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Selling Ourselves Short: Why We Struggle to Earn a Living and Have a Life (Brazos, 2003)
Over the past several centuries, developments in economic organization, in "family values" and in gender ideology have effectively marginalized compassion from its once-prominent place in Western social norms. "Get the most for the least" and "look out for #1" -- the norms of competition -- have replaced "love your neighbor as yourself." Altruism is now dismissed as merely an illusion. These developments place enormous pressure on our sense of ourselves or our confidence in the meaning and value of our individual lives: it has gotten brutally difficult to "have a life. No wonder "the time bind" and work/life conflicts drive us crazy: there is no other sane response. Written with the support of a grant from the Lilly Endowment.
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Dance Lessons: Moving to the Rhythm of a Crazy God (Morehouse, 1999); reissued in paperback as Motherhood in the Balance: Children, Career, God, and Me (2001)
A narrative nonfiction inquiry into identity and vocation braided from three overlapping narrative strands: an account of more-or-less bewildered motherhood; an inquiry into the relationship between faith and imagination; and a writer's coming-of-age story as I realize that I am (I am called to be) not an English professor but a writer, my own work in my own voice, not at a safe scholarly distance from the messy passions of life. The tale begins with an utterly unexpected pregnancy (I'd been told I wasn't fertile). It ends a dozen years later as I drag from a closet a carton holding decades of writerly journals and narrative sketches -- an "unexpected pregnancy" of another sort, perhaps.
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For Fidelity: How Intimacy and Commitment Enrich Our Lives (Knopf, 1998)
My title for this book was "The Holiness of the Heart's Desire: A Sexual Ethics for My Children." (I was over-ruled by the marketing people, who always make the final decision on book titles.) It's written primarily for other parents who share my yearning for reasonable, non-dogmatic, persuasive terms in which to explain and defend the significance of sexual fidelity. The first step in that process, I'm convinced, is thinking through the issues coherently for ourselves, in fully adult terms that we can nonetheless translate in ways appropriate to the ages and situations of our kids. And so, I contend that sexual fidelity is best understood as a subset of interpersonal ethics-not as a variety of property rights. The applicable category is friendship: don't exploit; don't let yourself be exploited. From various angles I explain that we have an erotic need for fidelity, a psychological need for it, and a spiritual need for it as well. Faithful sexual relationships are ultimately holy; they reflect some of our deepest capacities for spiritual expression. (In passing, I observe that the same is true of faithful, committed same-sex relationships: orientation provides no moral excuse for promiscuity or sexual exploitation.)
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The Design of BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983)
In what is probably the first self-conscious or highly intentional work of narrative nonfiction, Coleridge explains how imagination operates by recounting the key personal experiences that led him to his now-famous insight into this crucial creative faculty. Imagination provides (1) our deepest insights into the character of reality, (2) our finest, most transparent use of words, and (3) our most profound access to God. The activity of imagination is the "image of God" within us; it is, as the Biographia explains "the echo in the finite of the infinite I AM."
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