Homeless and at Home in America: Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place

Extract

Homeless and at Home in America: Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place, Peter Augustine Lawler, South Bend IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2007, pp. 229, index.

“We Americans are the most homeless and the most at home people of the West today” (1). This is the central paradox of Peter Augustine Lawler's latest book, Homeless and at Home in America. It is a collection of essays (some previously published elsewhere) on a wide variety of topics, from Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons and bioethics to Casablanca and Tocqueville. The chapters, though, fit well together and are linked by a set of related themes. The book, written in Lawler's usual engaging and often humorous style, presents a fascinating argument from one of the chief proponents of what he calls the “‘crowd’ of American faith-based, non-libertarian, Strauss influenced thinkers” (Stuck with Virtue, Wilmington: ISI Books, 2005, viii). This group is part of a growing school of thought Lawler refers to as “conservative postmodernism—postmodernism rightly understood” (134), which “is associated with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and American literary Thomists such as Marion Montgomery, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor” (135). Tocqueville is one of their favorite authors. This line of thought is a reaction against modernity for its failure to comprehend what it means to be truly human, that is, as creatures that occupy the “middle class” between beasts and God.