Presented at the CiRCE Spring Regional Conference 2022.

C.S. Lewis’s famous introduction to On the Incarnation of Christ offers a brilliant apologetic for reading old books. We’ll explore reading great books as an act of hospitality-training. Through hospitality we learn to listen well to others; we practice articulating our own beliefs in contrast to their “strange” ideas; we are forced to reckon with unexamined perceptions and prejudices that become embedded in our thinking simply by living in our cultural spaces. Reading old books functions as a spiritual discipline, developing the muscles necessary for our children to love others well and become winsome witnesses to those who are searching for truth.