ABSTRACT:

The title of this blog series is “The Faithful Librarian.” But, what is a “faithful librarian”? This entry argues that a faithful librarian is a Christian librarian who seeks to bring every aspect of librarianship under the lordship of Jesus Christ. It frames librarianship not as a spiritually neutral profession, but as a vocation shaped by worship, service, repentance, and ongoing theological reflection. Drawing on Abraham Kuyper’s vision of Christ’s sovereignty and David Claerbaut’s four-step model of faith integration—philosophical justification, prevailing paradigms, critique, and build—the essay contends that librarianship should be examined through the lenses of Christian epistemology, ontology, and axiology. It critiques pragmatist and individualist assumptions common in LIS, especially when they conflict with the imago Dei, and proposes that Christian librarians develop theory and practice rooted in Scripture, neighbor love, and human dignity. This entry concludes that being a faithful librarian is not about spiritual elitism or coercion, but about humble, ordinary acts of service that witness to Christ through professional integrity, generosity, and wisdom. In this view, library work becomes a genuine site of sanctification and a means of glorifying God alone.

FULL TEXT:

I have named this blog series: “The Faithful Librarian.” While the about page gives the purpose and some context for my understanding of a faithful librarian, I feel it would be helpful to succinctly define a “faithful librarian.” In this blog series, a “faithful librarian” is a Christian librarian who seeks to glorify God alone by bringing every aspect of librarianship under the gracious Lordship of Jesus Christ.

My warrant for using the term “faithful librarian” is not to create a special spiritual category of librarian, nor to infer that I have somehow arrived at a final and flawless expression of my faith. On the contrary, I have been (and am convinced that I will always be) in a process of learning, repenting, revising, and growing. The process of becoming a faithful librarian is an imperfect endeavor, marked by my own flaws and errors, empowered by the richness of God’s grace.

Abraham Kuyper (1998), a Dutch statesman in the early 20th century, stated: “(t)here is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!'” (p. 461). If Jesus Christ declares possession of all domains, I have no warrant to confine my faith to specific contexts (e.g., “church time” or “devotional time”) and to treat a large part of my life as if faith has no bearing on it. Demanding that faith be separated from other domains of life denies God’s sovereignty and makes it difficult to see work (and many other contexts) as places where the Lordship of Jesus Christ can be manifested. If Jesus is Lord over all, then he is Lord of our professional lives, and librarianship becomes one of the ordinary places where we learn to manifest the extraordinary nature of God’s love. My motivation for integrating faith and librarianship is therefore not primarily strategic or institutional, but quite ordinary; I want my whole life, including my work life, to be brought under the domain of Jesus Christ. I want the hours I spend managing, cataloging, troubleshooting databases, meeting with students, and conducting reference interviews to be part of my sanctification—not cordoned off as spiritually irrelevant, but rather offered as a quiet act of worship that glorifies God

At the same time, I recognize that many Christian scholars and practitioners have labored faithfully to explore how Christ relates to their disciplines, including librarianship. Although their resulting models may be different from mine, I am deeply grateful for much of their work. In fact, my work and convictions stand on their shoulders. Therefore, instead of dismissing other models of integrating Christianity and librarianship or implying that my model is the only way to be a faithful librarian, I offer an additional model that will hopefully sharpen and enrich the broader conversation. Within that larger conversation, I am advocating a particular model of faith integration that I believe is especially robust. My claim, then, is not that I have the definitive model, but that the model I am working with offers a particularly rich way of drawing librarianship and Christian faith into a coherent whole.

I discovered this model in David Claerbaut’s (2004) work, Faith and Learning on the Edge. Claerbaut (2004) presents a four-step process that I have found especially helpful in shaping the questions I ask and in guiding my pursuit of understanding how I can glorify God in my work as a faithful librarian. Claerbaut’s four steps are: philosophical justification, prevailing paradigms, critique, and build.

Philosophical Justification. Faith integration rests on the premise that if Jesus Christ is Lord over every “square inch” of human existence, then no sphere of scholarship or work—including Library and Information Science (LIS)—is religiously neutral or exempt from this claim. In other words, integration is not an optional add-on for especially devout professionals but a necessity flowing from the confession that all of life, including one’s work life, belongs to Christ. Since every discipline is grounded in worldview assumptions about reality, knowledge, and values, treating librarianship as spiritually irrelevant would, in practice, be to deny that every square inch of human existence belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, rather than accepting the unchallenged defaults of secular frameworks such as scientism or individualism, a faithful librarian must bring these underlying assumptions under Christ’s Lordship. Instead of restricting faith to “church time” or “devotional time,” integrating Christianity with librarianship preserves intellectual integrity by resisting a divided life or vocation. This integration also unites all truth under God so that LIS can be approached from the ground up as an authentically Christian discipline. This is why, in the preceding paragraphs, I insist that my professional tasks as a librarian are not cordoned off from Christ’s domain but are ordinary sites where his Lordship rightly claims my thinking and loving.

Prevailing Paradigms. All disciplines, including LIS, implicitly operate on a paradigm or worldview that shapes how theorists and practitioners in those disciplines understand what is there (ontology), what is valuable (axiology), and how we know these things (epistemology). Since faithful librarians seek a paradigm consistent with the Lordship of Christ, they must investigate LIS’s prevailing paradigms to see whether they align with Christian presuppositions, premises, and worldview. While many paradigms influence LIS, LIS is generally a very pragmatic discipline (Budd, 2001, pp. 303-305; Cossette, 2009, p. 17; Emery, 1970, p. 88). Subsequently, pragmatism is often one of the prevailing paradigms that drives assumptions about truth, knowledge, persons, and society for LIS. 

