We live at the crossroads: a time of great pains and anxiety, a time of great hope and possibility. It is a time of international tension and international commerce, a time of technological tyrannies and informational delights. It is a time of national distrust, imperial loneliness, and meaning crises; and it is a time of artistic creation, community formation, and personal renewal. In short, it is a great time, like all times are, to invest ourselves in firming the bulwark, countervailing the ills, and extending the capabilities of civilization and rejuvenating the heart of culture.

In 793, the Vikings first made landfall in Northumbria, Britain. It was the first of 250 years of Viking raids. In that same year, Baghdad became the chief financial center of the world, connecting the Arabic speaking world to China, using paper promissory notes. While the civilized worlds of Baghdad and China connected themselves to each other, the small glimmers of high literacy in Ireland, Britain, and Italy were threatened by a black dawn of incessant raids in both the Mediterranean and northern seas. The legacy of the Roman Empire was scattered about in error-ridden, half-readable, near-rotting texts. A ‘big’ library boasted 100 books. The copying practices were so bad that the next generation of books would be nearly useless.

In France, one warlord, Charlemagne, was creating a vast Frankish empire out of military might, but although his political accomplishment was short-lived, he left behind an important cultural legacy: the preservation of knowledge and an end to the heedless destruction and abandonment of texts which characterized the previous 400 years (Mulhall). There is no text that we know was around in 793 in Western Europe, that cannot still be read today. Literate civilization did not backslide any further. To what can we attribute this ancient accomplishment, this new foothold on solid ground from which European civilization would one day leap? It was the monk of York, Alcuin. Alcuin, and the monks of Charlemagne’s court, who reformed the clergy, refined texts, created textbooks, and both taught and inspired a new generation, a generation who in turn taught another generation, passing on the skills of administration, counsel, and moral formation to the next cohort, until a more civilized world could be born.

 This process is not over. This process has only just begun, and it is ours to treasure. In Alcuin’s day a most important task was preserving and transmitting information so that individuals and society would not lose sight of their purpose and potential. In today’s world, another most important task is to sort, structure, manage, and marshal information, so that individuals and society will not lose sight of their purpose and potential. But our task is deeper than that. It is not a matter of mere ‘information’ storage and retrieval mechanisms. It is a matter of maintaining a sacred contract to see to it that the next generations do not fall into tyranny, viciousness, destruction, and obliteration and that they equip themselves with those values, skills, and relationships that identify and promote what is good and make life a wonderful adventure. This sacred interpersonal contract, written in the stones of what we choose to build, determines the future.