Transcript
Speaker: So you can lie to yourself and you can tell yourself all day long that this isn't affecting you, but you are giving an example to your children, you are giving an example to your friends, you are leading them down a road that is destructive, and you are destroying yourself.
Speaker: Welcome to Verity Podcast, friends. I'm Felicia Misenheimer, your host, the founder of Every Woman a Theologian. And at this podcast, we love books. And we're in the middle of a series called Thinking Biblically. Today, we're going to do an episode all about thinking biblically when it comes to your reading habits. So if you like books and you want to be equipped to think well about them, this is the episode for you.
Speaker: So in this episode, we're going to first talk a little bit about literacy in general and what has changed over the last few centuries in regard to reading. I have some really great articles about this that we'll link in the show notes or in the video description. And then we're going to talk about discernment and reading and then move into what books I love to read, why I love to read them, and what my reading routine looks like.
Speaker: So let's start with the literacy changes that we've seen over the last few centuries. I found an amazing article called the The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. And this article is not a Christian article, so keep that in mind, but it is really helpful for understanding the data behind the fall in reading that we're seeing in today's digital age. Now, if you're a reader, most likely you attract other readers. So you might not feel this shift in our society as much regarding reading because everyone around you is reading. And I have a lot of people in my life who are readers. But if you go out into society at large,
Speaker: you'll often find that a lot of people aren't reading or the things they're reading are such poor quality, they're forming them in and really unhealthy ways. um So we'll talk about that a little bit later on when we talk about discernment and reading. But there's an interesting chart in this particular article, again, linked in show notes and description, um called The Decline of Reading. And it's a chart showing the percentage of U.S. teenagers who read in their leisure time. 1985,
Speaker: Almost 40% of U.S. teenagers would read almost every day in their leisure time. But in 2026, 55% of U.S. teenagers hardly ever read a book.
Speaker: This source was the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress Long Term. reading assessments. So this is a trustworthy source on this report. And so it says in late 2024 that the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were declining or stagnating in most developed countries. So in developed countries, that's what's happening. This is so shocking to researchers that looking at these statistics in any the other setting, they would think that there was some kind of crisis, like a war or collapse of the education system. But most scholars are attributing it to the smartphone and the lack of ability to pay attention long term. And I'll be honest with you, this has been a really discouraging for me um as a writer, because what I'm finding is when I took a break from social media from February to August, I'm still mostly off of social media. but I'm posting reels and teachings there again. People were messaging me saying, well, I don't listen to your podcast or watch your YouTube or read your books. I just really like to consume on Instagram. And this literally makes me ill and makes me sick and sad every time I hear this because I'm like, you can't learn about the Bible from me in one minute in a reel.
Speaker: You can't learn about your theology in two minutes on a reel. It literally makes me panicky. And That is not how you are formed as a person. Like you have to consume something that is longer, that is teaching you, that is forming you. And the best way to do that is through a book.
Speaker: The invention of the printing press in the fourteen hundreds was transformative to society. And it allowed the the written word to spread so much further than it ever could before. And that's such a privilege. So having this technology of the smartphone and the addictive nature of it is causing people to move away that long-form technology.
Speaker: move away from that long form kind of attention training into short form, and they're truly becoming post-literate. That is the terminology they're using for it. In fact, a study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens' novel, Bleak House, a book that was once regularly read by children.
Speaker: So the problem here is they not only can't always read with a literacy level beyond fifth grade, which is an understood factor in today's society, and publishers understand it. They want books written at that level. Even Bibles are are sometimes written at that level, other than the KJV, which is considered like beyond high school level at this point. But they can't read and understand the language in the first paragraph of a Dickens novel.
Speaker: That's where we're at as an overall society. So because of all this, what we're seeing in this this article has a bunch of different charts in there for you that's showing you like the test scores in decline, performance in reasoning and problem solving in tests is declining, um All of this is happening, and they're attributing that back to literacy and the the inability both to read, so going back to um the baseline um educational methods for teaching reading, like phonics and the shift in educational philosophy around that over the last 40 years, but then also simply attention span, like people aren't reading because they get bored with reading.
