Most of us have been cornered by friends and family who insist on telling an old story that seems to go on and on. Generally, these stories can be squeezed into about a tenth of the words used without an appreciable loss of the story’s meaning or its essence. Reader’s Digest and therapists have made a good living doing that very thing. There are probably lots of really good reasons why the extra words are used, but they are hard to rationalize, at least for me. But that has not stopped me (and a lot of my colleagues) from embellishing lectures. Most of the time, these captive audiences endure my old stories without obvious discomfort. That is, of course, if you don’t count the occasional “glassy-eyed stare,” as my eighth-grade world history teacher called it.

More than once, my friend John Pafford and I would lose interest in Mr. Williford’s compelling story of daily life in third-century Rome, and he would catch us looking out the window. With a crisp snap of his fingers, he’d call our names (without looking at us), all the while mopping his brow with his white handkerchief. Once again we were walking the dusty cobblestones of the Apian Way . . . at least until we could see the busses start lining up. I’m sure Rome’s smells and its side streets were memorable, at least to Mr. Williford, but after lunch on a warm southern Georgia afternoon, I just wanted the Joe Friday version of history—“just the facts, ma’am.” It was too hot for the details. I didn’t know it at the time, but some of the details took root (that’s probably why this article is so long).

One of the assignments in that class was an oral book report on a historical novel from any time period. As a poor reader, I had to choose a book with certain criteria. It had to be short and there had to be a CliffsNotes version. The Red Badge of Courage fit the bill. In just a few pages, I got it. A young boy, not much older than me, went off to war full of himself and talking big. But when he saw what war was and what it did, he panicked. With that bare-bones outline, I could fill in the blanks with applications from my own life, much like I imagined Stephen Crane would. I told that story in Mr. Williford’s class; to my surprise, he apparently liked it, and I learned a lot.

Unlike my fast-reading colleagues, I am probably a little more open to the role of CliffsNotes. Most of the people I know with initials behind their names tend to think of these essential aids in my education a little like the Romans thought of the Barbarians at their gates: These mongrels will ruin it all. Maybe so. But as I look around, I find “the less is more” principle in almost everything—from Thoreau’s doctrine of simplicity to Willie Nelson’s suggestion that, “maybe it’s time to get back to the basics of life.”

While this may not be Luckenbach, Texas, there is a real market in the back-to-basics movement, at least the “summaries division.” John Pafford, a lot of poor and/or busy readers, and I may not be the only ones who know about CliffsNotes. In a recent New York Times article, Peter Myers noted: “The business of selling executive summaries of business books is booming.” Busy executives from Washington to Wall Street may not have the time to plow through Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, but she or he can get someone to read an abridged version in less than twenty minutes. Every morning, the president of the United States has a staff that pores over the details of the daily news to give him the “executive summary.” I suspect that he, like me, fills in the blanks.

The good news for readers similar to me is that I think I found the CliffsNotes for scripture. As a young Christian, I was repeatedly encouraged to read the Bible “cover to cover,” but at a rate of about four minutes a page, it was daunting. Fortunately, I stumbled across a handful of scriptures in Matthew’s gospel (22: 37–40) that seem to summarize this most intimidating of all books. When a lawyer asked what all of this was about, Jesus replies:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

According to the last sentence, every adjective and adverb, noun and preposition in the scriptures point to those two golden principles. The stories told in the text are of people who have done it right and people who have not; they show the consequences of those who love and those who don’t; and they give some handy examples to follow if you’re still confused. Consequently, if you’re a poor reader or just too busy to read the whole thing, these CliffsNotes can be a real lifesaver. That, of course, is not to suggest that the full-length version of the scripture is unimportant. It is. However, if I can conjugate and then exegete the various forms of agape and can’t actually do that troublesome verb, that seems to have the tinny sound of tinkling brass.

As I understand CliffsNotes, they provide the basic outline, and then we’re asked to fill in the blanks with our own imagination. That may be the secret to real learning and real living. Throughout history, we have tried to distill powerful and big ideas, from Einstein’s elegant summary of space and time (E=mc²), to political cartoons that rattle regimes and shape our discourse. These fundamental notions are the skeletons over which we have draped our individual lives and made meaning of existence. The devil is not in the details, but individual lives may be. Anyway, that’s the long and short of my story.

Gary Riggins is the director of graduate studies in education at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.