Catholic professor Anthony Esolen maintains that American culture is rotting along with the rest of Western civilization and is in desperate need of revitalization. Out of the Ashes is a blunt rallying call to Christians to do everything they can to restore a love of truth, appreciation of beauty, a proper understanding of education, and a joy in play and creating beautiful things. Without the rediscovery of these fundamental ideals and practices, Esolen anticipates American society will continue to become increasingly antisocial, shallow, unstable, and prone to tyranny.

Why do we lie? We lie for the same reasons that children do. The consequences of others knowing the truth could impact us negatively. Whether it’s about the baseball through a window or a government scandal, lies obscure or conceal the truth. We must not tolerate lies or participate in them ourselves.

We are made in the image of God, who is Truth itself. So we will never be able to erase our instinct that truth is real and we should be aligned with it. That is to say, we will never completely obliterate our humanity, or the way we were made to function. But to lie is to settle for being less than human. The more we speak truthfully, the more human we become.

We are becoming a world of liars, in part because many people now consider truth optional, but also because a sustained lack of vigilance has led to a stream of lies infiltrating the culture. It is virtually impossible to avoid ingesting falsehoods now.

It is imperative that we regain our truth-telling abilities, as well as our capacity to accept truth, even when bitter. Part of being a truth teller is clearing out the verbal lard from your vocabulary. Listen to how politicians, reporters, celebrities, and, really, just about anyone on the street talks about their lives and the world around them. Chances are very good that they will rely on words like equality, democracy, the system, capitalism, rights, sexism, religion, racism, xenophobia, and inclusivity. Such words are simultaneously loaded and empty. Using them does not help us think or communicate clearly about ideas. We’re drowning in a sea of abstractions.

Such empty rhetoric has become common parlance for elitists—not the language of ordinary people who interact with the real world. Orwell strongly urged people to respect language and be wary of vagaries, especially in politics. Simple, concrete, and precise language is always best. Unlike abstractions, the tangible world can’t be bent to accommodate lies and vague ideas.

Avoid the rehashed clichés and empty words; enrich your vocabulary. Become a lover of words so that your language can become more precise, so that you can apply nuance, and so you can better experience (and enjoy) the texture of language. Poetry is a wonderful way to enrich your imagination and help you see the world in new ways. Consider picking up poetry by Keats, John Milton, Lord Tennyson, or the psalms of David. These works put what passes for modern poetry to shame. The lack of exposure to the great tradition of literature and poetry contributes to the deficit in modern poetic expression.

Modern architecture is an assault on the senses, a caustic blend of bland and garish. Compared to old cathedrals filled with beautiful stained glass, intricate stonework, and vaulted ceilings, modern architecture falls far short.

Art is dying everywhere, and, with it, an appreciation for beauty. Tragically, this lack of appreciation for beauty is a common feature of church culture. This up-and-coming generation is drifting through life without exposure to antiquity and artists older than Any Warhol. It’s time to start ripping out the plywood of ‘good enough’ and laying stone foundations for a revitalized appreciation for the beautiful. Our hearts and minds are deprived of its elevating influence otherwise.

Even without a talented organist to fill a cathedral with music, every person has an instrument at their disposal: the human voice. We would do well to bring back hymns. They are brimming with theological richness and help orient us toward God and sensitize us to beauty. So much of what passes for hymns today is shallow at best and, at worst, harmful. The choruses are simplistic, overly reliant on emotion and hype, and elevate people instead of God. They fail to tell the truth about humanity, that we are encumbered by sin and in need of God’s grace and the courage to die to self for the sake of God and others.

Traditional hymns have a way of bolstering our hearts in a way that simply saying “Jesus” over and over fails to. Let’s choose beauty and rich meaning over cheap flashy hype that lasts only as long as the rush of dopamine.

The church can also involve congregants in making art, encouraging them to learn from past masters in their respective fields. Raw, innate creativity is an important ingredient, but if we do not learn proper technique first, that creativity will never be properly harnessed.  Aspiring poets can learn from more experienced hymnists, and musicians can put themselves until the tutelage of Johann Sebastian Bach and other greats. Let us not forget Gregorian chants either, which aren’t dated, but timeless. They are simple (not simplistic) prayers put to music that all can follow and leads people into a meditative rest and admiration of God that a soloist in skinny jeans cannot.

Beauty orients toward higher things. The drab and the gaudy fail to take us there.

The way sex is understood and discussed and displayed has changed rapidly over the past few decades. In the absence of worship of God, modern man is now elevating himself, his libido, and a state that will defend his right to get turned on.

We’re like Esau, trading an amazing inheritance for a bowl of stew: the body profits, but the soul goes malnourished.

Until recently, sex outside the commitment of marriage was viewed as morally inferior, even by liberal lights. Premarital sex was a decision that boys made—not men. Most liberal doctors in the 1950s argued that masturbation was not immoral, but were clear that it turns someone narcissistically inward on self and dampens sexual drive. People commonly employed the language of “dirty” to describe pornography until the 1980s. There was a time when Cosmopolitan was a family magazine.

