Sweat of Your Brow Winter 1996

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The Fabric of this World: Inquiries into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work by Lee Hardy (Eerdmans, 1990), 213 pp.

The great preacher Phillips Brooks once said in a sermon on the exemplary life of John the Baptist, "I will insist on your recognizing that you are, in great or small degree (that makes no difference) preparing the way for something, and that what you are preparing the way for is simply the logical outcome of your own character and life. Every man is making it easier for the world to be that which he is, harder for the world to be that which he is not." Lee Hardy's book, The Fabric of this World, can help the reader clarify for him or herself just how to begin preparing the way for the kingdom of God in his or her working life.

As a professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Hardy developed The Fabric of this World out of a course he has taught for a number of years, and consequently the book is instructional as well as inspirational. Hardy devotes the greater portion of the book to the historical analysis and explanation of both secular and Christian ideas about the nature of work, but he always relates his conclusions to the larger question of vocation: what is it, and how can we as Christian people realize it in our own lives?

The book moves systematically from general ideas to particular applications. In Chapter One, Hardy outlines a brief history of Western civilization's thinking about the nature of work itself, beginning with the classical Greeks and continuing through the Medieval Christian social structure, the humanist Renaissance, Marx's idea of work as self-actualization, and the Freudian view of work as a denial of self. In Chapter Two, he then shows how ...

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