Orality at Home
The language of postmodernism.
by Dawn Herzon Jewell
posted 3/17/2006 09:30 a.m.

Much of the world's oral majority can read, but doesn't. Sound familiar? The National Endowment for the Arts reported in 2004 that more than half of American adults no longer engage in literary reading. They are what the 2004 Lausanne paper "Making Disciples of Oral Learners" calls "secondary oral learners," people who choose to be entertained, to learn, and to communicate via oral means.

"The storytelling around the campfire that we view as the practice of the ancients has been replaced by storytelling from the flickering light of the television screen," says Grant Lovejoy, the Southern Baptists' director of oral strategies. The rest