I need to understand

March 20, 2008 8:06 PM

How does one read pages (dozens, maybe even hundreds of pages) of boring 17th century sermons or other boring material?

I could skim the texts but I have to have an in-depth understanding of the literature. I could be tested on any facet of the reading. This reading is for an early American literature correspondence course. I have great reading comprehension but this stuff bores me to death. It is getting in the way of me finishing my course. I have tried taking notes while reading but then I just get distracted. What are some tips for getting the most out of really boring material and maybe actually enjoying it? Also, I'm taking this course during a semester off from college so these tips will help me, and hopefully others, as I advance through my higher education.

posted by bobber to education (22 comments total)

Eventually, you need to decide whether the risk of you being tested on something you've missed is worth the benefit of being able to get through the damn text. If it's actually getting in the way of you finishing the course, I'd say you need to start skimming - it's a valuable skill t learn, anyway. Focus on reading the beginnings and ends of each sermon, and note down obvious references to parts of the Bible so you can look them up and figure out what the speaker's talking about.

I took an advanced seminar for my undergrad on American lit, although I don't recall any detailed study of sermons - you don't have more detail on the author or authors that are bugging you by any chance, do you?
posted by bettafish at 8:15 PM on March 20, 2008

Try to find the ridiculous in it, similar to this. I'm not suggesting you sit down and start a blog about these things, just that you accept their quirks and mock them in your head.

Also, everything has a 'stock' format; 17th century documents and Goosebumps included. Just figure out the format and work within it. It'll help with memory, and with mocking. "Oh, there he goes again, discussing God in relation to social standards, like he always does midway through, before finishing with from Hell, Fire, and then finally God's Love." "Oh, he's using the typical love-letter format, except he's screwing it up a bit..." See here.

Bonus!: you mock it, you remember it. "Oh, yeah, I remember something about it the maidservant because he sounded like a twat when discussing her 'low breeding'!"

I say all this as a history student and document nerd (as my FPPs prove).
posted by flibbertigibbet at 8:20 PM on March 20, 2008 [2 favorites]

The main author giving me trouble is Jonathan Edwards, specifically "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and other selected texts of his. Also, John Woolman. It's about 50 pages in one of those Anthology-type books so you can imagine the font is quite small.
posted by bobber at 8:24 PM on March 20, 2008

I find it helpful to be doing something else that's fairly mindless but doesn't require eyeballs (knitting, maybe some instrumental music in the background). Something to distract the distractable part of your brain while making sure you don't wander off.

Take scheduled breaks-and stay on schedule.

If that doesn't work, try making up snide commentary as you're reading (you're on metafilter, you should know how that goes). You have to actually concentrate on what you're reading in order to get the material for the jokes.

A friend of mine used to get a little tipsy before plowing into Confucian texts-the extra effort it took to read the passage meant that it kept her interest better. This does not work for everyone.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:24 PM on March 20, 2008

This is what has gotten me through dry, boring, or dense readings:

I find it helps me immensely if I have some background knowledge of the context (author's biography, historical setting, other important contemporary works, etc.) of the stuff I'm reading. Once I've got some context, I scan and skim through the document and try to find the author's organizing structure--I break the work into chunks that make sense to me, even if the author hasn't used headings and subheadings. Then I make an outline with these (sub)headings. Then, as I read, I take notes. (This is the key, for me.) The content of the notes isn't as important as the physical act of writing, because that seems to be the trick to helping me remember. It's just a bonus that I also have notes in my own words to refer to later.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:28 PM on March 20, 2008

Look for other sources that are written in a more accessible style, pore over them and take notes before returning to the boring assigned reading. Find a way into it before you tackle it. Maybe it's the music or art that was contermporary to the time, or some salacious gossip about the people you're studying, anything to provide a historical frame of reference. Do a wiki on each individual and you'll usually find some interesting tidbit. For example: Did you know William Wigglesworth, the Puritan minister and poet whose The Day of Doom was a bestseller in early New England actually thought he was damned by God because of a few "nocturnal emmisions" (nighttime ejaculations) in his early adulthood? That bit of weird information would probably make trudging throughthat dusty old poem more interesting, but that's just me.

Flog yourself to get through the literature once while making notes and a timeline of events. Look over the notes and timeline, and return to specific passages to make sure you got it right. Skim and scan the assigned reading a third time to get the whole of it. Finally, recopy all these notes (they'll be messy by now) so they're easy to read. [On preview: what everybody else said.]
posted by Blingo at 8:38 PM on March 20, 2008

Seconding hurdy gurdy girl's recommendation for familiarizing yourself with the context. I read tons of dry stuff - some from the 15th and 16th century - and I've always found that if I come at with a good understanding of what is going in the background that I enjoy it a lot more.

