Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice

＂A timely and accessible primer.＂--Christian Century

What if we viewed reading as not just a personal hobby or a pleasurable indulgence but also a spiritual practice that deepens our faith?

In Reading for the Love of God, award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson does just that--and then shows readers how to reap the spiritual benefits of reading. She argues that the simple act of reading can help us learn to pray well, love our neighbor, be contemplative, practice humility, and disentangle ourselves from contemporary idols.

This accessible and engaging guide outlines several ways Christian thinkers--including Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy L. Sayers--approached the act of reading. It also includes useful special features such as suggested reading lists, guided practices for approaching texts, and tips for meditating on specific texts or Bible passages.

By learning to read for the love of God, readers will discover not only a renewed love of reading but also a new, vital spiritual practice to deepen their walk with God.

Jessica Hooten Wilson (PhD, Baylor University) is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She is the author or editor of eight books, including The Scandal of Holiness (winner of a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit), Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?, and Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (winner of a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award). Hooten Wilson speaks around the world on topics as varied as Russian novelists, Catholic thinkers, and Christian ways of reading.