Nick Almeida, 21, is my personal friend, a youth pastor, and a theology student. As someone who roots his profession and religion in certain texts, he is an interesting case study when it comes to reading. The interview upon which this report is based was conducted casually and in person over a couple of hours.
Nick estimates his total reading time at 3 hours per day. This includes reading the Bible, theology textbooks, novels, Hebrew texts, and personal development books. The place of his reading is not strict, though often he does personal reading at a desk in his home, and professional reading at his church. Times tend to be more consistent: Bible reading every morning, professional reading and studying during the day, personal reading in the evening, and he practices reading Hebrew before bed. He prefers solitude, but is fairly adaptable to his environment. He is fairly indiscriminate in his sourcing, getting his books by having them shipped to him, going to bookstores, going to school libraries, or reading them electronically. “Whatever’s cheapest or available,” he tells me. He prefers to buy books rather than borrow them, so he may keep them as a reference.
Nick cites his parents as major influences on his reading practice. In our interview, he explained, “Mom was a school librarian. I basically grew up in a library.” He considers what he reads a more independent choice, however. Before settling on the Christian Bible, he read from each religious text, saying that he “was always looking for meaning.” Nick carries this theme into his preference for fantasy novels. “A lot of the books I read focus on good versus evil. Morality is at the center of the books. [There are] ideas about the world in them. Morality, motivation is now what I do for a living, so it makes sense.” Here, Nick cites his reading practice as a link between his personal and professional life.
Nick responds decidedly when asked if there was good or bad reading: “Definitely. Reading something like a Cosmo magazine -- that definitely has a huge negative effect on teenage girls.” He approaches the quality of a reading from a moral perspective. For him, the morality of a reading is determined by more than the text and its context: “Part of my job as a role model is to understand or read popular culture. So I guess it’s ok for me to read [something] I wouldn’t want my kids [in my youth group] reading.” Outside of this moral perspective, Nick is unwilling to call any kind of reading bad. “I wouldn’t look down my nose at any kind of reading. All types of reading can be beneficial to you, depending on who you are.”
Nick frames his studies of language and culture around better understanding the author’s time and the reader’s time—the contexts of the encoding and decoding, respectively. Nick believes that there is “a range of acceptable interpretations,” but that not every reading is valid. But he does not constrain this range by his own scholarly approval or even by the original author’s intent. “Like, Luke wrote his gospel for a very particular audience and purpose…but if someone is reading that who’s depressed, hopefully they’ll get whatever they need from that.” He describes the range of meanings in the Bible as invariably relevant to a person’s real life.
One of Nick’s professional roles is to serve as a conduit for the interpretation of texts. The audience for his sermons is not expected to read the texts upon which the sermons are based. Nick takes a very active role in this, far beyond relaying the text verbatim, and even altering details of the text to serve the purpose of the meaning. “In the Jewish tradition of teaching, sometimes you would change the quote in order to make it more relevant to the people you are speaking to.” He is willing to transplant the meaning of a Bible story from a historical context into a personally relevant one. Part of this may include censorship: adapting sexually or otherwise explicit scenes in the Bible to a younger audience. In choosing which details to change or convey, Nick makes meaning from text for people beyond himself.
But Nick is unwilling to claim a monopoly on making meaning from his religious texts. He feels that his position causes him to read in a very unique way that might not be the only method. “The more academic you get in the book, the fuzzier the main points get. It is totally possible for [a layperson] to grasp something that scholars completely missed.” He also mentions the dangers of reading a text with a specific lens, forcing a limited meaning. “If I have to preach on Community, but I’m reading from [the Biblical book of] Acts, I might get something that fits the prescribed sermon plan, but isn’t […] as genuinely meaningful as it could be.”
