NOT AS THE WORLD GIVES

My new book is a summation of a lot of the work on social teaching I have done in the past ten years. The cover of the book, by Ducio, shows Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The extract from Ch. 49 of Christ the Eternal Tao begins to explain the meaning of the image:

The Master of the universe,

Showing us how to walk the way of humility,

Took a towel

And, bending down below his disciples,

Washed their feet.

Learn not from an angel, He said,

Not from man, nor from a book,

But from me—

From my indwelling,

From my illumination and action within you

For I am meek and humble in heart

And in thought and in spirit,

And your souls shall find rest from conflicts

And relief from thoughts.

The Trinity reveals the pattern of the cosmos, of reality itself—from the stars to the dust we kick around our feet. The same Trinity that meets in a kiss between two people is the Trinity that governs the swirl of leaves in autumn when they fall from the trees. There is nothing beyond the Trinity, nothing beyond the particles that all things are made of, nothing beyond these pieces of stardust.

There is no peace without justice, and no justice without goodness. The Ten Commandments are a search for justice, but the Commandments of justice are balanced by the Beatitudes, and the vision of Moses is balanced by the vision of Christ. According to Pope Francis a religion of money dominates our global civilization. Money and sex, therefore, and one more determining factor, technology, needs to be taken into account. We are living under the rule of the machine, and we are called to evangelize these three with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Not As the World Gives reaches from the Age of Money to the Age of the Machine. What emerges from this sequel to The Radiance of Being is not just a presentation of Catholic social doctrine, but a vision of integration and wholeness, of a society both divine and human, and of a humanism open to the absolute.