It's been a while since a review made me want to snap up a book, but"The Little Way of Ruthie Leming" is going on my reading list just because of what this guy found in it:
. . . you will also find in it a moving affirmation of the sense that most of us can only discern rarely and vaguely in the bustle of our daily lives—the sense that beyond our petty vanities and momentary worries, beyond arguments and ambitions, beyond even principles and ideals, there is a kind of gentle, caring warmth that is really what makes life worth living. It is expressed through the words and acts of people who rise above themselves, but it seems to come from somewhere deeper. Maybe it’s divine, maybe it isn’t, but it’s real, and it effortlessly makes a mockery of a lot of what goes by the name of moral and political philosophy, and especially of the radical individualism that is so much a part of both the right and the left today.
A "gentle, caring warmth that is really what makes life worth living." I think that's what most of us long for but, as he says, we can discern it only rarely and vaguely. Thank God for the good writers who can at least inspire us to look harder.
