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Common life in our society is in decline. Our communities are disintegrating, as the loss of meaningful work and the breakdown of the family leave us anxious and alone-indeed, half of all Americans report daily feelings of loneliness. Our public discourse is polarized and hateful. Ethnic minorities face systemic injustices and the ever-present fear of violence and deportation. Economic inequalities are widening. In this book, Jake Meador diagnoses our society's decline as the failure of a particular story we've told about ourselves: the story of modern liberalism. He shows us how that story has led to our collective loss of meaning, wonder, and good work, and then recovers each of these by grounding them in a different story-a story rooted in the deep tradition of the Christian faith. Our story doesn't have to end in loneliness and despair. There are reasons for hope-reasons grounded in a different, better story. In Search of the Common Good reclaims a vision of common life for our fractured times: a vision that doesn't depend on the destinies of our economies or our political institutions, but on our citizenship in a heavenly city. Only through that vision-and that citizenship-can we truly work together for the common good.… (more)
User reviews
The author does well at even-handedly investigating what has gone wrong with our culture: the loss of community, the rise of rampant individualism, the loss of value in work and effort, the commodification of everything, etc.
The author no doubt finds in faithful Christian living some kind of antidote to these difficulties, and a presumed path to the common good, but I found the work much lighter in terms of figuring out the way forward than it was in ascertaining how things have broken down. The author is a fan of Dreher's "Benedict Option," and much good could be done with more effective Christian catchesis. But that doesn't seem like something that's going to bring everyone in our pluralist society around to the common good, although it might well be that the author is convinced there can be no common good without communal confession of Christianity. If that's the case, then the common good was rarely, if ever, activated, and has little prayer in the future as a going concern, and is chasing after a myth...or the definition of what it might look like to find common ground in a secular society to improve the lot of everyone would need to be considered to be possible. Is it an impossibility or just beyond the imaginative purview of the author and his associates?
Nevertheless, a good read to consider the situation in which we find ourselves.
**--galley received as part of early review program