The cultural landscape has shifted significantly since the 1960s sexual revolution. The Christian response must be complete rejection of the revolution.

Feminism is an aspect of the revolution that is ruining us. The fundamental issue of feminism is that it presupposes you can seek the good of women without also considering the well being of men. The relationship between men and women has become antagonistic and zero-sum, which is tragic, because men and women were not made to war against each other but were made for each other.

Moreover, feminism has done little to correct the assumption that manhood is not a headlong plunge into animalistic pleasure. To revitalize our culture, boys must become men—not just adult males. The measure of manliness is not taking a girl to bed, but a willingness to face reality instead of retreating from it, to be brave enough to disagree, to stand up for what is right, to take risks.

Go to the world’s hinterlands—go just about anywhere—and you see that most of the world’s cultures observe the clear difference between men and women. Only in places of indoctrination will you find such distinctions minimized as much as possible. Men and women are found everywhere you go and they behave in ways that are readily identifiable as feminine and masculine. As Genesis 1:27 affirms, “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Down to their essences, men and women are different. We see the strengths and limitations of both sexes displayed throughout history and literature. Who would deny that the rich portrayals of female characters like Helen of Troy, Anna Karenina, Elizabeth Bennett, and Juliet bear resemblances to women we know in our own lives? It’s disingenuous to deny it or to reduce fictional characters to social constructions.

Sexuality is an integral part of who we are as human beings. This is nothing to be shunned or denied. Christ himself affirms the creation story and the purposes of two distinct human forms: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10:7-8). There is a beauty to the differences. How curious that a culture that supposedly celebrates differences insists on obliterating differences between men and women.

The workplace is gaining women, but the neighborhood is dying; it’s empty and antisocial realm now. Women used to employ their amazing skills in every area of beautification and maintenance in the home. They used to visit and be visited by neighbors. They were the social glue that was so essential to building the ties that form robust community. The home is now just a house, because women have been told it’s a prison constructed by the patriarchy. But the workingwoman is succumbing to the same malaise that plagues the workingman: a sense of identity in being busy, work to justify one’s existence. Work is important, but busyness has been an escape from contemplating and addressing the needs of the soul. Contemplation cannot happen in a state of perpetual busyness. Moreover, pay is not the final arbiter of work’s significance. We are handing off familial duties to bureaucrats and day cares, and the home suffers, the neighborhood suffers, children suffer, and women themselves suffer.

Why don’t we own or make beautiful things? It’s not a question of money. Even the poor in the United States are far wealthier than the majority of the world. And regardless of annual income, it seems just about everyone manages to acquire substantial amounts of junk. Our homes are filled with electronics that quickly become obsolete if they don’t break first.

It’s not that we don’t have time. We have, for instance, far more leisure time than our grandparents with laborsaving devices, and, on the whole, we work fewer hours. It appears that we don’t want to devote the time required to make something beautiful. People might like the idea of making things, but few actually follow the God-given urge, and let the cultural current of convenience and mass-production take them toward junk. Most find it difficult to swim upstream when cheaply made items are a click away.

But to create something, a work of art, a song, a table, is to step into a God-breathed capacity and responsibility. When we rush through something, or settle for making something poorly, the work is cheapened. It is easier to consume than to create, but we miss out on a key aspect of being human when we do. 

It’s tough to open people’s eyes to what they’re missing out on. From a historical perspective, we are the odd people out when in comes to play. Until recently, children played without the constant supervision and direction of adults. They formed societies of sorts, where they could take control of games played, make up rules, adapt the rules depending on who was playing. They learned how to organize their own sports and games like tag or hide-and-seek, and important abilities like navigating conflicts. No social workers, lifeguards, camp counselors, or coaches.

In C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, a senior devil (Screwtape) is training a junior devil in the art of temptation. Screwtape reminds his apprentice that pleasure is a gift of the Enemy above (God), that demons can use pleasure to tempt and make the love of pleasure inordinate. Play, mirth, celebration are all parts of God’s design, not the devil’s. But unfortunately, play is beginning to resemble work instead of being distinct from it. Even for children, sports have become a serious business. Parents push their kids, organize games for them, brag about their kid’s talent. It’s become work for kids instead of a respite from school and chores.

Nanny states like the United States and Canada have launched campaigns to encouraging parents (children of the increasingly paternal State) to encourage kids to play outdoors. How sad that this has become a public service announcement, that governments would need to advocate something as obvious as that.

But the issue of play is not as simple, unfortunately. It is connected to a tangle of issues that make playing outdoors an unnatural phenomenon. Consider how neighborhoods are no longer interconnected, with neighbors who know each other and keep an eye on each other’s kids. The elderly aren’t out on the porch, but at nursing homes. Too many kids would interfere with the ambitions of two working parents, so there are far fewer children in the first place, decreasing the chances of groups of children forming or organizing any kind of play among themselves. Hospitality is quickly becoming a quaint, outdated convention because trust is dwindling.

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