The St. Leibowitz Library

I don't know about you, but when I think "religion and public life," the first words that come to mind after that are "Key West." Ahem. Which makes it fitting that I'm writing tonight from Key West, where the Pew Forum is holding a two-day conference on, yes, religion and public life. Lots of good stuff planned here, which I'll be blogging on as soon as I get the ruling on what's on the record, and what's off.

On the way here, though, I started reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz," the 1959 sci-fi novel set in a post-nuclear apocalypse world in which monks are trying to preserve the wisdom of the past for a renewal at the end of the Dark Age, and people of the future are seeking to gain knowledge for bad ends. Someone recommended it to me the other night at the Spence dinner, given my interest in Benedictine monasticism during the Dark Ages, and I finally decided to take the worn secondhand paperback off my shelf and read the thing.

Well, it's a fantastic book. The Leibowitzian monks consider it their mission to preserve what fragments of written knowledge they can put together for the sake of the future. It made me wonder what books I would say would be necessary to preserve so people of a post-apocalyptic future could know from reading them what it meant to be human. To be good, and sane, and to live in truth. What do you think? Let's suggest volumes for the St. Leibowitz Abbey library. Assume that the Bible is already there, and volumes that teach practical things like health care and basic repair principles. I want to know which books you think are the most important to convey to generations in the future who will have lost all knowledge of our civilization what's important to know to reconstitute it.