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With Karen Swallow Prior
56 Plays4 years ago
From classical literature to throw-away tweets, communication and language are part of how we reflect the image of a God who is revealed by his Word. This time on PEP Talk, Andy and Kristi speak with US academic and author Karen Swallow Prior, exploring the touchpoints we have with the entire human race in the great books and stories of our culture. How can we make use of these when sharing the gospel?
Dr Karen Swallow Prior is Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She has written a number of books including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Literature (Brazos 2018). Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Relevant, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, Religion News Service, Books and Culture and other places. She is a founding member of The Pelican Project, a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum, a Senior Fellow at the International Alliance for Christian Education, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States.
Facebook: Karen Swallow Prior
Instagram: karenswallowprior
Twitter: @KSPrior
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Support
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, this is Andy Bannister. Thank you for downloading and for listening to pep talk. We are a holy listener supported podcast and we'd love to have your support to make it possible for us to continue to produce episodes. You can get behind the show by visiting solas-cpc.org, solas-cpc.org and click on the donate button. Thanks so much and I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Weather Banter
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Kristy and today I am joined as ever by my wonderful co-host, Andy Bannister. Andy, hi, how are you doing? I'm doing well up here in Scotland today. It's scorching, Kristy. It's 23 degrees in Scotland. That never happens.
00:00:53
Speaker
You just keep talking about this. You said this last time too, and I have to say in London, North London, it's 32. So I'm still claiming that weather superior card. I'm still going to
Guest Introduction: Karen Swallow Prior
00:01:03
Speaker
play that. But anyway, we are joined today by a wonderful guest, Karen Swallow Prior. Karen, hi. Hello. I'm sitting here trying to do the math to figure out what those temperatures are in Fahrenheit, which we still use.
00:01:17
Speaker
Oh yeah, what would that be? Andy might have an idea. Not as hot as you, I imagine. No, I'm sure not. I'm sure not. Shame. Karen, you are, let me see if I've got this right. You are a research professor of English, Christianity and Culture at South Eastern Theological College. Is that right? That's correct. Wonderful. And I've loved your work. You've written book and your recent book on Reading Well, Finding the Good Life Through Great Books. I hit our shelves in the UK.
00:01:48
Speaker
2018, a couple of years ago, yeah, in October. And I absolutely loved it. Karen, why did you write that book to begin with?
Passion for Literature and Faith Connection
00:01:55
Speaker
Oh, well, thank you so much. I loved working on that book. It's very precious to me. Well, you know, I teach English literature. I have been for 30 years and I also am a Christian. I have been a Christian since I was a little girl. And
00:02:14
Speaker
I, my first book, Booked Literature and the Soul of Me, which was also about books, was really about how I learned, I was really discipled by classic literature and learned to love God through books. And so that's been my, my joy in life is to, to, to share my love of literature and my love of God, but more importantly, how they connect together. And that's what I try to do in this book as well.
00:02:41
Speaker
Like you, Karen, I love books, I love reading and where I'm sitting now surrounded by shelves of the things, and also love God. How do those two things fit together? Because I sometimes come across Christians who sort of, those are different spheres. They have their love of literature, they have their love of God, but they haven't fitted those things together. You obviously have. How does that work for you?
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah, that is a great question. And even some people who like to read and are Christians often will only read theological or philosophical works and don't have time for fiction, which is my great love, is classical fiction. And what it really is, is that
00:03:22
Speaker
God is the Word, and we are made in His image. So we are creatures of language. And so all of the language that we use, whether it's talking to one another or reading or writing, is an expression, either, you know, whether good or ill, of God's image in us. And learning to read well and learning to love the written Word is
00:03:48
Speaker
is cultivating that image of God in us. I mean, we as Christians are people of the Word and God communicates to us through His book and through His Son, the Word. And so all language in that way is connected. Not all books are inspired and they're not all the Word of God, of course, but still anything where we are using this gift of language that God has given us is helping us to express that image more fully.