Speaker: One of the things that we are seeing is that we're also seeing a change in the writing methodology. So also in this article, um there is a chart that shows you the average number of words per sentence in popular books. And they use an example from deaf Daphne du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek, where the typical amount of words per sentence was 40, but then now, that was written back in like 1940. Now, in 2025, when It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover came out, the average number of words per sentence was 11.
Speaker: And I've noticed this in reading modern fiction and then going back and reading classic fiction, and I couldn't put my finger on what was so different, but it is this choppy, very um short, to-the-point kind of ah approach and kind of writing that also plays a role in that attention span. It's like this crazy cycle of, I don't read challenging books because I can't pay attention, And then because I'm reading books that aren't challenging, they keep me in that place of not being able to pay attention unless something is super short and super punchy and uses a really low-level vocabulary. So what we're seeing is kind of this circle of people can't pay attention, so they're given resources and and literacy um scaffolds that keep them in that place. um And don't push them beyond it.
Speaker: And I don't mean just in high school, just in our schools. I mean, beyond that, as adults, this is what's happening. We're not challenging ourselves. If you look at the average book club, so like the Jenna Bush, Oprah book club, kind of like That World Reese Witherspoon's book club, many of these books that come out and are in these book clubs really are represented by this like Colleen Hoover kind of example. They're that same type of writing. Now, of course, there are exceptions to that. Like, i absolutely love the author of Hamnet. I think it's Maggie O'Hara. um And The Marriage Portrait, she's a modern author and her writing is stunning. So there are exceptions to that rule in modern fiction. I'm not
Speaker: painting with a super broad brush. But what we do see is a majority of them are written in this super high speed, high turnover, the plot's moving super fast, and there's a ton of sexual content. Almost every book contains sexual content because you have to keep people's attention. that's where we are as a society.
Speaker: So as Christians, how do we discern through something like this? we We look at all this, like, how does that affect us? I think Christians should care a lot about this because, number one, Christians should care about education because education as a whole should be about the cultivation of virtue and excellence.
Speaker: it's not a just It's not just career preparation. This is why when I get to my Thinking Biblically About Education episode that is coming at the end of the series, we're going to talk about the fact that A lot of the debates between private, public, and homeschooling families don't get anywhere because their philosophy of education is completely different. It's why homeschoolers don't believe that there's any kind of civic duty to put their kids into public school beyond the civic duty of paying taxes because the public school is no longer in alignment with the true nature of education, which is the cultivation of virtue.
Speaker: but we'll get there in a future episode. So that's why they choose not to participate in it or choose to put their kids into a private classical school or Christian school or something like that, where that is still integrated into the goal of education. So with reading, if if reading is a form of education, a form of learning that's supposed to challenge us and grow us, cultivate virtue, cultivate a broad understanding of the world,
Speaker: cultivate this ability to read at a higher level, stretch ourselves and push ourselves. It's not just about fun. If that's what it's for, then that means that as Christians, we should care about what's happening with literacy, what's happening with the nature of books and reading.
Speaker: Because ultimately, being able to write and read and speak, this is really unique. This is unique to humanity. It's a way we image God. Jesus was the Logos, the Word made flesh, the Word from the beginning. So we should be thinking, okay, how can we...
Speaker: as Christians, read well, even when we're reading secular books, books that have content, which we will inevitably do at certain points, um books that have themes that we strongly disagree with, but we're reading them to understand, you know, a different perspective. We should be, as Christians, thinking this through. And this brings me to the verse that I think really guides my reading life.
Speaker: Philippians 4.8, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. So when we think about this verse in the context of our thoughts, we We don't take that as, well, I can never think about sad things. Like I can't grieve my grandma's death or I can't work through how to handle this conflict with my neighbor or i can't think about the really tough things.
