About Mars Hill AudioThemes from Our Interviews
A recent report released by the National Endowment for the Arts indicates that fewer Americans every year are bothering to read books, and those that do read less well than a generation ago. Is this a value-neutral cultural change, or is it a true cultural loss, a decline which should be resisted and remedied, especially by the ministry of local churches? That’s a question addressed extensively on Volume 90 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, with interviews with Dana Gioia, Eugene Peterson, Makoto Fujimura, and other guests.
The report, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, examined data on reading habits and comprehension skills, and the story conveyed in the data is principally one of decline. Young adults in particular show a declining interest in reading. In just 10 years, from 1992-2002, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who read for pleasure dropped by 12%, down to just 52%. In 2005, only 35% of twelfth-graders were reading at or above a proficiency level, a rate of decline of 13% since 1992. The numbers for 35- to 44-year-olds fell by 11%. Even college graduates are reading less well. In 1992, 40% of those with a bachelor’s degree were judged by the Department of Education to read at or above a proficiency level. By 2003, that number had dropped to 31%, a 23% rate of decline in 11 years. And American families are spending less on books than at almost any other time in the past two decades.
The word, spoken and written, lives at the center of Christian faith. The case has been made by many theologians and philosophers that human nature is in its essence linguistic; we are, after all created in the image of a speaking and writing God, one who utters all things into existence, who reveals his law by writing with his finger on tablets of stone, who reveals himself in dreams and visions, but who also provides words to accompany and sometimes explain those images; who comes among us as the living Word. Bread alone is not the source of our life, but rather words.
The Church has an obvious interest in working to reverse the trends summarized in the NEA Report, which is why MARS HILL AUDIO devoted over 75 minutes of Volume 90 of our Journal to interviews discussing the importance of reading. Information about ordering that issue on MP3 (immediate download), CD, or cassette is available here.
— Ken Myers
May 2008