The Catholic Perspective

Book Review: A Civilization of Love

Saturday, June 07, 2008

About a month ago, Fr. Mike the chaplain within my consul of the Knights of Columbus presented us with the new book written by our Supreme Grand Knight Carl Anderson. The book was a very quick read, normally it takes me about 2-3 weeks to read this size of a book. In general, I read books that are usually political, technical, or financial. In the “Civilization of Love” it presents many ethical questions and new way of handling our faith in our everyday lives without shoving it down others throats (plus not looking crazy). In this reflection / review I would like to focus on three key ideas I learned from this book:

• Charity of spirit and life








• Political Identity








• What is love

Charity one major component to the Knights of Columbus, but should be a major component of everyone’s lives. Unfortunately is seems not to be. Lets present an example of charity in America, an average American making about 32,000 dollars a year ( avg single male salary) before taxes. That calculates about 120 dollars a day excluding weekends. If every American donated $120 every month and we will figure 67% of 300 million people could donate $289.4 billion. Today the national average is $82 per month. If you look at the numbers at justgive.org it mentions that people that make less than 10,000 dollars a year (vastly under the poverty line) give more than 5% of their income more than any other income group. Where is in my basic estimation, I ruled out the people making more than about 90,000 dollars/year and people making less than about 20,000 dollars/year. As well as the majority of the population that is not working. From justgive.org’s data, one can see how sad a state it is when people with so much less give more percentage of their income than the average middle class American, who gives a miserable 3% of their income. In Carl Anderson’s book, he really focuses on the morality of this issue in American culture. Today what he really indicated is that Americans are so into material possession and themselves. It is a call to all Catholics (and non-catholics) to reevaluate our lives and purpose and to pick up arms and give not only money but donate one’s time to charity. We all would have an impact on our society and world if we just donated one day a month in time and money to help our community to make a difference.

In today’s culture many Americans have moved from an extreme binary view of the world to an extreme relative view of the world. Carl Anderson points out our new political identity is not healthy because we are not standing up for own views and instead adopting to either extreme view. One example Anderson presents is the debate about pro-choice and pro-life. In my own life I feel that I am pro-life, but in my political life I feel that I am pro-choice. For the longest time I believed that I should not push my ideology onto others that do not believe in the things that I believe in. Looking at the debate between pro-life and pro-choice I never thought to take a middle road. Our politicians can still follow their ideology without failing the people they represent by not voting, and instead making a statement. In our country, unlike England, the people that represent the people either go with those people and maybe against their own personal beliefs or vote in favor of their beliefs and ignore the people they represent. In England people usually make a stand by resigning their position, not voting and telling their people by making a press conference explaining why. Today our philosophy has become very extreme. Even I have fallen for these extremes in my own life. The extreme that I have to keep my own views that I hold to be just mine and become silent. Now, I think that I can hold my own beliefs without pressing my own views onto others without compromising my own, while not being silent and expressing my own ideas about these issues.

All of this brings us to the idea that Anderson presents in creating the civilization of love. What I learned in this book is that love is strong enough to overcome all the hurdles we have in our lives. Love is an idea that everyone catholic and non-catholic can start to change the world by giving and understanding what views are right or wrong and what views have a sense of relativism. Love is more complex than only giving or understanding the philosophy of the world. Love is an idea that also needs to be practiced everyday in our everyday lives by donating time and money to help others. I am probably not the best at doing the book justice, but I would recommend anyone to read this book.

Posted by Catholic Chump on 06/07 at 11:08 AM | (0) Comments

Category: |Book Review| |