Speaker: situation I saw in the news, the really sad, grievous situation I had in the news. This isn't talking about toxic positivity or spiritually bypassing issues, but it is saying that when you meditate on something, when you really think about it, when you're really going to focus on it, what you should focus on is what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. What is excellent, what is praiseworthy. And sometimes you're reading a book that has themes that don't really align with this, but the overall transcendent theme, the ending of the book does align with these things. So I'm thinking I read a book once and I'm trying to think of of a great example. Anna Karenina by Leo twelve Tolstoy. I read this book about a year ago, and it's a very sad book. It's about a woman's affair that becomes all-consuming. She leaves her husband, lives with this guy she has the affair with, and at the very end of the book, she throws herself under a train.
Speaker: Spoiler alert. And you might say, well, that's not noble. That's not lovely. That's not admirable. But what Tolstoy was trying to do was show the effects of sin.
Speaker: He was a believer. And in writing the story of Anna Karenina, you're seeing her spiral into self-destruction. And right before she throws herself under the train, you see pages of her internal...
Speaker: dialogue with herself, her hatred for other humans, her hatred for everything she sees, that is really coming from a self-hatred for the choices that she made. She had ample opportunity to undo those choices, but she did not do that. And then in the end, instead of repenting and turning back to hope, she thought her only hope was death.
Speaker: And so, yes, it's a depressing book in some ways, if that's what you focus on. But if you step back and you consider the big picture, how would this fit into Tolstoy's Christian worldview? You can understand that all along, redemption was offered to Anna, and she refused it. And ultimately, what we're seeing is a warning against sin's consequences when we choose not to turn from that sin and choose holiness.
Speaker: So in the end, the message is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. Anna just didn't choose that message. And so it's a ah warning while at the same time being a beautiful piece of literature that is not distinctly Christian. It's not a Christian novel, but there's a lot of themes within it that align with the Christian teachings that Tolstoy would have been familiar with. So that's an example of what I'm talking about. we We're not saying, oh, you have to just read these, you know, Anne of Green Gables that has very little conflict or Laura Ingalls Wilder where the biggest conflict is just like the prairie that they're battling with as they're trying to make a living.
Speaker: No, we can read some pretty gritty books, but what we're reading is forming us. And so if you're reading books that have no redemption, have no real moral through line, and that's the main stuff that you're consuming, then you should ask yourself, how is this forming me? And that would be the first question I would say for Christian readers in discerning what you read.
Speaker: How is this forming me as a person? Is this leading me more towards holiness or more towards discernment, critical thinking, honor for humanity, leading me more towards the kind of life that honors God, or is this leading me away from that?
Speaker: So now let's talk about cultivating a reading life as a Christian. What can that look like? I think when I talk about this, people think that I only read nonfiction. And there was a period of time in my life where I did just that. And that was because I had come out of a years-long, like decade-long addiction to sexually explicit fiction, which back then was actually harder to find than it is now. I was exposed to it when I was 12 outside of my home and became addicted, curious, kept reading them. And it became something that I would hunt down anytime I could at the library, at other people's houses, whatever, wherever I could find it. And this is something that I knew I wanted to overcome because it was impacting my life and my faith. And I was seeing the impact on other areas of my life, but it was um deeply, deeply,
Speaker: deeply difficult to overcome because everywhere I went, no matter what I read, it seemed like there was a sexually explicit plot line. So this is when this was kind of picking up outside of the Harlequin novel kind of um approach. And so I just decided to not read fiction except for like classic fiction, Jane Austen and other Western classics. I just knew I couldn't trust it.
Speaker: I couldn't trust myself. I also didn't go to the theater for that time because I couldn't trust that movies would be clean. So that was about seven years that I did not consume fiction. I did not um go to the movie theater. and During that time, it was kind of a detox from those things. But then eventually I was able to add fiction back in and read much more widely and do so with a discerning eye.
Speaker: So I think when it comes to our reading habits as Christians, if we're going off of the Philippians 4-8 model, we want to be thinking through where am I at spiritually right now? Am I able to walk in purity and holiness? um Am I able to discern or am I actually lying to myself about what I'm consuming?