For me (political science grad) the danger is following too closely another scholar's opinion about a given piece. So I try to avoid analysis and look for neutral historical groundings. That may or may not apply to your text and discipline and frankly if you can piggy back off of another person's work while avoiding so called "thought plagiarism" then do so.

As for note taking - it depends on the work. Sometimes I write notes in the margin. Other times I write notes on a seperate piece of paper. Most recently I've started trying to read texts completely through and only placing a dot or dash beside passages I feel are important so as not to break my rhythm. This comes in handy for difficult texts that I just want to motor through. After you're done you can go back through and compile notes from important passages you designated with a mark, etc.
posted by wfrgms at 8:40 PM on March 20, 2008

Another vote for understanding the context! Try reading secondary sources for better understanding and comprehension. Stuff Like Leigh Eric Schmidt's Holy Fairs might help. The point of sermons like these is generally to induce conversion experiences, or in the case of the already-converted to help them grow in their prayer lives. If you understand the conversion experience, you have a fighting chance of quickly categorising and gutting a sermon and overcoming boredom as you look at how they work psychologically.

The Calvinist conversion experience is a bit like a glazier who goes round breaking windows in order to generate business. The point of preaching is first of all to generate despair at one's sinfulness and then to show how to mend it. It does this by encouraging people to look within and to label sinful thoughts/tendencies (which they can't control) as actual sins worthy of hell-fire for the least of them (the covenant of works). This is the 'terrors' phase of conversion that the ministers work to bring on. The idea is to show people experientially that they can't stop themselves 'sinning' and that on the basis of their own efforts at preventing sin they're going to go to Hell - therefore they need - ta-daaa!- Christ! (the covenant of grace) but laying hold of that is a tricky process. You can't just say the 'sinners prayer' in 17th century Atlantic world and magically you're converted. There's a process where you read the Bible in conjunction with extemporare prayer where you pour out your worries and fear of hell-fire while the minister and members of your prayer group will come round and counsel you.

Now watch carefully - at this stage in the process they move from holding out hell-fire and damnation to offering comfort in terms of signs of election and the perseverance of the elect. The idea is that one of these proofs of election will 'catch fire' with the person being counselled and they will experience the ecstatic feeling of conviction which represents the conversion experience. This experience is then developed in prayer through purging with repentance followed by elation and consolation when comforting bible verses pop into the person's consciousness during prayer. Developing this process is what they mean when they talk about 'sanctification' and growing in grace.

The process works as follows 'sight of sin' - the first awareness that you can't save yourself. Terrors phase when you're really scared you're going to hell. Assurance/conversion experience - when you lay hold of some text in the Bible/some point in a sermon which makes you think you're saved and then growth in grace as you tend that experience through cathartic repentance and prayer.

Now if you understand this model you can quickly look at 17th century sermon and ask yourself what it's doing. Is it aimed at the unconverted to bring them to sight of sin/terrors? How is it doing it? Is it aimed at comforting those in the terrors phase? Is it aimed at helping the spiritual life of the post-terrors saint? Or is it something different dealing with a particular case of conscience and whether something is a sin or not?

You may still find them boring, but I'm a sad git who's read thousands of pages of 17th century Calvinist sermons and spiritual diaries and it worked for me :-)

(heh - in LOLcat - my thesis, let me show you it!)
posted by Flitcraft at 9:31 PM on March 20, 2008 [4 favorites]

As they say: ever to confess you're bored reflects a lack of inner resources. Or at least that's the attitude I habitually take towards myself--and I find it helpful.

You need to take it upon yourself to find this stuff interesting. Ultimately, if you don't manage to do that, you'll fail in the larger sense, even if you win an A for the course. They question, of course, is how to do that.

Hurdy gurdy offers some good advice on this score: learn the context. Where were these people writing? What art were they making? What wars were they fighting? What ideas and principles were they being torn between as they tried to understand their own lives?

You need to ask yourself some questions: What interests you? And how does what you're reading relate to that? Or how does it fail to relate to that? One useful technique for overcoming your boredom is to use it more productively: ask why you're bored. What is it, as exactly as possible, that that puts you off about Edwards (etc.)? What does he fail to consider? Or what, specifically does he harp on needlessly? Consider whether his contemporaries offered alternatives to his way of thinking, and how your own perspective began to emerge and distinguish itself from his.

Appreciate what may be strange and alien about seventeenth century thinking, and see how and where you might find in it challenges to your own point of view, or how it relates to questions and concerns that seem immediately urgent and interesting now.

On preview: For extra credit (and after reading Flitcraft's excellent post) as you contemplate the tedious Mr. Edwards etc., perhaps have a look at There Will Be Blood (or Upton Sinclair's Oil!) alongside this.

