The Antidote to Social Despair, by Randall Smith

By Randall Smith, The Catholic Thing, June 16, 2021

Randall B. Smith is a Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas. He is the author of …

One of the most popular genres of non-fiction recently has been social critique.  It’s all the rage to tell people where we as a society went wrong.  Every aspiring “public intellectual” must stake his or her claim to prominence, it seems, by crafting a credible social critique. There’s Augusto del Noce in Italy, Pierre Manent in France, Charles Taylor in Canada, and Hartmut Rosa in Germany, all with big books, sometimes in multiple volumes.  (There is a lot wrong with us, it seems, and explaining it is a big job.)  We have our own home-grown critics in America, of course. Patrick Deneen, Carl Trueman, Christopher Caldwell, Jody Bottum, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Rod Dreher – the list is long.  And the Internet is filled with it.

Don’t get me wrong.  …

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