Speaker: Am i telling myself, it's okay because all the Christians I know are doing it. It's okay because it's not actually affecting me. A lot of people will tell me, well, I read these erotic fiction books, and I'm talking about A Court of Thrones and Roses. I'm talking about Fourth Wing. Those are all erotic fiction. i in fact, reviewed the most recent Fourth Wing book. There's a new one coming out, but I forget the name of it. It's the black one. um I reviewed this for Christianity Today. I read the book, and I am...
Speaker: I have to tell you this because I think a lot of women don't understand. They literally don't understand. They don't have any perspective on this because they're consuming these books at such a rate. The Fourth Wing and the Court of Thrones and Roses books. And then the there's another set of really famous books um about hockey players that is explicit. And these books are 10 times more explicit than the Harlequin novels were of yesteryear.
Speaker: I'm talking what you are reading, what you are leaving lying around your house for kids to find, for teenagers to find, for girls and boys to find. It is like picking up a hardcore porn magazine. That is what you are leaving around your house. That is what you're reading in front of your daughter.
Speaker: And she doesn't know that you're skipping the scenes. All she knows is that she sees that's what her mom approves of, and that's what she reads. And that's what her mom her mom's friends in the book club read. All those women who are also speaking spiritually into her life.
Speaker: That's what they read. That's the message that you're sending to the young people. And now I hear from women all the time who are like, oh, it's not porn because it's not hurting anybody. And porn is only when you human traffic human traffic someone. So I've been in the pornography conversation for 20 years.
Speaker: 20. Because I started talking about it when I started sharing my testimony. And 20 years ago, nobody was talking about human trafficking. Do you know why we told people to stop porn? Because it hurt them.
Speaker: It hurt their brains. It hurt their hearts. It hurt their souls. It was captivity. It was an addiction. And that was enough for people to walk away. But now we've added on a very real issue, which is that people in the porn industry are often trafficked in.
Speaker: But instead of recognizing that now there's double the reason to not be in involved in pornography... Women are actually reading these books and then looking back at pornography and saying, well, it's not the same because the only person I'm hurting is myself.
Speaker: They don't actually say that. They say they're not hurting anybody, but they are. They're hurting themselves. They're hurting their marriage. or hurting their brains. They're hurting their hearts. They're hurting their souls. But they don't care because my body, my choice.
Speaker: That's what's being said when it comes to erotic fiction. So you can lie to yourself and you can tell yourself ah all day long that this isn't affecting you, but you are giving an example to your children. You are giving an example to your friends. You are recommending books to other people who don't have discernment. You are leading them down a road that is destructive and you are destroying yourself.
Speaker: And unless you stop and acknowledge the lies you're telling yourself, you will remain in bondage and you will wonder why you have a split. There's a split in your soul regarding your allegiance to the Lord and regarding your allegiance to this addiction.
Speaker: I was once at a conference speaking on this exact issue. This was eight years ago. This was before all of these books exploded on the market. Speaking on this exact issue, and a pastor's wife came up to me and she said, I have 800 of these types of novels on my Kindle, and they're so easily accessible through Kindle Unlimited. They're always on sale, and I am deleting all of them so that I can actually be free.
Speaker: I come down hard on this because Women don't like to be confronted about their sin. We like to be told how great we are. And because we were so oppressed for thousands of years, then we can do whatever we want. And if I want to oppress myself through pornography, well, that's fine because I can do that. Just no man can talk to me about it. So here's a woman talking to you about it. This is destroying you.
Speaker: It's destroying your children. It's not helping your marriage. It's a third party in your marriage. It's a third party in your bedroom and in your sexuality. It is destroying you. So you can choose now whether you want to walk away from it and walk away from the pornography that you are addicted to and lying to yourself about and find true freedom, or you can stay where you are and wonder one day what would have happened if I turned around back then when Felicia made me super mad by talking about this.
