Reading, Reason, and the Lost Art of Dialogue

In an age of shouting and certainty, the disciplines of deep reading and civil conversation are not just pastimes, but essential practices for understanding truth and engaging with the world.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7yr4WfDKiY

The cold settles deep in Michigan, the kind that makes holding a pipe stem a test of will. It’s a cold that drives you inward, both to the warmth of a hearth and the warmth of a well-worn book. In this huddled season, the speaker settles into a ritual: a church warden pipe (the sort that reminds one of hobbits), hot cider, and a carefully chosen reading schedule. It’s more than comfort; it’s a preparation. As winter forces a pause, it creates a space for engaging with ideas that have outlasted centuries, and for reflecting on why such engagement feels so urgent today.

The Perspective of Time

Before diving into philosophy, there is a necessary meditation on time itself. The speaker notes the strange duality of its passage: weeks and months feel endless, but years vanish. A 40th high school reunion becomes a stark marker. In that span, entire lives have been raised, grandchildren have arrived—yet it was, fundamentally, only the repetition of forty Thanksgivings and forty Christmases. This isn’t mere nostalgia; it’s a crucial insight into perspective. We experience time linearly, but we judge it retrospectively. The child waits endlessly for Christmas; the adult watches decades blur. This understanding frames the entire project of a deep reading life. To spend a winter with dense books is to deliberately manipulate that perspective, to step out of the accelerating stream of modern life and into a slower, more cumulative stream of thought.

Building a Foundation in Lewis

Winter is, therefore, a season for foundational texts. The reading schedule begins with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a work the speaker first encountered at age 19 and has revisited multiple times. Born from a series of radio lectures, Lewis’s genius lies in what one observer noted: he “brings the cookies off the shelf,” making profound arguments accessible. Mere Christianity is a sustained exploration of the moral law—the innate sense of right and wrong that Lewis posits as a universal reality. His argument is not for a specific creed, but for the very existence of a moral standard that transcends individual opinion or culture, which he uses as a logical stepping stone to Christian theology.

This reading is paired with a more daunting first-time venture: The Abolition of Man. Where Mere Christianity is relatable, this work is dense, philosophical, and foundational in a different way. Lewis begins by critiquing a contemporary school textbook that dismisses objective value, teaching students that statements like “a sunset is beautiful” are merely expressions of personal feeling, not truths about the sunset itself. Lewis dismantles this subjectivism. He argues that when we call a sunset beautiful, we are recognizing a genuine, objective quality (value) that exists in the object, not just projecting our taste. This is a defense of foundationalism—the philosophical position that absolute, objective truths exist and can serve as a bedrock for knowledge—as opposed to non-foundationalism, which holds that no such bedrock exists.

The speaker connects this directly to epistemology, the study of knowledge. Foundationalism asserts that truths like the mathematical certainty that “1+1=2” or the existence of a common moral law are universal, regardless of time or culture. While challenges to this are rare in mathematics (though they exist in some fashionable academic circles), they are rampant in ethics. This is precisely the terrain Lewis is staking out. He builds the case for objective value and moral reality in The Abolition of Man and then, in Mere Christianity, constructs the argument for a moral law upon that foundation. To read them together is to witness a philosophical architecture being assembled.

Beyond Logic: Pascal’s Wager and the Life of the Mind

The reading list extends beyond Lewis to his intellectual forebears and companions, specifically to Blaise Pascal via Douglas Groothuis’s biography Beyond the Wager. Pascal, the 17th-century scientist, mathematician, and Christian thinker, is famous for Pascal’s Wager. Groothuis, the speaker notes, helps correct a common misunderstanding of it. It is not a cold, calculating bet about God’s existence. Rather, it’s a reflection on the practical, existential wisdom of living as if Christian ideals are true. The wager is framed as a question: given the stakes of eternal life, is it not more reasonable to live by those ideals and be wrong, than to dismiss them and be right? The speaker, about a third of the way through, finds the account of Pascal’s sickly but brilliant life compelling, recommending the book alongside Groothuis’s more massive 1,600-page defense of Christianity, which tackles historicity, resurrection, and philosophical foundations.

Literary Apologetics and Layered Narratives

This philosophical and theological exploration bleeds naturally into literature. The speaker plans a re-read of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. Both are more than adventure stories; they are works of literary apologetics—arguments for a worldview woven into narrative art. Citing the work of Dr. Michael Ward of Oxford, the speaker references Ward’s 2008 book Planet Narnia, which proposes that the seven Narnia novels are secretly structured around the medieval cosmology of the seven planets. This makes sense, as both Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were self-described medievalists. At Oxford and Cambridge, amidst the rising tide of modernism and the Enlightenment, they deliberately looked backward to a medieval worldview, finding in its literature and philosophy a richness they felt modernity lacked.

This layering is what gives these works their cross-generational power. The Chronicles of Narnia is often shelved as children’s literature, but its appeal, like that of the clever cartoon Animaniacs with its double-layered humor, spans ages. An adult can appreciate the theological underpinnings and literary craftsmanship that sail over a child’s head. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings similarly rewards deeper study, its books offering a far more detailed and textured story than even the beloved film adaptations could capture. The speaker’s hope for an “extended extended version” of the films speaks to this desire for immersion, to be fully absorbed in a coherent secondary world built on consistent philosophical and moral principles.

The Imperative of Dialogue

Reading these books—Lewis, Pascal, Tolkien—is not a solitary, defensive act. It is preparation for engagement. The speaker laments a profound cultural loss: the ability to have a real conversation. In the 21st century, dialogue has too often been replaced by shouting, where volume is mistaken for truth and emotion substitutes for argument. People proclaim beliefs they cannot articulate or defend, a circularity the speaker finds both unproductive and intellectually lazy.

This is why the discipline of reading deeply and understanding opposing views is vital. The speaker teaches a course on world religions, where the pedagogical method is to not only present an ideology but to then play devil’s advocate, challenging students to defend it from the inside. The goal is to foster a crucial skill: the ability to argue the opposite of your own position. If you believe in a pro-choice stance, can you articulately argue the pro-life case? If you hold a religious conviction, can you present the atheist’s strongest counterargument? Most people cannot. They remain locked within their own perspective, unable to test its strength or even understand its contours.

This ability to step outside oneself and charitably engage with a dissenting view is the antidote to the shouting match. It is the essence of true dialogue—a word from the Greek meaning “through words.” It requires humility, a willingness to be wrong, and the confidence that one’s own beliefs, if true, can withstand scrutiny. To read Lewis on moral law or Pascal on existential choice is to arm oneself for such encounters. It transforms reading from a passive reception of ideas into an active preparation for a more reasoned, respectful, and ultimately more meaningful interaction with the world and its many viewpoints.

So the work continues: through The Abolition of Man, into Beyond the Wager, and back through the mythopoeic landscapes of Narnia and Middle-earth. It is a winter’s project, but its purpose extends far beyond the last frost. It is an effort to fortify the mind and the spirit, not to build a fortress of certainty, but to build a foundation sturdy enough to permit the open door of conversation.

This article is adapted from a YouTube talk on reading, philosophy, and conversation.