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Perhaps I ought to preface my remarks this morning with a trigger warning. I am going to use the F word. Yes, today is Mardi Gras which in French means Fat Tuesday. It’s the day we stock up on carbohydrates – like pancakes – before the beginning of Lent. But “fat”, apparently, is a word we should no longer be using in a public place. “Sensitivity readers” have edited out such words from Roald Dahl’s children’s books. Augustus Gloop is no longer enormously fat, now he is simply enormous – which may or may not be any thinner. The argument, of course, is that our moral sensitivities change, and so, inevitably, does what we deem acceptable or unacceptable. But I still find it hard to appreciate the logic: Dahl’s references to wonky noses remain unexpunged – despite being an obviously anti-Semitic trope used by a notoriously anti-Semitic writer. Where’s the consistency? Heaven knows, of course, what sensitivity readers would make of the Bible. It’s a collection of books replete with lots of nasty bits. Perhaps not all that much about fat shaming, but there is murder and incest and all kinds of horrific violence. But I do think the nasty bits are really rather important to include – not, obviously, as an encouragement to behave in such a way, but as an acknowledgment that we live in a world in which such things exist. And furthermore, that if God is going to be of any use to us, then He has to manifest himself in the midst of a world in which terror is real. A sanitized Bible is no good to anyone. The real problem, I think, is not so much about what books say but more about how we have learnt – or not learnt - to read them. Texts shape our mental world, of course. But one of the most important aspects of education is to develop techniques of reading that both enter into the imaginative world of a text, but also place us at some degree of critical distance from it. We interrogate them just as they interrogate us. Indeed, in my view, sensitivity readers and religious fundamentalists share an unlikely similarity: they both imagine texts that overwhelm us, that demand our compliance, over and against which we are helpless. By contrast, serious religious traditions have long taught people how to read, and I don’t mean the simple phonics of the thing, but how to have a critical conversation with the text. Whether it be the Rabbis continuously studying Talmud or Monks engaging with the beauty of illustrated manuscripts, words open up the world in all its glory and darkness, not close it down. My question with sensitivity readers is not so much whether they disrespect the text, it’s rather more whether they disrespect the reader?