The Last Old Book
Vol. 57 No. 41 | The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity | September 6, 2026
The Last Old Book
Years ago, in my final year at seminary, I was in the library when another seminarian returned a book of assigned readings. It was Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a monument of English prose and Anglican theology. He slapped it down on the counter and announced in an aggrieved tone of voice, “That’s the last old book I’ll ever have to read.” It was a strange thing for a seminarian to say. I will grant you that reading Richard Hooker has its challenges. But he was preparing for a vocation in which one particular old book—the Bible—was supposed to occupy him for the rest of his life.
Perhaps, however, he was simply ahead of his time. For much of the last century, the dominant tendency in communication has been toward immediacy: simplicity, brevity, accessibility, the lowering of every possible barrier to instant comprehension. Journalism led the way with short sentences, and Bible translation was not far behind. Aiming at ease of comprehension, they broke up long sentence structures or moved toward paraphrase. Liturgical revision followed the same path. The stately rhythmic sentences of the older Prayer Books gave way to bleached prose organized with the linear efficiency of an office memo to the Almighty.
Don’t get me wrong. Clarity is a virtue. Needless obscurity is not. The problem came when immediate comprehension became the only standard by which language was judged. Anything that required us to stop, reread, remember what had gone before, puzzle over an unfamiliar word, or hold several thoughts together until their relationship became apparent was taken to be a defect in the writing.
But what if the difficulty was doing us good? That’s the question that is being asked with increasing urgency of late. For the revolution in communication did not stop with simpler prose. The internet flooded us with information, the smartphone put it in our pockets, and social media transformed it into an endless flicker of headlines, photos, short videos, and notifications—all designed not simply to communicate something clearly, but to capture our attention for a few seconds before something else took it place. The goal is no longer intellectual clarity, but releasing a surge of dopamine.
In this climate, education has struggled to keep pace. Students now encounter books through excerpts rather than by reading them whole. Publishers demand prose that moves fast and makes few demands upon the reader. And we are beginning to discover the cost. Students at prestigious colleges find it difficult to follow an argument sustained over many pages, or to understand a book as a whole rather than as a collection of detachable points. This is not simply the loss of an antiquated cultural accomplishment called “reading books.” Something more fundamental is at stake. To follow a complicated sentence, an extended argument, or a sustained narrative, is to exercise attention, memory, patience, inference, and judgment. We must hold one thought in mind while another is introduced; recognize qualifications and contrasts; remember what was said fifty pages earlier; resist premature conclusions; and sometimes live with uncertainty until the meaning of the whole emerges. Those are not merely reading skills. They are powers of the mind we need to live well. For reality does not disclose its meaning on demand, but only to who are equipped with powers of the mind needed to receive it.
And now comes artificial intelligence. Just when our powers of sustained attention have been weakened, we have acquired a technology that can relieve us of still more of the burden of thought. Why wrestle with a difficult book when AI can summarize it? Why follow the argument when it can extract the main points? Why struggle to find the right words when it can compose them for us? The danger is not simply that AI may sometimes get things wrong—it is that we may surrender to it abilities we ought to be exercising ourselves.
All of which gives me another reason to be grateful for the “old books” at the center of our life at St. John’s. We hear and read the King James Bible and the historic Prayer Book for many reasons. Their language is noble: it bears the weight of conviction; they connect us with generations of Christians who prayed and heard the Scriptures in these words; their theological insight is often profound.
But there is another virtue we might easily overlook: they make demands upon us. They do not always yield their meaning at first glance. Their vocabulary may require explanation; their sentences, to pay attention. A sentence of St. Paul may unfold through clause after clause before finally arriving at its destination. A Prayer Book collect gathers several thoughts into a single carefully ordered movement. We have to remember where the sentence began in order to understand where it ends. This is not a glitch, it is a feature.
In an age of instant gratification, patience; in an age of fragments, coherence; in an age of reaction, reflection; and in an age increasingly tempted to outsource the work of thinking, they require us to exercise the powers of mind God has given us. Reality does not disclose its meaning on demand. These “old books” not only disclose the truth, but make us capable of receiving it.