Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Could you even imagine the world without the wheel?

Simple, really, but undeniably, one of the most important inventions in the history of the world.

Think of the vast areas of industry and progress made possible from this one small stroke of genius. And yet,

when Life magazine ranked the 100 most important events and the people of the past millennium,

it was Gutenberg's 1455 printing of the Bible, using his movable type printing press that came

in at number one. Why has the written word, even more than our greatest

technical innovations, exercise such enduring cultural power? Joe Miller explored this in his book,

The Idea Machine, how books built our world and shape our future. In it, Miller traced the development

of the book and explain why it remains such a vital force for shaping culture and thought, even amid declining literacy and various large language models that write for us now.

For Miller, books function is both hardware and software, a physical format uniquely suited

for human interaction and the transmission of knowledge, a tool that spreads ideas across time and space.

From ancient scrolls to the codex, books and the words they contain have built the world.

Here's how Miller put it, quote,

books are a portable collection of written ideas designed to elevate the human mind

beyond its natural limits of experience, memory, distance, and time.

They're a vessel for numbers, narratives, laws, and lyrics.

They facilitate history, politics, philosophy, religion, science, self-discovery.

They enshrine traditions while providing direction as they shift and grow.

They inform the ignorant, they remind the learned, travel far, and cheat death, end quote. Well, Christians in

particular have long advanced books as instruments of cultural renewal, and for good reason. As in T. Wright

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