[Forest Keeper]

[About your priest:] His truly interesting point, though, was that he felt that in the modern age, the public reading of Scripture has become more important than it has been since those pre-printing press days. We in the 21st c. are so married to our TV and computer screens that we read less and less (and chatter more and more on-line about what little we do read.) I thought it was an insightful point...

I agree. I think we are reading less and less, partly because there is so much more competition for our time than there used to be. I'm glad to say that I read much more now than I did 15 years ago, except that I gave up the NYT ("All the news that might be true"). I wish my church was more like yours in public readings of scripture. How can you lose when you stick with the 'A' material? :)

[Agrarian]

"How can you lose when you stick with the 'A' material? :)"

Indeed. Except I would consider our many and lengthy Scriptural readings to be our "A+" material -- our "A" material is our huge corpus of liturgical texts, which have been honed and polished over countless centuries. :-)

It is no exaggeration to say that if one were to attend an Orthodox Vespers and Matins daily for a year (with the services in a language one understands, of course), with not a single service ever being preached and without reading a single book, one would probably have a better understanding of Christian theology than the average person with an M.Div.