As #BarbaraChristian, #OctaviaButler, and #DorianCorey remind us--reading is a sacred ritual. To properly honor our living and dearly departed intellectuals and creators, we must approach our reading practice with the same level of intention that we bring to our rituals for honoring Spirit, our Ancestors, and ourSelves.

We are often taught to think of reading as consumption and led to believe that eating letters until we are bloated and hoarding them in shelves in our minds somehow proves our capacity for understanding. This approach is limited and limiting and its promise of intellectual acumen is a lie. 

Moreover, the practice of communing with academic texts requires a heightened level of intention in order to (at the very least) understand them and (ideally) draw pleasure from communing with them. Academic reading is often taught to be suspicious, hyper-critical and extractive. Academic Communion however, is discerning rather than suspicious, generous rather than hyper-critical, and generative rather than extractive. 

This guide will teach you how to approach reading-as-communion rather than reading-as-consumption and provides strategies for engaging academic texts more easefully and meaningfully.