The Core Virtue of Christian Librarianship

Abstract

Christian librarians should derive their professional ethics from methodical exegesis of the Bible. The New Testament’s most salient ethical statements center on love--for God, neighbor, and fellow believers. Each of these has significant implications for library practice. Identifying love as the core virtue of librarianship represents a radical departure from secular approaches to library ethics. While the biblical and secular models converge on some significant points, they are fundamentally opposite. Where the two reach similar conclusions, the biblical model proves to be more philosophically consistent. The Scriptures speak with enduring relevance to the issues facing librarians. The core values of librarians have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. According to several accounts, the debate over the essential principles of librarianship reached a feverish pitch at the 2000 Convention of the American Library Association (ALA) in Chicago. There, following passionate discussion of a proposed Core Values Statement, the ALA Council voted to extend the process of formulating a set of values for the profession (Flagg, 2000; Gerhardt, 2000; “Values dominate,” 2000). Only weeks earlier, the ALA had published Michael Gorman’s Our enduring values: Librarianship in the 21st century. Gorman presented a synopsis of this book at the 2000 conference of the Association of Christian Librarians (ACL); a summary of his presentation appeared in The Christian Librarian in 2001. His proposals have elicited written responses from several Christian librarians (Baker, 2001; Delivuk, 2001b, 2001c; Doerksen, 2001) and appear to have heightened interest in the formulation of a distinctively Christian approach to library values. For example, the 2001 ACL conference schedule included at least five workshops or panel discussions on topics related to librarians’ values, a significant increase over recent years. In many ways Gorman’s proposed values--stewardship, service, intellectual freedom, rationalism,