The Way Out of the Modern Straitjacket, by Derek Rotty

Derek Rotty is a husband, father, teacher, & free-lance writer who lives in Jackson, Tennessee. He has written extensively on Catholic history, culture, faith formation, & family. Find out more about him & his work at www.derekrotty.com.

During his long and illustrious career as a bishop and evangelist, Venerable Fulton Sheen wrote and preached frequently about peace. Once of his best-known books, from 1949, was Peace of Soul. The theme was constant in his writing and preaching as the post-war culture of personal anxiety and social turbulence deepened and expanded.

At one point, he used his syndicated newspaper column to ask a question: “Is Modern Man Far from Peace?” Sheen’s answer in that article was yes, indeed, modern humans are far from peace. The reason, he wrote, was that we have wrapped ourselves in a “confining straitjacket…of the self left to itself.” Think of how a straitjacket works: the person’s arms are wrapped around himself, unable to stretch out and engage with the world around. ….

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