While the term acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common. Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself. As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not "want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is." Sloth is a hellish despair. Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us. Acedia and Its Discontents resists despair, calling us to reconfigure our imaginations and practices in deep love of the life and work given by God. By feasting, keeping sabbath, and working well, we learn to see the world as enchanting, beautiful, and good--just as God sees it. "In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell's book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty 'vacations' that are but interruptions in work. Like his great predecessors Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Max Picard, Romano Guardini, and Pope John Paul II, he diagnoses the besetting disease of our time--spiritual torpor--and prescribes as a remedy the joyful celebration of the Sabbath. A stupendous book, filled with the happiness of wonder."--ANTHONY ESOLEN, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child "A whole book about just one vice, 'sloth'? Ah, but this book is different-and devastating. It exposes a deeply hidden and deeply destructive fundamental attitude that pervades our culture, an attitude that comes not just from the flesh (laziness) or from the world (world-weariness, cynicism), but from the Devil: disgust and rebellion toward Being itself, natural as well as supernatural. This is the 'noonday devil' that great saints have labelled 'sloth.' Know your enemy. Read this book "--PETER KREEFT, author of Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas "Acedia--the sin of sloth, so often confused with laziness--is the most overlooked but widespread illness of the modern age; the emptiness under the mask of the world's frantic activity. R.J. Snell helps us see why this is so and what Christians can do about it with elegant, penetrating insight. This is a terrific book about a badly misunderstood 'deadly sin' and its antidotes."--CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Philadelphia "Our modern Empire of Desire manufactures endless appetite while simultaneously denying that anything is objectively good, beautiful, or desirable. The result is not great yearning or passion, but acedia or sloth, a pervasive 'noonday demon' which prowls about our culture like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. In this learned study, R.J. Snell draws on the vast spiritual and intellectual resources of the Christian tradition to diagnose the deep structure of our contemporary nihilism, exposing this demon and its far-reaching effects with elegance and profundity and thereby providing the weapons necessary to slay it. This is a timely and important book."--MICHAEL HANBY, author of No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology R. J. SNELL is professor of philosophy at Eastern University in St. Davids, PA, and executive director of the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. His recent books include Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone) and The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode. He and his wife have four young children.

The noonday devil is the demon of acedia, the vice also known as sloth. The word “sloth”, however, can be misleading, for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest as busyness or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and a lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaning Abbot Nault says that acedia is the most oppressive of demons. Although its name harkens back to antiquity and the Middle Ages, and seems to have been largely forgotten, acedia is experienced by countless modern people who describe their condition as depression, melancholy, burn-out, or even mid-life crisis. He begins his study of acedia by tracing the wisdom of the Church on the subject from the Desert Fathers to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He shows how acedia afflicts persons in all states of life— priests, religious, and married or single laymen. He details not only the symptoms and effects of acedia, but also remedies for it.

In Believing Again Roger Lundin brilliantly explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden nineteenth-century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world. / Lundin's narrative focuses on key poets and novelists from the past two centuries Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Melville, Auden, and more showing how they portray the modern mind and heart balancing between belief and unbelief. Lundin engages these literary luminaries through chapters on a series of vital subjects, from history and interpretation to beauty and memory. Such theologians as Barth and Balthasar also enter the fray, facing the challenge of modern unbelief with a creative brilliance that has gone largely unnoticed outside the world of faith. Lundin's Believing Again is a beautifully written, erudite examination of the drama and dynamics of belief in the modern world. In Believing Again Roger Lundin brilliantly explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden nineteenth-century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world. Lundin s narrative focuses on key poets and novelists from the past two centuries Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Melville, Auden, and more showing how they portray the modern mind in tension between faith and doubt. Lundin engages these literary luminaries through chapters on a series of vital subjects, from history and interpretation to beauty and memory. Such theologians as Barth and Balthasar also enter the discussion, facing the challenge of modern unbelief with a creative brilliance that has gone largely unnoticed outside the world of faith. Lundin s Believing Again is a beautifully written, erudite examination of the drama and dynamics of belief in the modern world.

The modern hope of attaining purely rational and objective knowledge has faltered, to the joy of some and worry of others. Philosophy's attempt to see reality with a god's-eye view is increasingly viewed as unlikely or undesirable, but what fills the vacuum now that the modern project is in jeopardy? Through a Glass Darkly examines the thought of Richard Rorty and Bernard Lonergan on the posibility of knowledge without a god's-eye view. Rorty, one of the most influential contemporary thinkers, exposes the utter contingency of all philosophical solutions and intuitions. Without the pretensions of objective knowledge, Rorty hopes for a liberal order rooted in hope and solidarity rather than fruitless longings for truth. Constantly asking us to pay attention to what we actually do when we attempt to know, Lonergan discovers in the fragility of consciousness a modest but invariant foundation for human knowledge. Unlike naive forms of realism, Lonergan's answer to Rorty's skepticism reveals Rorty's incomplete escape from Cartesian Anxiety. Lonergan's turn to the subject more radically breaks the lure of certainty and reveals Lonergan, not Rorty, as the integral postmodern thinker.

A joyous gent who sings of the glory of the true realities of life, Dan England chose “talking” as his vocation in life. This he did, joyously and beautifully. He talked to the poets without dreams, actors who couldn’t act, and writers who couldn’t write who came to his house for an evening to listen and stayed on for months...years. Not a few found new hope as they heard him capture the poetry of living in his talk of saints, and in stories about his greatness of God’s gifts (among which was the wine that gave added sparkle to his words). There was Briggs, the religion editor without religion to become a fearless “defender of the faith” under Dan’s influence. And Tim, the janitor who “exposed” the corruption of the Match Industry when in an idle hour’s count of a box of matches he found “four” missing. For the glorious length of a Dan England discourse the retiring little janitor became a tiger for reform. This is the latest troubadour of life-beautiful to come from the pen of the author of the classic Mr. Blue.

Fr Martin McAlinden's research focussed on the spiritual malaise experienced by many priests in the Catholic Church in Ireland. In response, he developed a theology rooted in the ancient notion of acedia and used this as a way of talking about the spiritual crises many priests experience and how this spiritual malaise might be transformed.

"Even more valuable than its widely praised predecessor, The Culture of Narcissism." —John W. Aldridge Faced with an escalating arms race, rising crime and terrorism, environmental deterioration, and long-term economic decline, people have retreated from commitments that presuppose a secure and orderly world. In his latest book, Christopher Lasch, the renowned historian and social critic, powerfully argues that self-concern, so characteristic of our time, has become a search for psychic survival.