Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age, by Joel Halldorf. New York University Press, 2026, 299 pages, $35.00.

The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of Post-Literate Society, by James Marriott. Doubleday, 2026, 190 pages, $26.00.

Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, by Maryanne Wolf. Harper Collins, 2018, $24.99.

I could not leave my readers without a final word on the important topic of media ecology. Analyzing the impact for good or ill of the electronic media upon the intellectual and public life of our nation and the church has been a passion of mine since I began my doctoral work in 1990. Some of the warnings of the small group of media ecology scholars are finally being heeded, although a lot of harm and grief could have been avoided had the warnings been heeded thirty-five years ago. There has been so much written since then, and I have tried to keep up with the latest analyses. I had intended to write reviews of two of the three books that I have chosen here, but time has run out. A review of Wolf’s Reader Come Home has been reviewed by Stephen Migotsky in January 2019 in Ordained Servant. Although it is eight years old, it is still timely.

Because we are engulfed by the electronic environment, it is easy for us to forget the effect that it has on our thinking and living. Since we cannot change this environment unless we are the CEOs of major tech companies, there is little we can do about the development of technology or its use. What we can and must do is be wise navigators of this environment and good stewards of the devices we own and use. This is especially true for those who lead in the church.

While it is true that reading can take place via many different media, it is also true, and there has been much research to prove this, that the reading of actual books has an intellectual benefit that no other media is capable of producing. Joel Halldorf’s Reading Matters crafts an apology for the codex, the book, in light of the history of reading. Christians invented the codex, or the book as we know it. It replaced the much less efficient and portable tablet and scroll. Halldorf ably demonstrates the value of the printed book as a technology, as an agent of deep thinking, and that its diminishing place in our reading culture is a serious detriment to Western Civilization.

James Marriott’s more accessible and briefer The New Dark Ages makes a similar case, echoing Neil Postman’s warning in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), that the television undermines serious public discourse. Marriott makes a strong case that our post-literate future resembles our pre-literate past in being “mystical, tribal, and autocratic” (11). This insight hearkens back to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982).

So, I leave you with this: Practice good media stewardship. The electronic media has transformed all our institutions and relationships. Our attention to reading, prayer, study, and other people has been diminished to the degree to which we allow ourselves to be absorbed by the ever present and addictive demands of this environment.

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, November–December, 2026