Tomes On Theology

St. Peter's College Library

At my own small Jesuit college in Jersey City, the library has had no choice but to winnow down its books due to lack of space, not to mention the increasingly daunting task of taking care of all those dust-collecting volumes. Books do mold and a leak in the library’s roof and occasional break-downs in the air-conditioning system do not help. Furthermore, many of the books in our college library were simply not the sort of thing 21st-century students majoring in Criminal Justice, Accounting, Biochemistry and Nursing would find useful. Holdings from the libraries of now-closed Jesuit seminaries (like the one formerly in Shrub Oak, New York) found their way to us, but we really didn’t have too many readers for tomes on theology, journals about linguistics and The New Criterion. Faculty were asked to choose journals, duplicates of books are still on sale for $1 and a few volumes were discovered in boxes beside trash bins by some of my students, who hurried to rescue them.

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