Customer Reviews

A Theology Of Reading: The Hermeneutics Of Love (Radical Traditions)

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I read this book one year ago, and I'm reviewing it because it has stayed with me---not the specifics (the book is a bit heavy going in places, as I recall), but the general admonition to be a loving reader. That instruction pops into my mind in odd times and places as I study literature and writing in a secular graduate program. If we are Christian scholars, our scholarship must have some uniquely Christian characteristic---what better characteristic than Christian charity to the author and community?

I heard a presentation by Dr. Jacobs the other weekend at a conference, but I had already been thinking about him, because I had recalled his book.

This book, then, has shaped me more than I thought it would. The more I learn about the academy, the discipline of scholarship, the skill of reading, the more I crave Christian theology to guide me through dangerous pitfalls of hatred, self-interest, and passionate error. A Christian scholar cannot afford to leave unexamined the issues this book raises and cannot afford to spurn the lifestyle this book proposes. Not many people I've found are asking these kinds of questions or giving these kinds of answers.

This is a damn fine book! Dr. Jacobs writes from a vast reservoir of subject-knowledge--from Aristotelian ethics through Augustinian theology, Dickensian sentimentalism to Bakhtinian hermeneutics--and takes us into an extended meditation as to what truly charitable reading might be. Poets, philosophers, and novelists come into vital dialogue about the intersection of love, justice, and knowledge in creating meaning. He gradually draws near to the still center of the interpretive whirl whose axes are faith, hope, and charity.

Read this book. You'll find many fine examples of literary criticism done with loving attention to the particulars of the texts. You'll see the a fruitful convergence of Christian theology and literary criticism. Dr. Jacobs brings blessed clarity to Bakhtin's project. Most impressive is his relation of criticism in-the-large to still-broader contexts & Classical ideas. We enter an ongoing conversation across centuries about what constitutes "meaning" and how we can deal with that meaning lovingly.

Alan Jacobs apparently has read and thought about pretty much every book pertaining to his vast subject and a few more besides. This extended essay (if I may call it that) offers the weary reader bracing refreshment from the grim sourness of a hermeneutic of suspicion. It calls us instead to a non-sentimental but clear-eyed and hopeful attitude by which to read, an attitude Jacobs himself exemplifies on every page, whether he's dealing with Nietzsche or Nussbaum, Descartes or Derrida.