Drawing on three twentieth-century thinkers who saw it coming—Robert Nisbet, Max Picard, and Christopher Lasch—LaRow diagnoses the rootless modern self with uncommon clarity: how the promise of self-fulfillment brought about the dissolution of community bonds; how the pursuit of inordinate freedoms wrought new forms of enslavement; how new tools for connection made us instead disconnected and lonely.
LaRow’s answer to the loss of our unifying narrative is as radical as it is ancient. In our modern age, he argues, we have become estranged from the only story that can tell us the truth about our existence, and can offer a home to the homeless and fragmented self. Those threads cannot be rewoven through better politics, more sophisticated therapy, or relentless scientific advancement, but only by returning to an institution far older than any of them. A home for the restless self, a story that does not revise itself, a community that makes binding demands and keeps binding promises: the church.
