What My Next Book is All About

Re-Collecting Your Life: an introduction

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I had a plan for today’s paid subscriber’s post. It was a good plan. I intended to respond to

Aaron M. Renn

’s article on ladder climbing. I knew that

Alastair Roberts

had already responded with a great Twitter thread. But I thought to myself, that’s just a Twitter thread. Surely there’s still room for me to contribute. Then

Myles Werntz

swooped in with this brilliant take and beat me to it. And this is after Myles forced me to rethink the direction of my book last week with his article in Christianity Today on “Rules of Life” and the church. In the coming weeks I’ll be looking for an opportunity to write a scorching takedown of one Myles’s articles to get back at him, but until then, I thought I would take the time explore what my fourth book is going to be about. I did a post like this a couple years ago, before I started writing the book, but at that time I didn’t quite know how the book would pan out. Now that I’m 2/3rds of the way through the book (just two more chapters and a conclusion left!), I have a better sense of what I’m dealing with and can help answer some questions I keep getting about what this project is.

First, my tentative title is Re-Collecting Your Life. And as I said in my original post announcing the contract, the main image comes from (of course) T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land where the speaker answers the question, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” with “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only /A heap of broken images.” In the modern and now contemporary world, society seems to lack the metaphysical grounding (the roots the clutch) that provided order, meaning, justification, purpose, values, belonging, and identity in the old world. In short, Christ. Our world is a world of “stony rubbish,” a spiritually dry and sterile world. For pre-conversion Eliot, modern people cannot say or guess what kind of metaphysical grounding might be possible in the modern world for one important reason: we have only ever known chaos. We have only ever known “A heap of broken images.” In the language of philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, we might call this “liquid modernity.” Everything is shifting under our feet, in chaos, in disorder, fragmented, broken up, in contention. And of course, this has only accelerated in our own moment. I fear that young people are inundated with conflicting, fragmentary messages about identity, sex, bodies, politics, truth, mental health, God, and everything in between. Eliot’s point here is that when you have only known fragments it’s difficult (if not impossible [it’s not impossible, but the poem implies it is]) to sort out how to live.