The Opening Lines of:
THINGS THAT COUNT

The Preface

The essays collected in this volume, written over a span of some fifteen years, are about "things that count" in life. Although the earliest was written in 1985, and although some are considerably more technical than others, they do, I think, have a certain coherence. And if they are not about everything that counts in life, they are, nonetheless, about much that is important. The essays are "moral and theological" in character. They focus, that is, on how we ought to live and who we ought to be, and they take up such questions often, though not exclusively, from within the perspective of Christian belief.

These essays focus far more on the personal than the political. They treat, in particular, the marriage and family bonds, and our sense of being located in particular communities. This should not be taken to imply that the political does not "count." On the contrary, it counts enormously. But it counts not in the way classical thinkers tended to suppose, as the arena for human fulfillment, but in the way Augustine supposes, as the arena that provides an ordered peace within which to pursue the rest of life. Hence, the essays in Parts I and II reflect, from various angles, on the meaning of our sexuality, the bond of a man and a woman in marriage, the bond between parents and children, and some of the stresses and strains to which these bonds are subjected in our society. Likewise, the essays in Part III reflect upon the meaning of everyday life, which also has its stresses and strains, joys and sorrows. These essays seek to learn from pain, to affirm the beauties of life, and to renounce even those beauties when and if they come between us and God.

Among the things that count in life are books! Not just books, of course, but their authors and those authors' ideas. The essays in Part IV are reviews, some of them quite long, of books. At many points along the way they take us back to themes from the earlier essays in Parts I-III: the limits of the political, the nature of the parent-child bond, the place of suffering in life, the power of possessions. The books discussed here are not all alike. Some are theological; others are not. A few of them are already important books; one has been for centuries. A few of them will never be important; one of them should not be. But all invite us to think, from one angle or another, about what counts in life.

Inevitably, readers will find some repetition scattered throughout these essays. We repeat what we know and care about, and some persisting interests of my own—in the thought of C. S. Lewis, in the place of everyday experience in the moral life, in the difference religion makes, in the meaning of friendship, in the limits of politics, in the fragile bond of the family—will crop up at various points along the way. This, I take it, shows simply that there has, in fact, been a single, somewhat coherent, mind at work in the essays—written, though they were, for quite different audiences at quite different times. And the themes treated here are, indeed, things that count. As Socrates says in the Republic, "we are discussing no trivial subject, but how one ought to live."

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