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Reading Classic, Reading Christian by Roseanna White
Today’s society is in a strange era of political correctness and blurring of lines. In a lot of ways, Christians are forced to adapt to the times, and in a lot of ways, the times have adapted to Christians. In the U.S., we can rage about prayer being taken out of schools and still have the freedom to worship as we choose, read what we like, and live how we’re led. All in all, I’d say that makes the Christian populace pretty blessed, if still challenged. Sometimes the hardest part of our world is living in it, among it, and staying strong against it. Christian literature is certainly helpful in providing entertainment that doesn’t blur any more lines, but at the same time, the genre of "Christian Fiction" is relatively new, and hence not all that large. The classics, on the other hand, are a category that a lot of people overlook simply because they’re deemed difficult. The language in them is often old fashioned and harder to understand, and the memories of being forced to plod through them in school is enough to sour most people to them. But if one can get past those initial turn-offs, one will find a whole realm of books at one’s disposal that are tried and true. More often than not, they make it into the Classics Section of the major bookstores because there is something timeless about them, something that can reach audiences from Ancient Greece and Victorian England alike. By reading Shakespeare or Austen or Melville or Dostoevsky, one can get much more than a plot or a peek into another lifetime; one can often see the path that Christianity has taken through centuries and continents and trials. Moreover, though it’s very rarely the whole point of the books, faith is often such an integral part of the life and times that it’s woven into the cloth of the story so adeptly that it cannot be separated from it. Even in reading things that were written or take place before the introduction of Christianity into the Western world, the threads of it are there, and the influence of, for instance, Greek and Roman culture upon Christianity and vice versa can be extrapolated and added to one’s own understanding of what this faith is that we claim, why we’re willing to shape our lives around it, and how it truly does mold us through our everyday lives. |
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