Try This if You’re Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed, by E. F. Schumacher

A Micro-Review

“Anyone who goes openly on a journey into the interior, who withdraws from the ceaseless agitation of everyday life and pursues some kind of training — satipatthana, yoga, Jesus Prayer, or something similar — without which genuine self-knowledge cannot be obtained, is accused of selfishness and of turning his back on his social duties.”

Schumachers don’t exist anymore, as far as I can discern. Schumacher was an economist, and a highly-respected one and, even more rare, one who was engaged in the practical affairs of commerce. Yet he had profound insight into the nature of the spirit, into religious matters, and how a soul operates. There were other people of this type — people talented at their mundane craft with spiritual insight — in the middle half of the twentieth century. Clare Booth Luce (her, ahem, peccadillos notwithstanding) comes to mind, as do Polanyi, CSL, GKC, Tolkien, O’Connor, Anscombe, Stern. Even Einstein, to an eccentric degree. But today, it’s almost as though the cultural swamp of materialism…