While the term Acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common.
This is a terrific book about a badly misunde.
Snell helps us see why this is so and what Christians can do about it with elegant, penetrating insight.
R.
J.
Thomas Aquinas Acedia--the sin of sloth, so often confused with laziness--is the most overlooked but widespread illness of the modern age; the emptiness under the mask of the world\'s frantic activity.
Read this book --PETER KREEFT, author of Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St.
This is the \'noonday devil\' that great saints have labelled \'sloth.\' Know your enemy.
It exposes a deeply hidden and deeply destructive fundamental attitude that pervades our culture, an attitude that comes not just from the flesh (laziness) or from the world (world-weariness, cynicism), but from the Devil: disgust and rebellion toward Being itself, natural as well as supernatural.
A stupendous book, filled with the happiness of wonder.--ANTHONY ESOLEN, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child A whole book about just one vice, \'sloth\'? Ah, but this book is different-and devastating.
Like his great predecessors Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Max Picard, Romano Guardini, and Pope John Paul II, he diagnoses the besetting disease of our time--spiritual torpor--and prescribes as a remedy the joyful celebration of the Sabbath.
Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty \'vacations\' that are but interruptions in work.
Snell\'s book on Acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water.
J.
In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R.
By feasting, keeping sabbath, and working well, we learn to see the world as enchanting, beautiful, and good--just as God sees it.
Acedia and Its Discontents resists despair, calling us to reconfigure our imaginations and practices in deep love of the life and work given by God.
Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us.
Sloth is a hellish despair.
As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is.
Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself.
While the term Acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common
