I just finished Pat Conroy's new book, South of Broad. When I read Conroy I get so caught up in the language-in the cadence and tempo of it-that I sometimes lose track of story. His style, at least for me, can overwhelm the plot. As a result, I find myself wallowing around in all this glorious construction, content to soak in the beauty of how the author's arranged 100,000 English words.

 This may seem like harmless self-indulgence; like the epitome of "reading for pleasure." But it's not a wise way to read. There is more to books-even those as pretty and popular as Conroy's-than aesthetics alone. Which prompts the question, especially for those of us who read for pleasure: How am I supposed to read this novel?

T.S. Eliot encouraged people to read everything, especially popular fiction, from an ethical and theological perspective. In an age like ours, he said (and this was in 1932), when there's so little common agreement on ethics, mores, and values-we need to scrutinize everything we read. 

Most of us have assumed, Eliot observed, that there's no connection between literature and theology. But fiction has always been judged by a moral standard. The problem, he pointed out, is that those judgments are made according to the moral conventions of the time, and when those conventions are detached from any theological background, they're nothing more than habit. When our values are detached from their theological underpinning, they're wide open to alteration. And then, Eliot explained, literature-and especially popular literature-becomes an agent of moral change.

Our judgment of what is acceptable or objectionable becomes a matter of what the culture is used to-and what shocked the last generation is "calmly accepted" by the current one.  Some find satisfaction in our cultural "progress"; they note how our adaptability is evidence of development and growing tolerance. But it is instead, Eliot claimed, proof of an insecure and rickety foundation. Which underscores the naïveté of separating literary judgments from religious convictions. 

Today, we tend to judge literature by its aesthetic value only-the way I read Pat Conroy. But this, says Hans-Georg Gadamer, a contemporary German philosopher, contemplates literature as a work of art, "without giving thought to its truth or significance." 

When we wallow in around in aesthetic construction we're not paying attention to what is said as much as to how the author says it. This "aesthetic distancing" Gadamer points out, places the question of truth at arm's length. And all writers, no matter how popular, no matter how accessible or easy to read-from Pat Conroy to Dan Brown to Stephanie Meyer-are conveying "truth."

It is the literature we read with the least effort, Eliot warned, that has the easiest and potentially most menacing effect. It's popular novelists, he insisted, who have the most impact on the culture, and on us. It is they, therefore, and their books that need the most scrutiny.  

Sources used:

Eliot, T.S., Religion and Literature, 1932

Gallagher, Susan and Lundin, Roger, Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith magazine. He is also the author of two novels, Safe at Home and Crossing the Lines, both published by David C.Cook Publishers