Publisher's Synopsis
As millennials we stand accused--of aimlessness, entitlement, indifference, lack of gratitude--merely for existing under the wrong conditions, for illustrating simply by that fact the wrongness of those conditions. This book offers an apologia for an entire generation. It is not so much a solution to our problems as an orientation allowing us to face them. It provides a way of understanding ourselves, leading us to see what our increasingly economic mode of being has lopped off and discarded. We have inherited a deformed anthropology, an inane status quo, for which we have been told we ought to be thankful. We need to rediscover meaning in a world that has become a matter of indifference to us. It will take work, it won't be easy, and it will have to start with our generation.
"A provocative re-orientation to the spirit and outlook of millennials; a testimony of faith from a generation not supposed to have any."--NATHAN SCHNEIDER, journalist and author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse
"Daniel Schwindt is one of those very unusual 'young voices' whose writing calls up very old questions: Why is our freedom in fact a form of exile? Why has the very concept of adulthood become meaningless? Why have our schools become 'our mental cancer'? Both radical and mindful of the radical nature of tradition, these short essays set off fireworks that signal the debut of a remarkable young social critic."--ELIAS CRIM, founder and publisher, Solidarity Hall
"Daniel Schwindt has demonstrated with incisive clarity and sobriety that a spiritual life is a real life. He does not flatter, cajole, or seduce the reader; neither does he treat him or her to the fruits of his subjective impressions. He knows that the world is hard, that time is short, that we have all been disinherited, but that there is nonetheless a clear way to proceed. Solid, relevant, perceptive, uncompromising, compassionate without sentimentality, not a word out of place."--CHARLES UPTON, author of The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age
"Daniel Schwindt in a very brief book has produced a very powerful message. With an economy of expression that is nearly aphoristic, he has constructed a work that simultaneously grabs our hearts and our intellects. His words penetrate the web of lies that largely comprises modern life, as in brief but eloquent prose he deconstructs many of the shibboleths of the modern world, thereby clearing a path to the heart of our predicament. And, having shown us how we got there, he then suggests the way out. I hope that every member of Daniel's generation will read this book. And every member of my own as well."--JOHN C. MÉDAILLE, author of Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More
"In There Must Be More Than This, Daniel Schwindt gives utterance to the previously unarticulated existential ennui that plagues the so-called 'millennial' generation. Like a true doctor of souls, he diagnoses the various spiritual diseases afflicting it: affluence and its accompanying spiritual desolation; disillusionment with the hollow reality of the 'American dream'; the failure of religious, cultural, and political traditions to live up to their promises of a truly authentic engagement with life; and the technological colonization of the human person. In short, Schwindt describes with penetrating insight the 'existential self-centeredness' characteristic of postmodern existence, which results in a 'verbal universe' void of meaning and significance. But he is not without hope. He proposes an alternative, calling us to deep engagement with the cosmological reality of all that is, and the spiritual renewal that accompanies it."--MICHAEL MARTIN, author of The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics
