I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

In a recent essay about our values as a nation, Marilynne Robinson wrote, "I do believe that we stand at a threshold, as Bonhoeffer did, and that the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as I see it, in the knowledge that no society is at any time immune to moral catastrophe. . . . We owe it to him to

We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful. The place of stillness that you have to go to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make

The philosopher Nicholas of Cusa can help us. He believed that the best way to choose between two seemingly equal but contradicting perspectives-what he called the "coincidence of opposites"-was to assume the stance of learned ignorance, in which one strives to thoroughly understand both positions and then goes outside them to evaluate and decide

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic-whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers. Whether cruelly enforced or subtly reinforced, homogenization in groups, societies, or language can lead