Crossway carries my article on the unique power of books in human life, and how God uses that power:

The importance of books for organizing and understanding information—as opposed to just having access to it—has not been displaced, even in our Internet age. Scholars, pastors and others whose jobs center on grasping “the big picture” in some field will often have conferences about books. They rarely write books about conferences. They write articles about books but they don’t write books about articles. The books are primary.

C. S. Lewis, in the epilogue to his masterpiece An Experiment in Criticism, asks: What are books for? He rejects the view, common among Christians, that the main goal of books is moral edification. It is not obvious that reading tales of great men who are brought to their doom by a thirst for revenge will actually help me become a more forgiving person, yet this fact does not make Homer’s Iliad or Shakespeare’s Hamlet a worthless waste of my time.

Lewis suggests that books allow us to see the world through other people’s eyes. Through a book I can view the world as someone else sees it—experience their view of the world “from the inside.” This is what gives books their profound and mysterious power.

Let me know what you think – preferably at less than book length!