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I retell in the pages of Booked how, by reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately, I learned spiritual lessons I never learned in church or Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that I would never have encountered within the realm of my lived experience. Most importantly, by reading about all kinds of characters created by all kinds of authors, I learned how to be the person God created me to be.
Practice makes perfect, but pleasure makes practice more likely, so read something enjoyable.
even as you seek books that you will enjoy reading, demand ones that make demands on you:
“speed-reading gives you two things that should never mix: superficial knowledge and overconfidence.”
Seventeenth-century Puritan divine Richard Baxter writes, “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but the well reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best.”7
The idea that books should not be written in is an unfortunate holdover from grade school, a canard rooted in a misunderstanding of what makes a book valuable.
To read well is not to scour books for lessons on what to think. Rather, to read well is to be formed in how to think.
C. S. Lewis argues that to approach a literary work “with nothing but a desire for self-improvement” is to use it rather than to receive it.
Visions of the good life presented in the world’s best literature can be agents for cultivating knowledge of and desire for the good and, unlike visions sustained by sentimentality or self-deception, the true.
Reading literature, more than informing us, forms us.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation:
I love that line
But the desires that are cultivated by books (and other forms of stories, including film, songs, and especially commercials) can pull us toward the good life—or toward false visions of the good life
Richard Baxter: “Good books are a very great mercy to the world.”
Prudence is “at the heart of the moral character, for it shapes and directs the whole of our moral lives, and is indispensable to our becoming morally excellent human persons.”
virtue is developed through actual practice—by which habits become tendencies, which become instincts, which then become essential nature—literature
Prudence is in human affairs what God’s sovereignty is over all of creation.
Temperance is the virtue that helps us rise above our animal nature, making the image of God in us shine more brilliantly.
Temperance is liberating because it “allows us to be masters of our pleasure instead of becoming its slaves.”
while the United States has 3.1 percent of the world’s children, it has 40 percent of the world’s toys.
Daisy is for Gatsby like the volumes of books that fill his library shelves: with pages uncut and unread, their value is in what they symbolize, not what they are.
Consumerism has created a society, Debord argues, in which appearance has replaced both being and having.
Justice is the morality of the community.
Aristotle calls justice “anything just that tends to produce or preserve happiness and its constituents for the community of a city.”
To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas [also drawing from Augustine]: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”21
Darnay is innocent of the crime, but the jury is eager for blood. Indeed, many of the spectators have paid for admission. When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.
Moreover, there is not one way of achieving justice any more than there is one way of being beautiful.
Courage—or fortitude, as it is often called—is defined most succinctly by moral philosophers and theologians as the habit that enables a person to face difficulties well.
Aristotle says that “it is for the sake of what is noble that the courageous person stands his ground.”12
In Introducing Moral Theology, William Mattison uses slavery as an example to show how the conscience can be malformed by social norms such that a slaveholder in eighteenth-century America could “genuinely” believe “in his heart of hearts” that owning slaves was “a virtuous act.”
Knowingly facing risk or danger is necessary for an act to be courageous.
We can understand a great deal about a culture—its strengths, its weaknesses, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature that it not only produces but reveres.
Thus faith, “over time through the hard work of habituation,”5 can become a “consistent and enduring quality of one’s character.”
a colleague who is a New Testament scholar describes faith as having three primary elements: belief (cognitive), trust (relational), and fidelity (obedience).
Modern apocalyptic literature, which is largely secular apocalyptic literature, demonstrates the truth about the modern condition: because we have replaced God with ourselves as the source of meaning and the center of the universe, “all we see on the horizon is our end.”4
Aquinas finds in hope. The four conditions of hope are that it regards something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain. The practice of hope, Aquinas says, is “a certain stretching out of the appetite towards good.”10
theological hope is a “habit of the will.”
as N. T. Wright explains in Surprised by Hope, the theological virtue of hope is manifested not merely in eternity, but in the implications of eternity for present realities
Aristotle says friendship “is an absolute necessity in life.” No one “would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods” that life offers.
Various studies have shown how poorly children do in institutions where their physical requirements are met but their need for love is not. One study showed that children raised by their mothers in prison did better than children raised by highly trained professionals in a well-equipped institution.3 Another study found that the lack of love can actually be fatal for children.4 Harvard Medical School’s famous Grant Study, which followed the lives of hundreds of men for seventy-five years, concluded that the most significant factor in life satisfaction is warm and loving relationships
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Augustine explains that love is the “impulse” to “enjoy God on his own account and one’s neighbor on account of God.” In contrast, cupidity (or lust) is “the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbor and any corporeal thing not on account of God.”
Chastity, most simply, is fidelity.
Chastity, then, is “not the mere absence of sex but an active conforming of one’s body to the arc of the gospel.”
The desert fathers understood lust more broadly as any excessive desire, not only wanton sexual desire. They viewed lust as “a sin of weakness, not a sin of malice.”
It’s the age-old story, the paradox of the extramarital affair, confirmed by research: had the time, attention, and emotion spent on the affair been invested in the marriage instead, the affair might never have occurred.
The connection between the appetite for food and the appetite for sex is one that the desert fathers recognized.
But at some point in the modern age, people were led to think that while some things might be hard and so must be worked at—things like work, school, raising children, maintaining health, even life itself—a marriage that is hard must be quit.
Frederick Buechner explains that “the hunger to know someone sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly.”
Marriage forms a little society. And the health of that little society depends to some degree on the health of the larger surrounding society.
Bunyan’s Calvinist belief emphasized not the moment of salvation but the work of ongoing sanctification that is evidence of salvation.
The essence of patience is the willingness to endure suffering.
