On a related topic — "spiritual reading"

Spiritual reading, designated lectio divina by our ancestors, has fallen on bad times.  It has always been a prized arrow in the quiver of those determined to cultivate a God-aware life, but has suffered a severe blunting in our century.  This particular arrow has lost its point more through ignorance than indifference or malice, ignorance of the sense that "spiritual" carries.  For the modifier "spiritual" in spiritual reading does not refer to the content of what is read but to the way in which a book is read.  Spiritual reading does not mean reading on spiritual or religious subjects, but reading any book that comes to hand in a spiritual way, which is to say, listening to the Spirit, alert to intimations of God.

Reading today is largely a consumer activity — people devour books, magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers for information that will fuel their ambition or careers or competence.  The faster the better, the more the better.  It is either analytical, figuring things out; or it is frivolous, killing time.  Spiritual reading is mostly a lover's activity — a dalliance with words, reading as much between the lines as in the lines themselves.  It is leisurely, as ready to reread an old book as to open a new one.  It is playful, anticipating the pleasures of friendship.  It is prayerful, convinced that all honest words can involve us in some way, if we read with our hearts as well as our heads, in an eternal conversation that got its start in the Word that "became flesh."  Spiritual reading is at home with Homer as well as Hosea.

Spiritual reading, for most of us, requires either the recovery or acquisition of skills not in current repute: leisurely, repetitive, reflective reading.  In this we are not reading primarily for information, but for companionship.  Baron Friedrich von Hügel once said it was like sucking on a lozenge in contrast to gulping a meal.  It is a way of reading that shapes the heart at the same time that it informs the intellect, sucking out the marrow-nourishment from the bone-words.

— Eugene Peterson, Take and Read