Check out this piece by Jason Byasse on the way to mentor people through the reading of books. Here is a taste:
Maybe it’s because I sit in an academic community, but the best way I know to mentor people is through reading texts together. Something happens in the act of reading that’s not reducible to the sum of its parts. Reading creates community, and so makes us better people — which is the point of mentoring in the first place.
For example, when a friend of mine began his PhD studies under Stanley Hauerwas, Stan took control of the reading from day one. First, he gave him Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue.” It was exactly what my friend wanted as a new ethics student: bold, clear, bombastic diagnoses of the culture’s ills. Next, Hauerwas shifted gears, giving the man St. Athanasius’s “On the Incarnation of the Word.” My friend couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But even if he didn’t get the text, he got Hauerwas’ point: this is theological ethics we’re doing here. Difficult as ancient church texts are, we can’t leave them aside for the stuff that makes more immediate sense.
It would be tempting to regularize this: form a reading list for all time, patent it and churn out intellectuals. But people aren’t products. Hauerwas could have started another student off with Athanasius and gotten the same jubilant initial reaction that MacIntyre prompted in the other man.
Reading expands the community of potential mentors to which we might submit. If we follow C.S. Lewis’ advice (offered, appropriately enough, in the forward to Athanasius’ aforementioned work), we will read two old books for every new one. This is not just to be an antiquarian. It’s to note what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” With tradition, even dead people get to vote. Or even dead people can serve as our mentors.
I wrote a little bit about how this kind of “mentoring” happened in the rural eighteenth-century world of Philip Vickers Fithian in my book, The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
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