Much of the current library literature assumes that professional library service is necessarily neutral-detached from the librarian's philosophical or religious views. By contrast, contributors to this collection assert that librarianship is best practiced as an outworking of spiritual conviction. Accordingly, they discuss principles for integrating Christian faith and librarianship within various contexts, and reflect on professional issues from biblical and theological perspectives. This text will prove beneficial to Christians working in all types of libraries, whether religious or secular. This compilation of 16 essays is divided into two main parts, the first on theory and the second on practice. The first part includes chapters such as A Rationale for Integrating Christian Faith and Librarianship, The Master We Serve: The Call of the Christian Librarian to the Secular Workplace; and The Impact of the Christian Faith on Library Service. Chapters in the second part include Library Encounters Culture, A Christian Approach to Intellectual Freedom in Libraries and Keeping Sunday Special in the Contemporary Workplace Culture. Contributors include William Fraher Abernathy, Rod Badams, Donald G. Davis, Jr., John Allen Delivuk, Kenneth D. Gill, Graham Hedges, D. Elizabeth Irish, James R. Johnson, Roger W. Phillips, Gregory A. Smith, Stanford Terhune, John B. Trotti, John Mark Tucker and Geoff Warren.

What do Christianity and librarianship have in common? Netherlands Prime Minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was among the first in the modern era to attempt to rejoin the dichotomy of sacred vs. secular study when he said, "no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest." Over the years a number of publications have followed Kuyper's lead yet little has been written on the subject since Greg A. Smith's notable Christian Librarianship (2002). Building on Smith's work, this volume seeks to bridge the sacred/secular divide with an exploration of how Christianity and the gospel are manifested through the profession of librarianship.

What do Christianity and librarianship have in common? Netherlands Prime Minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was among the first in the modern era to attempt to rejoin the dichotomy of sacred vs. secular study when he said, "no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest." Over the years a number of publications have followed Kuyper's lead yet little has been written on the subject since Greg A. Smith's notable Christian Librarianship (2002). Building on Smith's work, this volume seeks to bridge the sacred/secular divide with an exploration of how Christianity and the gospel are manifested through the profession of librarianship.

This fascinating and lively book provides the first comprehensive discussion of the production, circulation, and use of books in early Christianity. It explores the extent of literacy in early Christian communities; the relation in the early church between oral tradition and written materials; the physical form of early Christian books; how books were produced, transcribed, published, duplicated, and disseminated; how Christian libraries were formed; who read the books, in what circumstances, and to what purposes. Harry Y. Gamble interweaves practical and technological dimensions of the production and use of early Christian books with the social and institutional history of the period. Drawing on evidence from papyrology, codicology, textual criticism, and early church history, as well as on knowledge about the bibliographical practices that characterized Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, he offers a new perspective on the role of books in the first five centuries of the early church.