Habits of the Heart is a moral adventure based on a real family’s saga. A story within a story, it opens in the chaotic days of 1967 when Jim, a sophomore in college confused by the times, finds a respite from the storm at an Easter family gathering, and so much more. As he listens to his ninety-six-year-old great grandmother share stories from when she was young, he enters a world he never knew, one so captivating that he asks his grandfather to tell him more. Thereupon he discovers more than he could have imagined—an extraordinary story of the life an ordinary man of essential servitude forged on the unyielding anvil of life. Struck by what he hears, Jim realizes how important these stories are in the noise and chaos of 1967—perhaps even more so now—yet how easily they are lost. Habits is a lived picture of the “habits of the heart” Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came to America. Through his grandfather’s story Jim discovers how good habits are formed and passed from generation to generation and woven into the fabric of life, and how important they are in life’s perilous storms.
Habits of the Heart is a moral adventure based on a real family's saga. A story within a story, it opens in the chaotic days of 1967 when Jim, a sophomore in college confused by the times, finds a respite from the storm at an Easter family gathering, and so much more. As he listens to his ninety-six-year-old great grandmother share stories from when she was young, he enters a world he never knew, one so captivating that he asks his grandfather to tell him more. Thereupon he discovers more than he could have imagined--an extraordinary story of the life an ordinary man of essential servitude forged on the unyielding anvil of life. Struck by what he hears, Jim realizes how important these stories are in the noise and chaos of 1967--perhaps even more so now--yet how easily they are lost. Habits is a lived picture of the "habits of the heart" Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came to America. Through his grandfather's story Jim discovers how good habits are formed and passed from generation to generation and woven into the fabric of life, and how important they are in life's perilous storms.
In the passage to modernity we in the West have lost the ability to see things whole. We’ve closed our minds to all things transcendent and default to unbelief, and can’t make sense of the persistent echoes of the voice of God that reverberate in our souls. In Rediscovering God’s Grand Story, James Roseman picks up the strands of science, philosophy, history, the arts, and theology, and reweaves the tapestry to see a coherent story that makes the best sense of the world and provides real meaning and significance to our lives—God’s Grand Myth. We see that the signals of transcendence that confound our culture of doubt are a universal language and vocabulary of the heart echoing the voice of God; and in the very Judeo-Christian story we so readily jettison is found the Author enabling us to see the world whole again. This essay tells why the story and promise of Christianity is so hard to hear today but won’t go away. Could it be that, as T. S. Eliot wrote in the mid-twentieth century, “at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”?
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