But as the Bible loses influence, the West is losing its sense of any unified truth. “The very idea of such a total book is disappearing,” Bloom laments—and with it, the idea of total truth. Parents send their children to school to learn specialized skills so they can get a job. But they have lost the ideal of becoming a whole person living out an integrated vision of life. “Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the whole is lost.” 13
