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.

This book is about re-collecting those fragments, the fragments of our lives and putting them in order so that we can move through the contemporary world in a manner worthy of the gospel.

As I went around the country giving talks about Disruptive Witness and You Are Not Your Own, one of the most common questions I received was, “What am I supposed to do?” Which is a perfectly good question, but not one that I was focused on answering, particularly in YANYO. My focus was on social analysis, on exploring why the contemporary world feels so inhuman, not so much how to live in an inhuman world. Of course, I do address that question somewhat, but I primarily focus on the spiritual response: recognizing that we belong to God and acting accordingly. What I don’t do is offer much by way of practical advice. What does belonging to God practically look like? In many ways, Re-Collecting is an attempt at offering that practical advice. It responds to the question: how do we live in an environment which assumes that we are our own and belong to ourselves? How do we honor God and thrive in an inhuman environment? That’s what re-collecting the fragments looks like: figuring out how to act rightly.

In striving to answer this question for myself, I was led to the work of Thomas Aquinas scholar Josef Pieper and his two books, Faith, Hope, Love and The Four Cardinal Virtues. Between these two books, Pieper walks through the seven traditional virtues recognized by the church. He offers definitions, explanations, philosophical and spiritual implications, and commentary by Aquinas and other Church Fathers. What I found immensely valuable in Pieper was that he took these classical ways of pursuing human fullness (which is roughly the definition of the virtues: that which brings us closer to how God designed us to be), and made them real and alive. And I saw in these virtues answers for questions like, what is justice? in a society that is wrestling over social justice. And what is love? in a society confused about the definition of love. And what is temperance? in a society addicted to smartphones and adverse to chastity. Pieper, in short, became what Charles Taylor was for me in Disruptive Witness and what Jacques Ellul was for me in You Are Not Your Own, the brilliant scholar whose abstract philosophical work I could help translate for readers and apply to an immediate contemporary context. Naturally, my old friends Taylor and Ellul make an appearance in this book as well. But Pieper is my guide.

The goal of this book is to offer a practical guide to life for those who feel restless and confused about how to live in the contemporary world, which describes most of us. It isn’t a list of do’s and don’ts. But it does offer principles based off of timeless virtues that will help guide our thinking on complex issues. I hope it will be the kind of book one would give to a college student or anyone struggling with direction or feeling overwhelmed with this world. Each chapter discusses the challenges to practicing a virtue in our current context, defines the virtue, and gives practical applications.

Re-Collecting is not without its challenges. For one, I have to balance the personal responsibility to choose to act virtuously with both the communal practice of virtues (thanks,

Myles Werntz

) and the work of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise this book quickly turns into a works-based righteousness manual. Second, I have to overcome Protestant unfamiliarity with the virtues: “The Fruit of the Spirit I know, but who are these Virtues and why should I care?” I’m still not entirely sure how I will handle that, or if I’ll just take it for granted that they are valuable, as the church had traditionally done. Third, while I love Pieper and think he is a genius, he is what I would describe as very Catholic, so in some places my own reformed presbyterianism comes in conflict with his views. Mostly this is irrelevant, but on some virtues, like in his essay on “Hope” where he directly describes the reformed doctrines of grace as a heresy, we disagree, a lot. Fourth, some of these concepts are simply overwhelming in their complexity. Right now I’m on the virtue of “Hope” and I find myself largely stuck. Hope is complicated. And I’m not looking forward to getting to love; as wonderful as a topic as it is, I’m quite daunted to tackle in a chapter what C.S. Lewis wrote an entire book on.

Naturally, I’d appreciate your prayers and encouragement on this project. I hope to finish drafting by the end of the year and then revise the entire thing in the early spring to send off to my editors (late, I don’t know how late) mid-spring. It feels good to be making some clear progress on this project after a year and a half of very little work due to personal issues. My hope is that when it’s done, my four books will act as a kind of series. With Disruptive Witness introducing the problem of technology and secularism, You Are Not Your Own introducing the problem of radical autonomy, On Getting Out of Bed offering a way of living despite the mental suffering that comes from a world described in DW and YANYO, and Re-Collecting offering a holistic way of living in a world described in DW and YANYO. The question in the back of my mind is what comes next.