00:04:13
Speaker
Because your latest book on Reading World talks a lot about virtue formation through a number of brilliant classical works that you draw upon, talking about patience, prudence. What do you think it means for someone who doesn't yet know the Lord reading, like a classical work of literature in terms of this?
00:04:35
Speaker
being formed more into the image of God as we encounter what it means to be made in his image through the Word that's being communicated to us in literature. What does that mean for the non-Christian who might be reading like the great Gatsby, for example? No, that's a great question.
00:04:53
Speaker
I think it can all be summed up in what Augustine says on Christian
Literature and Virtue Ethics
00:04:59
Speaker
teaching. He says that all truth is God's truth and that we should take truth wherever we can find it. And so, in writing about virtues, of course, I drew heavily upon classical
00:05:13
Speaker
moral philosophers like Aristotle who really is sort of set the standard for the idea of virtue and what constitutes human excellence. Many other thinkers have come after him. There's lots of literature both ancient and medieval and modern about the virtues from a Christian and from a non-Christian point of view.
00:05:36
Speaker
But they share so much in common and give us so much truth about what it means to be excellent as human beings. And even the pagan philosophers understood that there's something different about human beings from all other animals. And that's why they were so obsessed with figuring out what it is that makes us different and what it is that makes us excellent. And so I just examined those
00:06:01
Speaker
a number of those classical virtues and saw how not only we can learn about them through these great works of literature, but even just reading these works of literature and discerning and interpreting them is a practice in virtue itself.
00:06:17
Speaker
You know, as you as you were talking there, Karen, one of the things that struck me is that, you know, I think we live in a culture here in the West where, you know, many people have forgotten the great the classics. They don't they don't read as widely as they wanted. Everything is very immediate with with social media and so forth. But I was also reminded
Literature's Critique of Modern Culture
00:06:36
Speaker
of something that
00:06:36
Speaker
you know, C.S. Lewis once said about being, allowing the kind of, when you read older books and older literature, it allows the fresh winds of the ages to kind of blow through your mind, right? Because you can, you can allow yourself to be critiqued by somebody standing outside your own culture. Is there something in that you think that actually opening ourselves up to, you know, the classics, the older literature is an important corrective to some of the trends of our age that we live in?
00:07:00
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. There's another sort of great aphorism about the great books and it's that goes along the lines of that we don't read the great books, they read us because they do, you know, they sort of hold up a mirror to ourselves and we can see where the reflection is good and maybe where we're distorted. They can reveal
00:07:23
Speaker
moral blind spots and cultural blind spots. And even in a more practical way as we're facing this global pandemic, I have found one of the greatest divides in the way that people think about this pandemic is the one between the people who have a broader, deeper sense of history and culture, whether through
00:07:46
Speaker
literature or through other reading. They're just history and those who don't because that's one of the gifts that literature gives us. My specialty is, you know, 17th, 18th, 19th century British literature. And you can't read more than a few pages of
00:08:03
Speaker
those works and not encounter the kinds of plagues and pestilences and short lifespans and miserable lives that people had throughout much of human existence. And we're so spoiled in this moment in the 21st century where it seems like we've conquered almost everything that we're so shaken by a 100-year virus, which has been part of human existence.
00:08:31
Speaker
since we've been on this earth. And so I think that wider perspective is just something that can give us a greater sense of rootedness and calm, even in a moment like this.
00:08:45
Speaker
What do you think it might look like to use some of these great books to give those who don't know Jesus that wider perspective of what it means to live a good life? I mean, have you ever used these evangelistically?
Spiritual Conversations Through Literature
00:08:56
Speaker
Do you have any tips as to what that might look like? That's a great question.
00:09:02
Speaker
I think one thing to understand is that because we are all creatures made in God's image, we all have this desire. We'll draw on C.S. Lewis again, his famous picture of
00:09:18
Speaker
this famous idea that we were not made for this world. And so when we're restless and we have other desires, it shows us that we're made for another world. We all share that. And so what literature does is it shows us how every good story is the story of someone who desires one thing, goes in pursuit of it, and then discovers what it is that he or she really needs. And so the same pattern
00:09:45
Speaker
of a quest for the good life, a quest for what a person desires and in the process finding out what he or she really needs is the journey that we're all on. And we can see through literature the kinds of mistakes that can be made and avoid them ourselves. So I think a lot of Christians tend to think that we have to read explicitly Christian books in order to kind of communicate the gospel.
