It would be wrong to divorce the purposes of writing with the ultimate goal of spiritual quest. Writing is a spiritual practice, an attempt to draw lessons from life so as to shed light on religious truths. Literature, professors should remember, is deep with meaning, and the ultimate seriousness of its attempts to delineate the deep mysteries deserve respect. To ponder the meaning of a poem is not a light matter, easily done overnight.

Moderners might sneer at the stuff of religion. Causes wars, one might mumble. We are too jaded to wait any longer in gardens on Easter morning expecting a risen Savior. However, the truth is that we have perfect divinity within, and it is anyone's humble duty to teach so, and this is what written works have been after since they came into being. Books as we know them. Novels, epics, poems. The modern short story.

Don Quixote brought us into the modern world of doubt and skepticism, a beautiful half-baked Christ no one in right mind would believe in, a courteous earthy disbeliever willing to suspend his disbelief by his side, as if so we could be made to laugh at ourselves in the act of belief and faith. Shakespeare, anticipating the coming rise and fall of the great empire, went in search of Buddhism in a time of political turmoil over belief's written laws. (These days we all live the beat-up life of Quixote, have our moments on the heath with Lear and clown.)

By law of symmetry an unexpected common wise-person, of real flesh and blood and no fancy story, will come out upon the stage of literature and claim again the ability to believe in that which is after all perfectly logical and healthy and all-round good. And so will the poor old wandering knight will be restored and recognized, as on the road to Emmaus, and literature itself shall be recognized as something wholesome and good for relationships and not just irrelevance.

A respect for the act of literature, be it reading, be it writing, the time has come for.