Good Bookstores: If We Ignore Them, They’ll Go Away

I remember in 1980 the thrill of opening my first newsprint catalogue of a new company called “Christian Book Distributors.” I was a theological graduate student and “CBD,” as it came to be known, offered remarkable savings particularly on Big Books and even more on Big Sets. I bought a lot from CBD and asked my family and friends for Christmas presents from CBD as I built my library. What a wonderful find for a financially struggling young scholar!

CBD is now christianbook.com, and newsprint catalogues have been replaced by websites. It’s still exciting to come across a great deal on something expensive. But something else has been happening for a decade or more that I never thought I would see.

Bookstores are disappearing. Not all stores, of course. But specialist bookstores, academic bookstores, and particularly theological bookstores are disappearing. Many colleges and seminaries now have no bookstore at all, just a place to buy T-shirts and mugs emblazoned (profitably) with the school logo. When Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in suburban Boston, a major American theological graduate school, radically downsizes its bookstore, we’re no longer talking about the canary in the coalmine. Miners are dropping all around us.

I teach at a place with the finest theological bookstore in Canada, and probably one of the best in the world. But bookstores like Regent’s can’t survive if we readers don’t do the one thing we need to do: buy books there.

“But prices are so much higher!”

I have thought of that. But let’s give this reflexive response a bit of a look.

Evangelicals and Catholics (Mostly) Together

Here, in a recent number of First Things, itself a place of conversation between evangelicals and Catholics, is a special recent initiative of evangelical-Catholic dialogue, namely, a response to the pope’s important recent writing, Caritas in Veritate.

The response is offered on behalf of “evangelicals,” but it has arisen largely on the initiative  of some Christian Reformed individuals and groups (a tradition which, let’s gratefully acknowledge, has done a lot of the serious thinking on behalf of evangelicals at large). Your servant is one of the signatories, as are a number of friends and my Regent colleague Prof. Paul Williams.

A Cruise Ship . . . and a Classroom

I’ve just returned from a cruise up the Inside Passage of British Columbia to the Panhandle of Alaska. Professors can’t afford a cruise on this luxurious line (Silversea), so it has been my privilege to work for my passage by serving as a lecturer on board one of their ships–last summer and again this summer.

To my delight, I have found the many of the passengers on board these ships to be keenly interested in the nexus of history, politics, geography, and wildlife I discuss in my talks. (I have lectured on “How Alaska Became American,” “How the Mounties Tamed the Gold Rush,” and “Welcome to Canada: A Very Small Country with a Very Big Backyard.”) Out of a few hundred on board (these are relatively small cruise ships), a hundred or so attended each talk and many more told me they watched the lectures via the closed-circuit broadcast on the ship’s television.