00:10:15
Speaker
One of the books that I write about in Unreading Well, I think, is one of the best examples of the gospel in literature, and that's A Tale of Two Cities, a famous work. Of course, Dickens was at least nominally a Christian. He had some doctrinal irregularities, but he wasn't writing
00:10:35
Speaker
to save people. He wasn't writing to give the gospel. He was writing truth about human existence and human nature, and it's a story of the gospel of a man who gives his life for others.
00:10:48
Speaker
The other thing that struck me as you were talking there, Karen, I've got some, I lived in Canada for six years before I came back to the UK and I had some dear Canadian friends who'd figured out a really kind of a powerful evangelistic tool for them, was they love literature. And so they started a book group based in their home.
00:11:07
Speaker
And largely working through, as you would say, the kind of the great books, the classic books, but also in time expanding that circle slightly. And they said they deliberately didn't populate the reading list with Christian books. They just picked books that were classics that were well-known and that naturally raised spiritual questions. In fact, I think A Tale of Two Cities was one of them. And they said the conversations that opened up with friends and with neighbors through the pages of literature was incredible. And so I think there really is an opportunity here that maybe we're missing.
00:11:38
Speaker
That's an excellent idea. My church actually asked me to do a community book club last year. And it was so wonderful. I just, we met, you know, in a place off the church grounds at a local coffee shop and read Jane Austen's Sends and Sensibility, another one of my favorites. And it really is a way of, of
00:12:01
Speaker
inviting anyone to come in, but also a way of getting at the great questions because that's what makes great books great is that they do address these universal human questions about who we are, why we exist, and what's gone wrong, and what solutions there might be. And they ask those questions and allow us to kind of
00:12:24
Speaker
they tell the truth, but tell it slant, I guess, in the words of Emily Dickinson. Just to take a slightly different slant or angle on this is that I think one of the ways in which we first connected, Karen, was through social media.
Social Media Engagement and Respect
00:12:40
Speaker
You have a wonderful presence on Twitter and on Facebook and Instagram. And I've just loved kind of learning how you engage with friends, but also people who are quite critical of what you're doing, what you have done.
00:12:54
Speaker
I just wondered how do you make the most of social media? How can we be a presence of being able to communicate salt and light in those areas where, particularly for Twitter, it can be very toxic? Are there any things that you've learned? Very toxic, might be the understatement of the year now.
00:13:18
Speaker
No, that is a great question and thank you for asking. People tell me how good I am at social media, especially Twitter, and it's actually embarrassing. Yes, I have the gift of Twitter. One of the loneliest gift in the kingdom.
00:13:34
Speaker
But I think it starts with something that's so easy to forget, is to realize that behind every social media profile, maybe excluding the Russian bots, is a real person, or maybe not, is a real person. It's so easy to, I mean, we've just distanced ourselves from these profiles and we just see them as electronic avatars.
00:14:04
Speaker
So, my cardinal rule of social media interaction is to interact with that person as though they were in the room with me. And if we were all in a little party together at someone's house, I would not
00:14:20
Speaker
be rude or I would not walk up to a stranger and say, why did you say that? Or you're wrong. I mean, that is not how we interact with one another when we are present with one another. And if we can treat one another on social media that way, we will go so far. We need to put the humanity back in it.
00:14:40
Speaker
Another thing that I like to remember, because I'm not always treated that way in kind. Another thing that I always remember is that it's not just about the single person I might be going back and forth with on Twitter.
