Book Hunters in the New Dark Ages


In the Fall edition of The City, a publication of Houston Baptist University, Paul D. Miller discusses the importance of being a book hunter. He writes:

The times call for a new generation of book hunters. Like the book hunters of the Middle Ages, the new book hunters take it as their mission to uncover and salvage the best of what came before:  to cherish it; hold it up for praise and emulation; study it, above all, to love it and pass it on. The new book hunters sift the cultural artifacts of the world - in our era, not limited to books - to separate the wheat from the chaff, to weed out the unworthy and cultivate the fruitful and edifying, to recover the scattered, forgotten gems amidst the avalanche of trash. The new book hunters are not rescuing works from mold and decay but, what is sometimes just as dangerous, from obscurity, neglect, ridicule, and scorn. 

He goes on to describe the Bible as one of these great books:

The original and still-greatest of the great books is the Bible. Even atheists should recognize that it is the most influential and probably most widely-read book ever produced in human civilization. Familiarity with the Bible is a basic requirement for even a perfunctory understanding of history, literature, art, philosophy, religion, or society. Its removal from school curricula was the victory of barbarism. It need not - should not - be taught as God's truth in public schools, but it should be taught for its literary and historical value in every school on the planet. If you have not read the Bible cover-to-cover, you are not an educated adult and your understanding of every other book you read will be still-born.

This is a great article and it has caused me to create a reading list, which Miller also discusses in the article, which consists of books I might otherwise not have considered re-reading or reading to become well-rounded and better able to discover the "gems" from the "trash".

You can find the Fall edition of The City here. The article is on page 45.

Stand firm in Christ,
Chase




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