For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about a unique effort to bring theological knowledge where it’s needed most.
The stories of science and theology can be told, at least in part, as the story of the grand movement of books. Throughout the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds, key texts such as scriptures, metaphysical treatises, or mathematical proofs were carried from their points of origin to distant centers of learning where they were copied, translated, and used as the basis for more scholarship — and ultimately more books.
Even today, at thousands of theological institutions in the Majority World — ranging from university religion departments to remote seminaries — the books necessary for productive scholarship can be surprisingly difficult to come by. The logistics of selecting, ordering, and shipping key texts can be overwhelming, and getting a book to a specific institution often costs more than the book itself. Since 2004, the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Theological Book Network has been procuring and sending sets of books to libraries at more than 1,800 partner institutions in 90 countries. Most of the two million books distributed by the Network over the past 15 years are part of general theological collections, but they regularly survey their partners to identify common weak areas in their collections and create curated capsule libraries to fill those gaps.