My latest: biblical literacy in a postliterate age, for CT

My latest column for Christianity Today is called “Biblical Literacy in a Postliterate Age.” Here’s how it opens:

Christians are readers. We are “people of the book.” We own personal Bibles, translated into our mother tongues, and read them daily. Picture “quiet time” and you’ll see a table, a cup of coffee, and a Bible spread open to dog-eared, highlighted, annotated pages. For Christians, daily Bible reading is the minimum standard for the life of faith. What kind of Christian, some of us may think, doesn’t meet this low bar?

This vision of our faith resonates for many. It certainly describes the way I was raised. As a snapshot of a slice of the church at a certain time in history—20th-century American evangelicals—it checks out. But as a timeless vision of what it means to follow Christ, it falls short, and it does so in a way that will seriously impinge on our ability to make disciples in an increasingly postliterate culture, a culture in which most people still understand the bare mechanics of reading but overwhelmingly consume audio and visual media instead.

This is a theme I’ve reflected on before here on the blog. Eventually I engage with recent writing on Gen Z literacy among college students by folks like Adam Kotsko, Jean Twenge, and Alan Jacobs. And I try to be tentative and non-despairing in the final turn. See what you think.