Discuss!
posted by washburn at 10:06 PM on March 20, 2008

When I have to do this, I do it in two passes -- the first is read aloud, which allows the text to percolate into my brain, and also lets me have fun working on pronounciation or tone if interest flags. Then the second, read-and-note pass is much easier as I already have the text mapped in dark parts of my brain, and I can glean what's required far more easily.
posted by bonaldi at 10:17 PM on March 20, 2008

See if you can find contemporary facsimiles, rather than normalised texts in modern anthologies. That's more challenging, but it feels more 'in its right place'. There's a texture to late 1600s devotional literature (or conduct literature, a related genre) that seems, at least from my perspective, tightly bound to the way it lies on the page in original (or near-original) printed form.

Also, read it aloud. Act it out.

But as others have said, you need to have a degree of sympathy with the bind of predestination. That's to say, you need to appreciate that these people believe that there's a hellhound on their trail.
posted by holgate at 10:19 PM on March 20, 2008

bobber writes "The main author giving me trouble is Jonathan Edwards, specifically 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God'"

You've got to be kidding me. SITHOAG is great. "Like spiders dangling above a flame" and all that.

Look, have fun with it. Read it out loud, imitating (your image of) Edwards. Pretend you're Oral Roberts or Jeremiah Wright. Read it angrily until spittle flies form your lips; cast your arms up to heaven as you appeal to God; let the fear show on your face as you behold the fires of the sinners' Hell; sway low like the sweet chariot that will take them home or to torment.

A sermon isn't a dry treatise to be calmly read. It's a performance, a dialog between pastor and flock, a desperate attempt to save sinning sheep from the terrors of Hell. Get into it; get sweaty; feel the Spirit moving within you as you shout and whisper, as you demand and as you cajole your flock and beseech the Lord God of Israel, the Lord Our God, as you beseech Him for the unworthy souls of your congregation!

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Then read it drily and tremulously and very dubiously, like an Anglican "tea-with-the-vicar" priest, a secret agnostic in the See of Canterbury. As if that role were played by Mr. Bean or John Inman's fruity haberdasher from "Are You Being Served". Pick slowly over the sermon, intersperse "ah-ah-um"s, look doubtfully around, worried you're offending the little old ladies in your oh-so-mild Anglican parish.

Or perform it some other way. As Rocky Balboa, or Tony Soprano, or Katharine Hepburn's Rose Sayer rom "The African Queen".

But perform it. Have fun with it. It's a play's script, it's a great sermon, and you're in starring role (well, actaully God is, but you have the best lines). Play it.
posted by orthogonality at 11:13 PM on March 20, 2008

Wait...are you talking about cotton mather-type stuff. I had to read a semester of that type of stuff as a high school junior. I had NO attention span when reading, so it was really hard.

It took a while, but I realized that that writing was kinda creepy. Fire and brimstone kinda writing...kinda scary (No offense to anyone...if you're a puritan).

I put on some loud beethoven, and I just went through it. Just tear it up. Read it once as fast as you can...then do another reading, slowing it down a bit. You'll have digested it, and you're gonna understand the emotion and feeling of the stuff with the accompanying music.

Good luck, you'll be a better person for getting through it.
posted by hal_c_on at 11:43 PM on March 20, 2008

A friend of mine used to get a little tipsy before plowing into Confucian texts-the extra effort it took to read the passage meant that it kept her interest better. This does not work for everyone.

Worked great for me, though. You bring the book with you to the pub and nothing else, and go somewhere you won't know anybody, somewhere boring. I did sometimes forget endings thanks to the beer level at the end, but.
posted by kmennie at 12:32 AM on March 21, 2008

I am studying some rather dry material (thankfully not sermons!) and I have done well with reading it aloud and recording it, then listening to it on my mp3 player when I'm walking to work. I don't force myself to pay particularly close attention at either stage, but the brute repetition is drilling the stuff into my head.
posted by happyturtle at 1:03 AM on March 21, 2008

I've had to read dozens of pre-Revolutionary political pamphlets (even more boring than sermons!), and the only thing that's helped was skimming in a certain way. First, you have to realize that a lot of this material was based on fixed phrases and outlines. Once you can recognize these, your job is to scan over the text to see if anything breaks that mold, or phrases something in an unusual way. That's generally the most valuable part of the text. Everything else is usually much less important.

Also, seconding finding facsimiles. For instance, you might have access to the Early American Imprints database, which should contain all of this material. The typography and presentation really make the text much more fun to read. Trust me.
posted by nasreddin at 3:16 AM on March 21, 2008

Seventeenth-century sermons boring? Never! (Full disclosure: I wrote my PhD on seventeenth-century sermons.)

