Let me introduce you to The Fourth Watch, a newsletter from First Things. For those who do not catch the admittedly obscure biblical allusion, the fourth watch refers to the stretch between 3 and 6 a.m. when the night is darkest and dawn, while soon to break, is most in doubt. We are told that it was during this time that the disciples, caught in a sea storm and at the point of losing hope, glimpsed Jesus walking toward them as one who commands the howling winds and the watery depths (Mark 6:48). The story is both testimony to Jesus’s divinity and an exhortation to the Church where she must look in times of maximal distress and despair. Our hope is not in our poor powers, but in the Lord.

The Fourth Watch seeks to alert its readers to the various issues of the moment, including the tempests that threaten St. Peter’s Barque to the point of sinking. It will not, however, provide yet another occasion for doomscrolling. Just as there are dark things happening in our world, there are also signs of impending dawn. The accent will be on the hope the God revealed in Jesus 
Christ provides. Readers will be pointed to commentary from First Things and elsewhere that offers acute analysis of our present storms and, whenever possible, a path through them.

I begin with a familiar trope of bemoaning the state of youth today. I am a college professor and have been teaching undergraduates for over twenty-five years. Accordingly, I have had a front-row to the well-documented decline in basic skills of reading, writing, and speaking. For many of my compatriots in the humanities, few things bring more pleasure than chronicling how little our students know about history, how little they read, how few words they know, or how unwilling they are to consider opinions at odds with their own. It’s a form of gallows humor for those of us paid to lead students through challenging texts, philosophies, and works of art. It is 
untoward that we complain so, since we neither crave nor are capable of other work. And yet, that fact does not change the basic truth of the challenge we face. Our students do not arrive at college prepared to do the work previous generations did.

Mark Bauerlein has written about the phenomenon of “a-literacy—being able to read but not wanting to,” and its connection to the rise of nonbelief among the young. More recently, Wessie du Toit’s “The Future of Reading” in the June issue of First Things argues that those who read for pleasure belong to a cultural subset akin to those who still buy vinyl records. There
 is a political dimension as well. Those who do not or cannot read cannot imagine a reality beyond what society has provided. Frederick Douglass connected his hatred of being enslaved to learning to read. George Orwell warned that you cannot think what you cannot speak. Writing is
in even worse shape. The rise of “educational” AI in the form of ChatGPT and Grammarly means that a student can complete an assignment without either reading the book or writing about it.

That’s the bad news, and there’s plenty of it. It is, however, only part of the story and not the most important part. The good news is that it has never been easier to teach what I wish to teach than it is now. What my students lack in literary skills they make up for by their desire for something different than what our world offers. When I first started teaching in the late 1990’s I noted the near absence of existential urgency on the part of undergraduates. It is difficult to teach “the big questions” when no one is asking them. One could, of course, seek to frighten their young souls of the dangers of relativism: “Don’t you realize that you can’t distinguish the life of Adolf Hitler from that of Mother Theresa or the aesthetic accomplishments of Mozart from Brittany Spears?” A lot of effort went into such pedagogies of fear but with little result. The simple fact is that it is very difficult to convince someone that they should be scared when they are not.

What’s different now is that such “dog and pony shows” are no longer needed. The students, or a good number of them, know something is amiss. They are well aware of the downsides of a world fashioned by the iPhone, social media, and now, generative AI. Many are nostalgic for a time before the internet and envious of previous unconnected generations. Consequently, they are prepared to read authors who lay out the problems in a stark manner. I have had
 success with articles by Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, and Paul Kingsnorth. I keep waiting for The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt to become dated, but so far, no. Dystopian novels have a particular resonance. Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, P.D. James’ Children of Men, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro explore, each in their own way, what is essential to human life by imagining its absence.

The news gets even better. Dissatisfaction with the present creates an openness to books, short stories, poems, movies, and works of art which reveal the various ways goodness and heroism can prevail in a sinful world. There is no need for me to give a list of such books, but I 
can attest of the power of Pope Francis’ favorite book, Alessandro Manzoni’s Catholic masterpiece, The Betrothed. The misadventures of two young Catholics who wish for nothing more than to be married allows the consideration of virtually every sin and every virtue within 
the human arsenal. Through it all, one detects the hand of the providential God guiding them toward greater holiness and, ultimately, reunion. A decade ago, I would have considered it too pious, too Christian, but not now. The insanities of the present moment present a field ripe for the harvest. If the recognition that something is wrong constitutes the first step towards salvation, our culture is doing the work for us. We exist at the fourth watch and need only look to the one who brings the dawn.