Speaker: So when it comes to reading habits and discernment, we have to be honest with ourselves. How is this forming me? Am I being honest or am I lying to myself because everybody else is doing it and so it must be okay? It's just like when Christians were all watching Game of Thrones and it's like, it's just a show. It doesn't matter. i don't look at the naked women.
Speaker: Okay. All right. ah but but So you didn't watch half the show. I'm sorry. I don't believe you. um So we just have to be clear about what is actually impacting us and the example we're setting in our reading habits. Now, the question women come to me with is, well, if you take away Court of Thrones and Roses and take away Fourth Wing, take away these things, which I'm not.
Speaker: I'm asking you to discern. You talk to the Lord about it. um What do I read instead? And then I say, my friends, we have thousands of years. of books available to you. And if you just started with the Western classics of the last 300 years, if you just read, you know, go back to what you read when you were elementary school. Yeah, read. That's what I was reading when I felt like I couldn't read adult fiction for a while. When I was detoxing from that addiction, the dopamine of those sexual scenes, I read young adult fiction.
Speaker: Because I knew it was clean and it was the old stuff, the stuff like Summer of the Swans and um Princess and the Goblin and The Hobbit and all of those like Newbery Honor Award books that we, Island of the Blue Dolphins. You know, those are the books I was reading to kind of reset myself and set a new equilibrium. And i I think that that can be a really healing place to go if you're trying to figure out what do I read. And maybe you're not ready to be challenged with some of these, you know, Jane Austen or Leo Tolstoy or Thomas Harding or or whatever. So that can be a really great place to start. And it was actually refreshing because it brought back all these memories from when I was a kid. And I was like, this is such a good book. I don't have to be a kid to enjoy this book. So that can be one place to start. Another place is to read nonfiction.
Speaker: To start reading, you know, maybe start with some devotionals, Christian devotionals versus reading like straight theology if you need something a little bit more accessible. Memoir. i love reading memoir. I read a bunch of different books about Julia Child, different parts of her life. So biographies can be really interesting if they're written in a way that is interesting and if it's a topic that interests you. So what's who's a person you want to learn more about?
Speaker: I have a book of um love letters between Christian couples. Love that one. It's really short, but reading the letters is really cool. So there's so many types of books that you can read instead of consuming sexualized fiction.
Speaker: or fiction that takes you to this really dark place. Poetry is a great thing to read. It's really good for your brain. It's good for um your speaking. um a lot of people say they don't like poetry, but it's because they were in classes that made them analyze poetry instead of just read it. So that can be a really fun way to engage with um rhyme and meter and learning some of the references that we see in classic fiction to some of the famous old poets. And Substack is a great place to find information on all of this because there's so many great book recommendations there. So let's now talk about reading routines. So for me, i don't like being trapped into one book at a time. So I read about five books at once and i pick them up based on my mood. I usually read nonfiction in the day.
Speaker: i usually read um like a devotional in the morning, not theology devotional in the morning. nonfiction, maybe a little bit in the afternoon. And then in the evening, I'll read memoir and fiction.
Speaker: And so I have a big stack on my nightstand that I rotate through. And sometimes I'll have a more challenging book. Like right now I'm reading Les Miserables. It's a challenge for me. um But I also have a memoir written by a guy who worked in luxury hotels for 15 years. And so his story is really interesting. And so that keeps me engaged. So kind of rotating through books based on interest, based on what you like. And here's the other thing. It's okay to quit a book.
Speaker: It's okay to quit. Now, I think that if you are coming off of these modern fictional sexualized plot lines, you're going to have to push yourself a bit. You're going to have to push yourself to focus because what those books do is they train you on dopamine. They give you really fast, quick results. They don't give you a lot of description in the plot. They just keep the plot plunging forward, usually from sexual encounter to encounter. That's what keeps you going. So your brain is hunting for the dopamine. That's why you get bored so easily.
Speaker: So start with a book that has no sex in it and see if you're getting bored. That's how you know. So even if it's like a short book, a young adult book that has no sex in it and you get bored, oftentimes it's actually that your brain is trained to hunt for the sex scene. And that's why you're bored. So push through it the first few times. Then Once you've accomplished reading things that are outside your comfort zone, then if you get to a book that you're just like, I am not motivated to read this, just quit.