Don't forget that 'Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God' was the inspiration for one of the greatest American poems ever written. Why not read the sermon alongside the poem -- in dialogue with it, so to speak -- and see how they relate to each other?

What are we in the hands of the great God?
It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
In battle array against the fire
And treason crackling in your blood;
For the wild thorns grow tame
And will do nothing to oppose the flame;
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

Read the whole poem, aloud to yourself, slowly. 'How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?' Doesn't that send a shiver down your spine? I can think of many words to describe 'Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God' -- thrilling, terrifying, shocking, horrifying, repulsive -- but 'boring'? Never. If you find it boring, you're not reading it right.

The reason why you're being asked to read Jonathan Edwards alongside John Woolman is (I'd guess) because you're being encouraged to do a 'compare and contrast' exercise -- comparing Edwards the strict Calvinist, apostle of fire and brimstone, with Woolman the gentle Quaker, apostle of sweetness and light. Read the two quickly -- not aiming for total comprehension, but for a sense of the overall tone and 'feel' of the text -- and see if you perceive any difference between them. If so, how would you describe that difference? Which writer do you find more attractive? Whose congregation would you rather be sitting in?

Finally, try to look at 'Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God' in a longer perspective. What happened to that Calvinist tradition? You could argue that it died out, some time in the nineteenth century, as people gradually abandoned the doctrines of predestination, total depravity and eternal damnation. Alternatively you could argue that it never really went away, it just went underground. This is the underlying theme of Lowell's poem -- the suggestion that there is something in the American psyche that still responds very strongly to the Calvinist strain of melancholy and despair. ('Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!' as Lowell writes in another poem.) These are big questions. We all know the importance of religion in American life, and understanding the history of American Protestantism is a big part of understanding the history of America. Maybe Edwards and Woolman can help you do that.
posted by verstegan at 3:24 AM on March 21, 2008 [2 favorites]

Sometimes I'll read each sentence as though it ends in an exclamation mark. Can be quite funny. Usually though when I have a ton of boring material to get through I just try to plow through it. Lots of caffeine helps. Really intense music that you're very familiar with (and can therefore ignore while reading) is a big help too. And make sure your computer is off.
posted by sero_venientibus_ossa at 4:20 AM on March 21, 2008

Of course someone with a PhD on seventeenth-century sermons chimed in--ahh, the joys of ask metafilter.
posted by umbú at 6:39 AM on March 21, 2008

This is a great thread! Having read way too much boring crap myself. I've utilized the above mentioned methods: doing a little side reading to understand the author's life and times will make him a much more vivid person - figure out what might be causing him to write what he does. Pull back and examine the format and over all subject of the piece and determine how the author's style or topic changes over time and why. And yes, the mocking! You must find a lot of what he's discussing just outrageous by our standards. But, also try to think about what it would have been like for him -- is he actually really liberal in his piece for his time.

The best suggestion I could give you for all your classes is to find at least one thing (a literary theory?) that's interesting to you and exploit it, hunt for it, apply it to everything. i.e. for me, I was really interested in homo-eroticism, gender roles and the hierarchy of power (queer theory helped me get through college). If I was reading that stuff I'd have a field day. It might not be really important to the test or even the class, but it'll help you get through the reading and if you end up having to write a paper it might be a useful perspective (or perhaps for another class later on).

Good luck - and don't stress, you'll get through it.
posted by Craig at 9:41 AM on March 21, 2008

If I just can't get through a dense text, I translate it into my own style. It forces me to understand every sentence enough to rewrite it. I try to make my translation as snarky and smartass as possible (because I get off on that) so it keeps me entertained.
posted by jewzilla at 6:59 PM on March 21, 2008

In terms of just getting through the texts, I find large amounts of coffee and sitting somewhere when people will see me if I goof off (like a coffee shop) is the only thing that can get me through something like this.

But in terms of being able to analyse - I find that if I just start taking notes, I take way too many. I once spent about 6 months taking notes on some 27 seventeenth century pamphlets debating drainage (which possibly be even more confusing and boring than sermons, especially when they get into discussinng the conditions of specific rivers, in minute detail, but without maps. I wish they were as exciting as political pamphelts.) But I ended up with so many notes that I had to take notes from my notes to write anything. I now have awesome notes on those pamphlets - a binderful - which is good because I never want to read any of them ever again.

Paraphasing works -- but it might be best to skim, and then go back and paraphrase each sermon. (People do this for whole history books for examinations.) Maybe take notes of the major points/heads of the sermon as he goes along - not trying to summarise it, but like a roadmap through the argument. You can always go back for details if you need to write an analysis of them. I also find sticky notes very useful - I take little notes and stick it to the page, and I can find where I got them from. I do throw the page number on, just in case it falls out.
posted by jb at 9:58 PM on March 21, 2008