Reading is a practice, one that is increasingly threatened in a world of reels, and AI summaries. To help recover the difficult and joyous work of deep reading, I talked with my friend, Jason Baxter. Jason is the Director for the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College, and the author of several books including The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis and a new translation of Dante’s Inferno. Jason is a scholar who engages not only the mind but also the heart. That comes out clearly in his latest book, Why Literature Still Matters, which has been described as The Abolition of Man for our times, refering to C.S. Lewis’s classic defence of the humanities. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jason about reading, doing hard things, and learning to inhabit the language of other times. You can find out more about Jason’s work at his website, jasonmbaxter.com, and at his Substack newsletter, Beauty Matters.

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