Selling Ourselves Short : Why We Struggle to Earn a Living and Have a Life

by Wallace, Catherine M.

• ISBN13: 9781587430794
• ISBN10: 1587430797
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: Brazos Press

Summary

The guilt and exhaustion that plague our lives are all too familiar. How can we balance work, parenting, relationships, and personal fulfillment while laboring under the cultural mandate to compete and consume? How can we become truly successful human beings when the marketplace recipe for success disregards what it means to be human? Catherine M. Wallace argues that the root of the problem is that "competition, rather than compassion, is the public norm of adult behavior." While many books on this topic turn only to hoped-for but remote policy changes for an answer, Wallace proposes a more immediate, and in many ways a far more radical, solution. Drawing on the ancient traditions of spiritual discernment, she challenges us to embrace moral responsibility and compassion. We can finally trade nagging guilt for the freedom of living in good conscience. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Catherine M. Wallace is the author of For Fidelity and Motherhood in the Balance. Recently, she was writer in residence at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. She has three grown children and is currently a freelance writer living with her husband in Skokie, Illinois

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	9	(6)
Part One: What Does It Profit? Wanting More from Life Than a Paycheck
Autobiographical Prelude: Of Kids, Careers, and Craziness
1. How Competition Has Replaced Compassion in American Culture	15	(12)
The Tinker Man's Endeavor
Who Cares?
The Power of What's Missing
2. Compassion, Altruism, and the Common Good	27	(20)
Religious Accounts of Compassion
The Altruist and the Rational Actor
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Common Good
Part Two: The Angel and the Oaf: How the Self Divided against Itself and Everybody Lost
Prelude
3. How Did We Get into This Mess?	47	(12)
The Spiritual Grammar of the West
Virtue and the Good Life
Surviving in a World "Grazed Thin by Death"
4. Can We Blame the Victorians?	59	(10)
The Challenge of Industrial Capitalism
The Changing Vocabulary of Virtue
The Rise of Victorian "Separate Spheres"
5. Why Gender Dualism Leaves Us All Half-Crazy	69	(16)
Distortions and Deteriorations of Gender Identity
Gender Metaphors and the Loss of Compassion
Gender Metaphor and Contemporary Motherhood Polemics
Conclusion: Reclaiming Our Humanity
Part Three: Home Sweet Home: How "Family Values" Fail Us
Prelude
6. Making It Official: Why Morality and Compassion Don't Belong in Public	85	(12)
Family Values and the "Public" World
Where the Golden Rule Has Gone-and Why
How "Family Values" Undermine the Common Good
A Plague of Experts
Discounting Ourselves
7. What Counts Is What Counts-and Nothing Else Does	97	(10)
The Rise of Quantification
Double-Entry Bookkeeping: The Either/Or Cosmology of Spreadsheets
8. Home Sweet Home as Sacred Center	107	(10)
The Mythic Resonance of "Home"
The Architectural Iconography of "Home"
The Mythic Locus and the Shopping Mall
9. Having a Soul That's Not for Sale	117	(14)
Has Meaning Any Meaning?
The Divided Self
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Conclusion: Caring in Public
Part Four: Secular Salvation and the Divine Right of Markets: He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins
Prelude
10. What's Work?	131	(14)
Having a Life and Finding "Flow"
"Something More" than Work
11. The History of Our Dilemma	145	(16)
Downsizing and Damnation
Predestination: How Do I Know If I'm "Saved"?
Success as Salvation
My Job, My Self
What If Work Does Not Define Us?
12. Selling Ourselves Short in a Buyer's Market	161	(18)
Consumerism and Self Definition
Marketplace Realities and the Time Bind
The "Divine Right" of Markets
Conscience and the Divided Self
Conclusion: Reclaiming Our Lives
Part Five: Decoding the Child-Care Debates
Prelude
13. The Predicament of Parents	179	(10)
The Data on Child Care
14. Parents in the Cross Fire: Disputes among Academics	189	(30)
The Behaviorists
The Attachment Theorists
Sorting Out the Issues: New Work in Neuroscience
The Social Skills of Newborns
The Battle among Biologists: Genetic Determinism
Reclaiming the Question: The Concept of Memory
Reclaiming the Question: The Reality of "Self"
Conclusion: Compassion and Parenthood
Part Six: Survival and Integrity: Defining Our Choices, Living Our Lives
Prelude
15. The Question of Conscience	219	(18)
Deconstructing Conscience
Moral Norms and the Deliberate Life
The Moral Autonomy of Conscience: A Christian Account
Conscience, Faith, and Imagination
16. The Arts of Moral Discernment	237	(18)
Ignatian Discernment: An Overview
Neuroscience and Discernment
The Core of a Decision: Consolation and Desolation
The Rational Actor and the Religious Believer
Conclusion: To Seek the Discerning Heart	255	(4)
Appendix One	259	(6)
Appendix Two	265	(8)
Notes	273