Critique. Because the God of truth created everything, including us, we can find truth through God and throughout his creation. Therefore, God’s word (i.e., Scripture) offers the ultimate standard for weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the theories, worldviews, or assumptions that undergird LIS. This includes critiquing theories that justify themselves pragmatically by “what works.” For example, in Chapter 2 of his work, Leadership: Theory and Practice, Northouse (2025) discusses the trait approach (pp. 25–52). The trait approach draws on empirical correlations between certain relatively stable traits—such as intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, sociability, and Big Five factors like extraversion—and leadership effectiveness. The trait approach treats these as measurable predictors that organizations can use to select leaders who are more likely to achieve strong performance outcomes. While the trait approach has many implications, one could argue that it implicitly suggests that human value and leadership capacity are largely fixed and most fully realized in a “natural elite” whose traits yield desired results, blending an elitist anthropology with a pragmatist valuation of persons in terms of functional effectiveness. While Northouse acknowledges its weaknesses and provides a thorough critique of this leadership theory, faithful librarians must interrogate both its fixed-trait assumptions and its outcome-centered pragmatism through the lens of the imago Dei. Doing so reveals its flaws: Scripture affirms that every human bears God’s image with equal dignity, relationality, and Spirit-enabled growth potential (Gen. 1:27; James 3:9), not merely those whose trait profiles align with empirically successful leadership outcomes. For LIS leadership, this reframing could shift practice away from pragmatically driven, rigid trait-based hiring and promotion (e.g., privileging extraversion or high self-confidence because they “get results”), shifting it towards an imago Dei–honoring culture that mentors all staff, designs diverse roles that value quiet integrity alongside charisma, and measures success by communal flourishing rather than spotlighting a few “stars,” yielding more just and redemptive library teams.

Build. Because Jesus Christ is Lord of all, he shapes our ontology, axiology, and epistemology. Consequently, when these premises become Christ-shaped (e.g., we let the idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” drive our epistemological assumptions), they form a faithful librarian’s understanding of what librarianship might look like when grounded in Jesus Christ. From such a foundation, a faithful librarian can build faith-informed concepts and categories that can guide and norm practice, not merely inspire it. Faithful librarians can build biblical foundations such as the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge, neighbor-love in management, and image-bearing dignity for all patrons and staff. Such foundations can shape how faithful librarians understand knowledge, information, institutions, and authority, standing alongside or replacing prevailing LIS paradigms. These emerging theories can then inform the reconstruction of practice so that changes in cataloging, reference work, management, policy, and relationships are recognized as the outworking of a distinctively Christian understanding of reality rather than ad hoc adjustments. For example, after critiquing Northouse’s (2025) development of the trait approach (Ch. 2) for its elite and pragmatist assumptions, a Christian library director might first articulate a theological account of leadership rooted in the imago Dei, mutual service, and Christ’s kenosis (Phil. 2:5–8). From this, one could derive hiring and development practices—mentoring the potential of diverse staff, assigning roles that honor quiet integrity alongside charisma, and evaluating success by team flourishing and faithful service—that concretely instantiate this reconstructed theory of leadership.

A faithful librarian, in this sense, seeks to let Christ reshape both the ends and the means of librarianship. The ends are not simply that students complete assignments or that researchers publish papers, but that, over time, people are transformed into more truthful, humble, and loving knowers. The means include careful attention to the library’s structures, policies, and daily practices—how we describe materials, teach, decide what to purchase, and interact with those who come through our doors. None of this is done perfectly. Yet the aim is steady: that even the small, unseen acts of librarianship might whisper something of the reality of God’s love for the world.

I also want to stress that being a faithful librarian is not about using our roles to coerce or pressure patrons into explicit religious commitments. Rather, it is about allowing our love for Christ and our theological convictions to inform the quality of our service, the depth of our scholarship, and the integrity of our professional decisions. It will be expressed as patience with a frustrated student, generosity in going the extra mile for a faculty member, diligence in pursuing accuracy, honesty about our limitations, authenticity in our scholarly endeavors, and openness to learning from those who disagree with us. In all of this, the goal is not to draw attention to ourselves as “faithful librarians” but to quietly point, in word and deed, to our faithful Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

So, when I use the phrase “faithful librarian,” I am not designating an elite spiritual status. I am describing a posture: a librarian who, by grace, is trying to let the confession “Jesus is Lord” permeate the whole of his professional life, aspiring humbly—albeit imperfectly—to do it all soli Deo gloria. It is an ongoing, unfinished work. It involves continual repentance, ongoing learning, and a willingness to let Christ challenge my most cherished convictions, professional assumptions, and ungodly routines. My hope is that, over time, this way of understanding librarianship might help both myself and others to see that our work is not merely a way to earn a paycheck, but a concrete sphere in which we can love God and neighbor, bear witness to truth, and slowly conform ourselves, others, and the profession itself to the likeness of Christ.

Soli Deo gloria!

Works Cited

Budd, J. (2001). Knowledge and knowing in library and information science: A philosophical framework. Scarecrow Press.

Claerbaut, D. (2004). Faith and learning on the edge: A bold new look at religion in higher education. Zondervan.

Cossette, A. (2009). Humanism and libraries: An essay on the philosophy of librarianship. Library Juice Press.

Emery, R. (1970). Steps in Reference Theory. Library Association Record, 72, 88–90, 96.

Kuyper, A. (1998). Abraham Kuyper: A centennial reader. Eerdmans.

Northouse, P. G. (2025). Leadership: Theory and practice (10th ed.). Sage.