Banks of books

I enjoy walking into a bookshop in which the entrance is crowned with colorful book jackets that lure you as if into a cave that demands exploration, and despite the knowledge that you will be trapped for an hour or more and emerge with less cash in your pockets, but dozens of sparkling ideas in your mind. You keep going, and you are grateful.

We have such shop on a corner of West Main Street in Mystic, Connecticut. It’s called Bank Books and, glory be! is open every night of the week, including Sundays, till eight o’clock—a fact, I guess, well known to Christianity Today’s Editor in Chief (Russell Moore), who in his end-of-year issue shares some neat observations on the place books now occupy in our daily lives. Books, he says, books invite us to ask questions, ponder, and even change our minds.

Some people wonder, he writes, whether books really matter in an image-driven social media age, though the CT staff believe they matter more than ever.

“The nation, Moore observes, is polarized because all the thinking we seem to do is expected to be immediate and public. If one doesn’t have a position posted, as soon as some question emerges, another arises, and someone else is likely to ask whether he or she is really one of us, or will suggest that the silence is deafening.

That’s why we need books, adds Moore. A book offers a conversation and an argument. As we read, we ask, But what about … ? and we linger over the possible answers.There’s a big difference between reconsidering a viewpoint and losing an argument, says Moore. And he reminds us (speaking of the Spirit, through Jesus) that “ the wind blows wherever it pleases. But you do not know where it comes from. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it’s going. (John 3:8). Sometimes that sound is the turning of pages, and not until much later do we realize that all of our questions have changed.

That’s what happened to me when I realized that

there’s so much to learn from the tunnel of colorful dust-jackets that fill us with crisp new ideas even though we know we’re unlikely to reach the final pages of the book we’re holding, which, in this case, was Tony Reinke’s God, Technology, etc. (Crossway, 2022)

For example, James Kelly, Founder and CEO of Faith Tech, comments: “Reinke’s book is a must-read for any Christian seeking to understand God’s view of technology, fusing historical wisdom and practical application to give a rich, Christian view of technology in a cultural moment when technology [is often] viewed more as a harm than a help to many Christians, though it also brings fresh insights into often overlooked passages of Scripture.”

Kelly says Reinke offers an approach to technology that is ethical without being moralistic, careful without being restrictive, and positive without being naive—which confirms editor Moore’s love of books and the Scriptures.