00:14:57
Speaker
I mean, I have a lot of followers, so there are people who are following along, even if they're not saying anything. They are witnessing and they are watching, and they are learning, whether it's a good lesson or bad. And I think that's one of the most powerful things about social media that's kind of a reminder about how the real world works, actually,
00:15:19
Speaker
Well, it is sort of the real world, is that people are watching our words, they're watching our demeanor, they're watching our behavior, even when we don't realize it. And so what a great place for us to be reminded about how important our witness is, how it goes with us everywhere, even when we don't know, because people aren't telling us that they're watching and observing.
00:15:43
Speaker
And if we think of social media that way and that we don't need to have the instant gratification, which of course it's built on, but if we can just know that people are watching and we are witnessing, we could use it so much more powerfully than I think we realize.
00:15:59
Speaker
There's so much good wisdom in there. And I was really funny when you were giving your first half of that question, Karen, I was going to say, I was going to raise a question about the second thing you said, and then you said it. So you beat me to it, which I think is really, really exciting. And to what extent,
00:16:14
Speaker
I suppose put it this way. What are some of the advice that you would give to Christians who perhaps aren't on social media, who kind of feel they should
Social Media as a Mission Field
00:16:21
Speaker
be? Should they be on there? Is it for everybody? Because I noticed that you sort of self-deprecatingly said you have the gift of Twitter, but you clearly have an ability. I love your profile. I just looked it up while you were talking. That's you and the dog. That's quite a...
00:16:35
Speaker
That's hilarious. But yeah, people who are not on social media, should they get on there or should you leave it to people who really, the Lord has anointed them for being able to engage with the Bear Pit? Oh, wow. I'm glad you asked that question. You know, it...
00:16:52
Speaker
I miss my life before social media greatly. There is a sacrifice that you make in attention span and time invested. I really do think of it as a mission field and as a ministry, and I do think that it is some sort of weird gift that God has given me, and I don't want it sometimes, but I really feel that it's a responsibility I have. So I don't think it's for everyone, and I think it's perfectly
00:17:22
Speaker
fine and maybe even better to stay off of it because I've lived long enough to know what life was like before and what what life was like after and so I do think it needs to be treated as a Almost like a calling or as a mission field and really people need to go before the Lord and and and and and Be prayerful about how much time they should spend there I don't you know, I mean almost everyone has an account whether they use it or not and
00:17:47
Speaker
But it is something to take more seriously, I think, than we tend to. Because to go back to what I was talking about on reading well, it is a formative experience. Social media forms our character and our personality and our thinking. And if we aren't intentional about how it does that, it can form us
00:18:13
Speaker
in very bad ways. And so we need to be careful. And it's not just forming us, it's forming our whole culture. I mean, we are polarized as much as we are because of the way that social media works. Now, that's a whole philosophical and technological discussion that we probably don't have time for. There's a lot written about it. But just to think about that, to think about how it is a form, that's what media are, it is a form.
Balancing Digital and Physical Worlds
00:18:41
Speaker
And so it does form
00:18:43
Speaker
us and that's something we have to keep foremost in our minds. Sorry, just a very quick question as we come into land now. What kind of things do you keep in mind for yourself, Karen, knowing that social media is forming you as you're engaging with it? How do you interact with that formation?
00:19:02
Speaker
It's something I definitely still struggle with, again, because I'm old enough to have lived a good chunk of my life before and then after. And so I think about a lot. And so I just really just reading, reading books. I don't even read. I don't read Kindle. I don't read any electronic books. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But it's the written word on the page that I can hold in my hand and feel spending time that way.
00:19:31
Speaker
is a counteraction to social media, as well as other forms of balance, like physical exercise, being outdoors. It's all part of a well-rounded balanced life, which I think is what God designed us for. But again, we have to be intentional about.
00:19:48
Speaker
Well, Kara, this has been an absolutely kind of fascinating conversation. We've covered literature, we've covered social media. We've gone from the sort of 300 years ago right up to the present day. Thank you for sharing your passions and your calling and gifting with us. And I hope listeners have found it helpful. So thanks a lot for being on the show. And Christy and I will be back in two weeks' time with another guest. Thanks for listening to that talk.