We have presented the specter of a great crisis that has as its immediate cause an impending economic crash that will trigger as its effect the breakdown of our national consensus and American way of life.
The protests of 2010 in Greece on the left and in 2011 on the right. Photo by Philly boy92.
Although this crisis will wreak great material havoc upon us, its greatest damage will be spiritual. While we have presented some practical guidelines as to what we might do in face of the present crisis, it is in this spiritual sphere that the main remedy lies. Without a great moral conversion of some kind, we will not see the return to order we so desire.
There must be a great reawakening that addresses the core spiritual issues that are at stake in our great debate. It avails us nothing if we survive the present storm and even implement our organic principles if it is done with the same restless spirit that brought us to our present plight. As long as we are inside the framework of frenetic intemperance, we will always carry within us the seeds of our own destruction. We must first move outside this framework. There must be a fundamental spiritual transformation that will change our mentalities and mend our ways.
Painting of the Prodigal son by Nikolay Losev.
Such a proposal cannot fail to suggest the figure of the Prodigal Son who, having left his father’s house for the “frenetic intemperance” of a dissolute life, realizes the gravity of his error and longs to return. In looking for our solution, we believe we must follow a similar path.
John Horvat II, Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here, and Where We Need To Go (York, Penn.: York Press, 2013), 345.
