Author: John Collins

The scholarship committee has announced the scholarship recipients for the 2014-2015 academic year. The recipients are Dustin Engle, Kylie Engle, Kinsey Ford, Emily Johns, Mikiah Dykes, Molly Burt, Kaynan Anderson, Kialyn Anderson, Sage Tokach, Matthew Barlow and Alise Murray.

These scholarships were made possible by the generosity of members, former members and their families through memorial gifts and/or donations to the scholarship fund. Awards are presented in honor of the following persons: Eugene, Hilda and Alice Carlile, Milton and Ferne Mohler, Carroll and Emma Jane Scott, Dr. E. F. Stark, Valgene and Harriet Slingsby, and Clara Shirk.

In today’s voice of the day, C. S. Lewis makes the case for reading old books (and I would add, old theology books and old biblical commentaries, especially).

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” — C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Saint Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

Lewis lived and wrote in the 1900’s, but I am quite sure that the twenty-first century also has it’s blind spots. Books are the media through which the perspectives of other centuries are most readily available to us.

Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan