From the Director’s Desk • October 2026
This semester, I’m teaching a senior seminar centered on the power of narrative. As one of the final parts of Calvin’s core curriculum, this course asks students to consider a “contemporary challenge or enduring question” from a range of disciplinary perspectives. In this first month of our semester, it’s been great fun to explore story’s potency in areas as diverse as neuroscience and business. My students are really smart and engaged!
Unsurprisingly, in the class’s early days we engaged the summer’s much-discussed Atlantic article, “The Age of Reading is Over” by Rose Horowitch. If you’ve had a chance to read it yourself, you’ll know that Horowitch chronicles what she sees as the effects of a world that is postliterate. In particular, she, like many other contemporary commentators, links the erosion of reading abilities to a profound loss in “deep thinking” abilities.
Much of the article is quite dire in describing new realities, but towards the article’s end, she observes “[t]he arrival of that world isn’t yet a certainty. Some people have noticed what we’re giving up, and they’re choosing a different path…. If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile, the holdouts lose nothing by trying.”
That list bit put me in mind of T.S. Eliot’s observation in his masterpiece, Four Quartets:
“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Our work at the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing—celebrating readers and writers and all the ways that story gives us more with which to be faithful—may be out of fashion in an age of skimming surfaces and online-only lives. By contrast, we still believe in a project centered on embodiment and complexity, messiness and difficulty, community and diversity.
As we begin our next round of planning for the Festival of Faith & Writing, it’s exciting to get to try all over again to nourish and sustain this grand endeavor. Maybe it is an “act of defiance,” but we’re glad you’re with us in this good fight.
And we take sustaining encouragement from the words of the late Annie Dillard, another saint whose loss we lament, who appeared at FFW in 1996: “You can’t test courage cautiously.”
So send us those nominations—nothing is certain yet. We’ve got work to do!
