A number of bloggers have posted recently about speed reading and various techniques which may help those of us who still have 60-something books on the list we're trying to read by May.
But it was refreshing to come across this by Ellen Davis, on the merits of slow reading:
In addition to imaginations fit for the reading of Scripture, students also need literary skills, and these are often of a different kind than their earlier studies have required of them. Most new seminarians are schooled in textbooks, operators' manuals, and plot-driven novels. They know how to skim for content, yet relatively few of them are experienced with literary complexity. Moreover, the Bible is the last place they expect their reading skills to prove inadequate, since most entering students think they know what is there, even if they have never actually read it. So the first task that confronts them - or should confront them - is to learn to read in a radically different way. One of my students in the introductory Old Testament course put the problem succinctly about eight weeks into the first semester: "When we started, I thought the problem was that I read too slowly. Now I see that the problem is, I read too fast." Making mileage through the text invariably impedes movement into what Barth rightly calls "the strange new world within the Bible." Slowing down, we can begin to see how the (sometimes frustratingly) complex literary artistry of the Bible conveys theological meaning.
Different texts, different speeds.
To skim or to savour? For content or for transformation?
Lets learn to read our bibles more slowly.
