Preserve the past, preserve the future. I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Rod Dreher’s much-anticipated book “The Benedict Option” will be released next week. I hope you’ll check out our online symposium about the book next week at BreakPoint.org.

Dreher is asking how we preserve the faith in these dark cultural times. And, as reported in the Atlantic, one man is taking a page out of the Benedictine handbook. Fr. Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk, “has spent the past 13 years roaming from the Balkans to the Middle East in an effort to save [ancient] Christian and Islamic manuscripts threatened by wars, theft, weather—and, lately, the Islamic State.”

Fr. Columba and Hill Museum and Manuscript Library have trained local people to digitize their religious and cultural treasures—more than 50 million hand-written pages so far.

And it’s a good thing. A third of the manuscripts photographed in Iraq have fallen victim to the barbarity of ISIS.

Come to BreakPoint.org, and I’ll link you to this Atlantic article. And come back next week for our symposium on Rod Dreher’s book, “The Benedict Option.”