I am writing this column a few days before heading off to vacation, or “villa,” as Jesuit lingo has it. I plan to spend a large chunk of that time enjoying one of the finest pleasures August has to offer, reading on the beach.

While “beach read” often connotes less-than-serious material, I have taken all kinds of books to the beach, from literary novels to science fiction to books of essays. Last summer I read most of Czech priest Tomas Halik’s The Afternoon of Christianity while on the Jersey Shore. Once it was Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam.

The beauty of reading on vacation, whether the material is pulp or poetry, whether the site is the beach or the porch or sometimes even an airplane, is that the reading is uninterrupted, an oasis of real attention in a desert of what is otherwise just “content.”

The cover story of the August issue of The Atlantic this month was Rose Horowitch’s “The End of Reading Is Here,” documenting the transition into what some are calling a postliterate age. You should (ahem) read the whole article, but one way of summarizing it might be to say that the skill of literacy may survive even if the deeper practice of reading atrophies. Reading, at least in a form sustained beyond a few paragraphs, may come to seem elite and archaic, a prose equivalent of churning butter at home: practiced by some for enjoyment or as an affectation, and arguably yielding a superior end result, but not required in any real sense.

America’s James T. Keane, who among other distinctions manages our book review section, responded to the Atlantic piece with an exploration of how the practice of reading has shaped Catholic faith. He argues that reading is “not essential, mind you—let us not pretend we are more faithful or faith-filled than our illiterate ancestors—but central, at least in our time.” The interiority that develops in a deep encounter with the written word becomes holy ground for the encounter with God.

That article ran online with the title “No one reads anymore. But you should if you want to be a good Catholic.” And you should. You can consider this column an invitation to do so.

In fact, if you Google “reading and America magazine,” you’ll see that America’s editors have long been concerned with sustaining the practice of reading. Of course, part of that motive may simply be the self-interest of writers needing readers, but it also reflects the fact that any good writer begins as a passionate reader and remains grateful for the reading that sustains one’s own writing.

Even while the majority of what America produces is in textual form, we have established a beachhead in postliterate media as well, especially in our podcasts, which are now also distributed in video form on YouTube. Increasingly, we are offering subscribers online panel discussions (a wordy description, but far less ugly than the neologism “webinar”) exploring major topics from our coverage in a conversational format. When I meet people while traveling, my rough estimate is that slightly more than half of those who talk to me about America refer to a podcast episode. There is something about the immediacy of the human voice that invites response in a way that even the best prose may not achieve.

But I sometimes wonder if those listening to the conversations—and even we editors, who are the ones engaged in them—realize just how much reading lies behind them. We are lucky to spend many of our waking hours reading, just to do our jobs, and without those hours, we would not be worth listening to on podcasts or on panels.

It is tempting to say that we do all that reading so that you don’t have to, but that would get it exactly backward. We do all that reading so that you can read better, as one might rely on a marked trail for hiking.

Who has marked out those trails for your own reading? Whose reading do you trust?

I have come to recognize, while experimenting with artificial intelligence, that it is that question, about whose reading is trustworthy, that leaves me uneasy about the answers we can get from large language models. I do not know how to measure my trust in their “reading,” even though they have “read” far more than I or any other human ever will.

I hope that skepticism does not imply an outright Luddite rejection of A.I., which I would not endorse. Rather, it is a concern about sawing off the branch that we and the L.L.M.s are both standing on—all that reading done by all the readers who have marked out the trails for us.

Let me end, though, on a more hopeful note. One of the joys of reading well is precisely that act of trust required to step into a world of words and thought that we did not create for ourselves. While such trust should not be offered blindly, the practice of offering it at all may be a good spiritual practice to counter the endless scroll of text that all too often replaces reading these days. And perhaps, just perhaps, it may help us learn to inhabit this world that we did not create for ourselves with greater trust in God.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.