Speaker: Find a genre that you do enjoy. So how do I find time to read? So I have four children. I homeschool my oldest three. i have a one-year-old. I'm pregnant. I'm running the ministry. We're opening a bookstore, which we'll talk about at the end.
Speaker: How do I find time? It's in short increments. So when I do my Bible study in the morning, it's usually half an hour. So like 15 minutes of a book, 15 minutes Bible study. Later on, it might be i'm I try really hard to sit down in the afternoon for 15 minutes and just read.
Speaker: Don't always do it, but I try. and then in the evening at bedtime, usually about half an hour. So those are little increments. Audiobooks are great too. Listen to it in the car. um Listen to it as you do dishes. This doesn't work for me because my kids are all home. They're always talking. They're always around. So listening to audiobooks, it never works for me um in the day. So if you don't have that situation, then it could be helpful.
Speaker: So let's say you want to go the nonfiction Christian reading route. I have some recommendations for you from our shop. I don't do a good job of talking about what we offer at our bookstore. And it bums me out because I'm failing myself.
Speaker: but I need to tell you guys more of what we create because I'm a writer. That's what I do. And so obviously, you know, I wrote the book, Every Woman a Theologian. It is a systematic theology for lay women. So it's talking about all the basics of Christian theology, but in an approachable way.
Speaker: I have that book. I have Stop Calling Me Beautiful, which is like a devotional about how to walk out the Christian life. I have a brand new study that's coming in April, 2027. If you're watching online, you can see the picture of the cover. It's called Every Good Gift, Understanding Spiritual Gifts and Stepping into Your God-Given Purpose. This comes April, 2027 from Lifeway. I'm really excited about this. um So I'm due with our fifth baby, March 28th, and that comes out April 17th. So pray for us. And then as far as Bible studies go, we have five that I've written. We have our Revelation Bible study, all nations, tribes, people, and tongues, verse by verse. Leviticus, called the law of grace.
Speaker: We have who the sun sets free, exploring the freedom of Christ in Galatians. We have knowing and believing God's love, exploring the gospel you're one first through through 3rd John. um And then we have Who is Like Our God, Exploring the Justice of God in Amos and Micah. So these books...
Speaker: are just one example of some nonfiction you could use in your personal Bible study time. They are Bible studies, not books. But the other things I mentioned are books, like Every Woman a Theologian and Stop Calling Me Beautiful. And those are long-form versions that give you the content I'm doing on social media, I'm doing on this podcast. But that's where my heart is, is in the book. That's where I got to put all of my effort and my energy. Now, beyond just what we create and we make, there are so many good books. And I have literal stacks of books on my desk right now. I wish you could see it. It's like they're piled around me because I can't. um
Speaker: but We're moving everything into our physical bookstore because, yes, you guys, we're opening a physical bookstore. If you watched my video with the like sneak peek, if you haven't seen it, go back and see it. It tells you more about our pregnancy and about opening the physical bookstore. It's called Riverside Bookshop. So For that, we're going to have all of our books, but we're also going to have other books from other people. So if I were to start reading something for nonfiction, I'm like, I want i want to know what to read. Well, here's an example of something that I was like, yes, I want to read this. Jesus through medieval eyes. I love the medieval period. So I saw this and I thought, that's fascinating. I want to read that.
Speaker: Look for books that make you light up, that make you go, oh that looks so good. um I saw this one, Scribes in Scripture, the amazing story of how we got the Bible. Obsessed. I want to read that. um And then behind me, you can see on my shelves, I have so many different books about different topics. Sometimes I finish them. Sometimes I don't. I pick something up and say, I want to, I'm interested in this right now. I'm going to read this.
Speaker: And I try to kind of read based on the inspiration that I have or the problem that I'm trying to solve and not make it this whole big thing. I don't set like numeric goals per year for how many books to read. I think that can be helpful if you are trying to form a habit. But once the habits formed, I think, you know, don't stress yourself out about it.
