I can't review it here yet, because I am still too excited to have actually read the words that it contains. I shall wait awhile until I calm down and digest it. I think this particular tome, thin though it is, may even cause indigestion. It is, Nazareth or social chaos, by Vincent McNabb OP. Vincent McNabb OP is eulogized by many as being one of the most pioneering Distributivist thinkers of his time. He is also quite often recounted as a difficult character, difficult to live with and tempestuous. I think this is the case with many holy people. I cannot wait to enter a little of his world and he his way of looking, understanding and seeing the world that surrounded him. I'll let you know what I find. Books are dangerous things, you never know where you might end up. In the meantime, Godzdogz published, in April 2010, a celebration of Vincent McNabb OP's life in their series on priesthood, and it is worth a look.
1 comment:
I read this quite quickly in the end. McNabb is a dreamer and an idealist. His prose is so passionate it can move you to laughter and to tears. He takes no prisoners. He is sharp and critical of the status quo. However, his distributionist dream to relocate the masses to the countryside is not sensible or practical - it is the product of the idolization of the simple life by the middle classes. You have to be rich to live a simple life on the land, or at least, rich by the standards of those that work for the minimum wage serving in the city. This has always been the case. At the time when McNabb was writing, I would have thought that it was almost impossible to secure a living wage from life in the country without vast subsidies being paid by someone. The poor have always made their living by making that which the rich no longer have time to make for themselves, to argue that everyone should wattle out their own broomstick, rather than allow a skilled an imaginative entrepreneur to develop a machine that can make 10 broomsticks more effectively and cheaply, strikes me as a foolish notion. And, I say that as someone who has serious misgivings about capitalism and the place of the market. Still, I love his faith and his passion, his simplicity and his unwillingness to stand by while others took advantage of those most in need.
xxxx
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