Mark Lanier, both a major lawyer on the national scene, most recently taking on Mark Zuckerberg, and a devout Christian who has hundreds in his Sunday school class (they do things bigger in Texas), has built a world class library, the Lanier Library, in the setting of a re-creation of a small British village, complete with a Stone Chapel, a Great Hall, residences, and a pub (minus the alcohol. Mark is a Baptist). The whole place is amazing and well worth the visit and has regular outstanding lecturers including Tom Wright as a regular. The programming is run by Dr. David Capes.
Here are some pictures from the site, including a re-creation of a genuine British pub.
The ceiling in the Stone Chapel is amazing, complete with Hebrew and Greek inscriptions.
The Great Hall looks like something out of Hogwarts, and is a great place for a conference.
Shooting for an ancient Tudor look.
But the most amazing part of this is the library itself
Some might see this as a glorious anachronism. They might say, who needs it now that we have so much online at our fingertips on a laptop? My answer would be– there is a reason why a good deal of the available material online is free— it’s not worth much, and unless you have good critical Biblical judgment you will not know whether it’s worth spending time on. There is also the problem that unlike at a real library, you can’t line up 20 sources on a table and compare and contrast them on a laptop. For real scholarly research, or just good sermon preparation we need our libraries….. desperately, or you need to invest in a good, but large personal library. Take your pick. But thank the Lord, Mark was prepared to invest in a real library where real students of the Bible can come and do real research. Enough Said.
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