Speaker: If you were reading no books and you went to reading two books, that's an accomplishment. If you were reading two books and you went to reading four books, that's an accomplishment. So you see people who are just like reading 100 books a year. That's not the goal. That's their goal. So you can decide what that reading habit looks like for you.
Speaker: So to kind of recap on this, how do Christians form their reading habits? Well, number one, they think about Philippians 4.8. What's noble? What's right, pure, lovely, admirable?
Speaker: Is this forming in me an unhealthy dependence or dopamine addiction or lust or greed or what's it forming in me? And if it's forming those things, I don't want to be consuming that no matter how normalized it is. That goes for shows and media as well.
Speaker: But, you know, we can also ask ourselves, do I allow myself as a Christian to rejoice in my reading? Rejoice in your reading. So like find something you enjoy. God's not asking you to only read things that are like Puritan reflections on the gospel. like It's okay to enjoy what you're reading and to read things that, yeah, are fluffy.
Speaker: There's nothing wrong with reading fluffy, enjoyable books. The question, though, is, is that all you're reading? If that's all you're ever reading, you're never challenging yourself, you're never expanding your mind, or you're never questioning how that's impacting your soul, then you have a problem. There's a big difference between, for instance,
Speaker: just sitting down at a buffet and just gulping down food with no limit on it and going along the buffet and taking just enough to satisfy you.
Speaker: But the satisfaction included both the meat and the dessert. It wasn't like, oh, I got all the meat off the buffet, and but no, can't have any of that ice cream because that wouldn't please the Lord. No, that's not that's not the Christian life. The Christian life is not nonfiction only forever or, you know, Christian theology books is all I read. no that's not what God's asking when he when we look at Philippians 4.8.
Speaker: We can rejoice in beautiful writing. We can rejoice in fun writing, funny writing. I'll give you an example of funny writing. We read... ah way back in the day, josh and i used to read aloud to each other at night. He's not, he wasn't as much of a reader when we got married. And over time, he's become more of a reader. We read a memoir written by Sandra Bullock's sister. So the actress Sandra Bullock, she has a sister who lives in Vermont and opened a bakery.
Speaker: i think the book is called Made From Scratch. And it's about her experience of opening this bakery. I don't know how I found this book. But we loved it. It was funny. It was relatable. It was so cute. And it was just refreshing. And so we read that aloud in bed at night.
Speaker: Did that form my soul in any significant long-term theological way? No, but it did bring me joy in humanity and in humanity's creativity and in the beauty of living up north, which is where I live. So it's things like that that I just want to encourage you to be open to reading,
Speaker: Read something that does bring joy to you. it doesn't But also be willing to challenge yourself in your reading habits. Remember how you're being formed and fight back against this post-literate society by reading actual books, by willing to expand your vocabulary and take advantage of the gift that language is that we've been given by God.
Speaker: So, I could give you tons of book recommendations, but if you're looking for those, I do have on my Amazon storefront book lists of my favorites, what I'm currently reading, theology books, kids books. I encourage you, though, to buy local, so I use those lists on Amazon just as a way to keep them in one place. But you can take those lists and go to your local indie bookstore and shop from them because that makes such a difference in being able to, one, support your local community, but two, to keep these stores doors open. And as someone who now owns a physical bookstore, I just want to tell you it means so much when you shop locally through those bookstores. You can also usually go on your local indie bookstore's website and order through them that way or call them and they will order the book for you and you can just pick it up in store. so it's literally almost the same as amazon um you just have to wait a tiny bit longer so i definitely recommend doing that hopefully something in this episode challenged you encouraged you and i would love to hear in the comments or through email you can email us at felicia felicia masonheimer.com what are you reading what are your favorite fiction books
Speaker: that you think match up with Philippians 4.8? What are your favorite nonfiction books? And what do you think we should stock in the bookstore when we open? I will see you next time on Verity Podcast.
