haven't really gotten to specifically, in that book I talk about both the classical and the Christian understanding of virtue. And virtue is always determined by [inaudible] purpose. So every good question I think begins with first asking what is the purpose of it? And marriage is a good thing to ask that about, because we have a lot of different answers today, don't we?

Tim Muehlhoff: We do.

Rick Langer: Let's get back to the book. Tell us a little bit more about that, how you framed it, and what you were hoping your readers would, how it would impact your readers.

Karen Swallow Prior: So, I did. It was sort of accidental. That's how most of my books turn out. I start out with one idea, and it's a process of discovery for me. And so in the process of writing this book, my editor just suggested to me that I talk about practices and habits. I've been heavily influenced by James K. A. Smith's work. So we thought, we'll apply that to literature. And I said, okay. And where that took me was to sort of, I can be very literal, I'm Baptist. So I guess I can be very literal. I said, okay, so practices and habits, that takes me to Aristotle and virtues.

Rick Langer: That's a good place to go.

Karen Swallow Prior: Yeah. And I said, I don't know anything about virtues, so I needed to study virtues and virtue ethics. So I just began to do that and thought, wow, I want to write a book that explains what each virtue is and how we can see that in works of literature that I love. I knew I was writing a book about books, and I thought this is an interesting framework. So it ends up being a book that's sort of half about virtue ethics. And I choose like the 12, the cardinal virtues, the Christian virtues, and the heavenly virtues. There are lots of lists. There are many more virtues out there. And then I choose works of literature that I think tell us something about those virtues. I'm not saying that the purpose of the book was to teach this lesson, but rather by reading well, you can discover something about this virtue in the book. But I am by no means saying that you should read every book hunting for a virtue,