Banned Books Week this year runs from September 25 until October 1. Begun in 1982, it was founded in response to a sudden increase in the number of books challenged in libraries, bookstores, and schools and advocates for, and celebrates, the freedom to read in spite of censorship.

The theme for 2016 is diversity; when the American Library Association compiled a list of 2015's most challenged books, it noticed a pattern in which 90 percent of the books were categorized as having "diverse content" -- written by or about people of color, LGBTQIA people, and disabled people.

In a society that often works to invalidate or erase marginalized identities, diversity can be a frightening thing, threatening by its existence to shake up the familiar, the constructs we understand. But when the familiar and the comfortable are unjust and oppressive to any people, it, not the existence and assertion of identities, must be challenged.

And literature is a powerful tool to achieve such an end. Although individuals can never live the experience of another human being, books bring us into the thoughts and emotions of another, invoking empathy, forcing us to view the world we know and our privileges within it in a new light we never could have comprehended before. The canon of what our society describes as "classic" literature has, for too long, been dominated with the voice of those identities holding privilege, serving to reinforce entrenched sentiments. When diversity emerges in literature, the reader cannot help but look at the world with new eyes, new perspective, a newly opened mind; like the scales falling from the eyes of Paul of Tarsus, constructed absolutes collapse in the face of the infinite perspectives of other human beings and we are forced to think and question.

In this way books can change people, and change the world.

My first experience with real literature was when my high school English teacher assigned John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath over the summer before freshman year.

I hated it.

I was raised in a very conservative Christian household of moral absolutes and dichotomies -- an absolute binary of light and darkness, and the "good guys" in the didactic novels I read were without the taint of sin or moral ambiguity. My inner world was Manichaean, and my mind resisted ambiguity or shades of gray as a sinful and worldly slippery slope into vice; God had laid down the moral absolutes, unshakeable. And I only spent time with other "pure" Christian friends who reinforced my beliefs.

I was scandalized by Grapes of Wrath.

I was horrified that Steinbeck had dared actually use the vernacular of the people and the downtrodden -- it included profanity. I was disgusted by Steinbeck's portrayal of Tom Joad, who had spent time in jail, as a hero; I was shocked by Reverend Casy, who discussed sexual desires, and thought it a sacrilegious way to portray a holy man.

My first experience with cognitive dissonance, I rejected the new. And in doing so I rejected my first opportunity to gaze upon the "pores of the face of life," as Ray Bradbury expressed it. And I missed out on the stark, bare, desperately human beauty of the novel.

Absolutism is not life, and it is not literature. What I failed to understand was that literature is not a morality play or a lesson in good behavior, as the children's books I'd read often were, but rather a celebration, or lamentation, or most often simply a portrayal, in some light, of life itself and all its contradictions and complexities and irrationalities and desperate beauty.

The purpose of literature is not to indoctrinate us but to provoke us, to jar us from our sleepwalking and force us to again see and feel and experience life rather than merely exist.

And perhaps that is exactly what I feared. I feared that if I exposed myself to different ideas, if I allowed Nietzsche to whisper in my ear, "God is dead," and to entertain such notions, then I would be forced to question why I existed, what I believed in, what kind of world should come to be, if my reason and answers to those questions was no longer certain. It would be agonizing and confusing and would put me in conflict with my parents' desires and I would contend with nihilism as I proceeded to create my own answers.

Which inevitably happened, of course, two years later as I studied more literature, but now I delighted in it, as if I'd been wearing foggy glasses all my life and never realized it, but only now was beginning to clean them. If total understanding of complete human truth is asymptotic, then the more we read, the closer our graphs approach it.

We can never approach understanding, though, if our truths are shaped exclusively by the dominant narrative of the privileged, those who benefit and control under a racist, capitalist, heteronormative patriarchy. Equality, justice, understanding, love, can only come to be when voices of diversity are amplified.

And literature can also offer a glimmer of hope. When before I had fretted that the decline of morality would lead to social collapse, Grapes of Wrath taught me that human beings are never all good or all evil. We're neither, we simply exist in response to the circumstances that shape us, and often surprise ourselves by our own capacity for love and compassion living in systems which try to crush it out of us.

And that's beautiful. And as much as I feared worldly literature would pull me away from God, as it turned out, I learned to love rather than judge, and have hope for the future -- far more in the spirit of Jesus and true Christianity than any Bible-thumping list of rules and regulations.

I would like to make one final remark, however: I am saddened to see many individuals decry trigger warnings as a violation of free speech and expression without truly understanding the concepts or why it is necessary. A trigger warning in no way silences a work of literature; it only recognizes the lived experiences of people, and the difficult times they may have gone through either personal or by way of institutionalized oppression, and serves as a "heads-up" to alert them of what they will encounter to prevent traumatizing memories to resurface. Certainly, we shouldn't hide from difficult things, but nor should we sacrifice mental health on the altar of "deal with it." Freedom of choice means the freedom to decide what one chooses to expose oneself to. Trigger warnings do not censor art any more than allergy warnings censor peanut butter.

Happy Banned Books Week. Challenge yourself, and care for yourself.