This speech was delivered during the 2025 Research Week Awards Ceremony (30 April 2025). Many thanks for the kind invitation from Jeremy McGinness, Associate Dean, Research, Instruction, and Collections. Further thanks is owed to Dr. John Eller whose three-volume biography of Ray Bradbury I mined for background information. In addition, I thank The Ray Bradbury Center and my friend Dr. Jason Aukerman, its director, for the many hours of conversation about Bradbury while I worked at IUPUI (now, I.U. Indy). Most of all, I am grateful for Ray Bradbury, his many written works, and his commitment to libraries and free speech.
He had about him, the smell of kerosene. Guy Montag is a fireman. But he is not the kind of fireman we know. Montag starts fires, spraying kerosene instead of water. He is committed to burning books. The firemen work for the dictatorial state, the state which wants ideas, imagination, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism to be burned. Montag’s boss, Beatty, explains the world to Montag. He believes burning books stand against the people who want to “make everyone unhappy, with conflicting theory and thought.” In Beatty’s view, it is best, then, to be a fireman since books “Are like a loaded gun in the house next door. So burn them.”
Such is the premise of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper begins to burn. Inspiration for Bradbury’s literary fight against totalitarian thinking began when he saw reels in movie theatres, where Nazi soldiers burned books ahead of World War II. Later, Bradbury would witness the same kind of elimination of ideas, books being burned in the Stalinist Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s Communist China. Bradbury abhorred censorship of thought, wherever it was found.
But firemen like Montag did not do their work round the clock. You see in his culture, which resembled the United States, people did not like to read. Burning books was not always required. Why? Because huge televisions filled the walls of homes. People were anesthetized to anything but what they were fed through visual stimulation. The citizens also used what Bradbury called “seashells” or earpieces which fed them a constant stream of propaganda. The people had become addicted to media. [Sidebar: None of this sounds familiar, does it? Let me pause here while I wipe the sarcasm from my chin.] During the second act of Bradbury’s novel, he quotes Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian poet, who spoke out against his own culture, a culture that cultivated only “sweetness and light” placing “faith in machinery” with these words from Dover Beach,
And we are here, as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Every generation fights the same Bradburian cautions. At Liberty we speak up and stand against all forms of extremism, no matter their origin. At Liberty we read big books, think big thoughts, produce big research, and write big papers. At Liberty we are preparing ourselves to serve the culture, showing beauty, doing good, so that some will want to hear Truth. At Liberty we submit ourselves to The Personal Eternal Triune Creator, Who made Himself known through the Person of Jesus and the proclamation of His Word from the writings of Moses through the Apocalyptic literature of the apostle John. At Liberty, we are training champions for Christ not in the sense of “We win” but “We serve.” And what better way to serve, than to do research.
At the end of Fahrenheit 451 Guy Montag, who once set books on fire, then became a believer in reading books, finds Bradbury’s book people. Chased by the authoritarian regime, Montag finds respite with readers who are committing the Western canon to memory. I call them “book people,” because each person became a book so that books would not be lost. There is a restorative healing and hopeful conclusion to Bradbury’s cautionary tale. Not only have you been taught at Liberty to “hold fast the faithful Word” but you practice biblical blessing by your writing and researching.
You and I and Liberty’s faculty and JFL staff stand with Bradbury’s commitment to libraries and free speech. Here I offer you, Liberty students, ten “Research Week” encouragements:
- Defend free speech as Ray Bradbury did, rejecting tyranny, no matter its origin. God’s Truth, sourced by the Holy Spirit, planted as seed, fertilized by prayer, has been and will continue to be the wellspring of human freedom.
- Leave people with a choice, clearly articulating both sides and the consequences for each of any issue, seen or unseen. Allow your communication to pattern itself after Jesus’ repeated phrasing, “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” Allow your communication to be cautionary not confrontational. Remember, you are not the Holy Spirit.
- Live with the tensions of life, as Paul aptly said, “If it’s possible, as much as it depends on you, live at peace with all people.” So speak against armed conflict because human dignity should be preserved, and prepare for war because human depravity is ever present. Your research, as much as it depends on you, will seek to serve the flourishing of your culture.
- Love of neighbor includes protection of neighbor. Better to be prepared in self defense and never need it, than to need it, and not have it. Your research may protect your neighbor.
- You are the watchmen on the wall in Ezekiel 33. When you see danger coming, warn your generation of the potential harms. Your research may warn against media saturation and encourage the cultivation of our humanness by reading.
- Neuroscience research shows over and over that the reading of print material and writing with a pen on paper is best for cognitive development and memory growth. Your research will encourage reading, writing, and thinking, biblically.
- Libraries are the repositories of memory, of a peoples’ collective consciousness. We bear the responsibility to preserve and protect the wealth of physical and mental collections. Your research will serve to preserve history, which is the very basis for our worldview.
- “Don’t forget” and “always remember” are two phrases that dot the landscape of the Bible’s testaments giving us the charge to repeat, remind, and retell Hebraic-Christian teaching and its benefit for all people. Your research will work toward the future, harnessed by the past.
- As good Book People, you now bear the responsibility of internalizing what you have read and researched, which is akin to what the prophets declared, “I ate Your Words, and they were the joy and rejoicing of my heart.” Your research suffused with biblical thinking will have people asking, “What makes you different?”
- You are the future, the bulwark against extremes, working within the tension of human dignity with depravity, calling people to the cross, the resurrection, and Jesus’ return. Your research will be lived out in your vocations, laced with the principles of God’s Word, and weaving Transcendent wisdom through creation.
Joining the book people, Montag must now memorize one of the Bible’s books, the book of Ecclesiastes. I smile when I think of Bradbury’s choice. The book of Ecclesiastes, my favorite Bible book, leaves people with a choice. Choose a human-centered, “under the sun” view of life which ends in vanity, or choose a God-centered view, marked by the repeated phrase, “Enjoy life because it is a gift of God.”
Mark Eckel (MA English, ThM Old Testament, PhD Social Science Research) is Executive Director of the Center for Biblical Integration, Liberty University.
“Give Me a Minute” is an ongoing effort to simply, clearly, and quickly explain aspects of true Truth.
Gratitude, as always, to my longtime friend, videographer, and tech guru Josh for his continued service.
Picture credits:
Dr. Brian Yates, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Liberty University
Wikipedia Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
By photo by Alan Light, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1566877