Designs for Christian Living by Carol Jackson Robinson (Book 3/Collected Works)

Designs for Christian Living was originally published in 1947 and is Book 3 of the Collected Works of Carol Jackson Robinson. 

Book 1: Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity

Book 2: The Eightfold Kingdom Within

From the Foreword:

Designs for Christian Living suggests the kind of small, mustard-seed endeavors that could, with God’s rain and sun, germinate in the soil of the world and provide oases of shade for men weary of secularism. They are mere beginnings, but one must begin somewhere; and beginnings, by their nature, are small. God’s own beginning was the infant offspring of a poor, working-class family who lived in a backwater town in an insignificant province of the great Roman Empire; but that child lit a small blaze that eventually set that empire and the entire world on fire. May Robinson’s book be the spark that kindles that same fire in us – the desire and resolve to work, once again, to restore all things in Christ. - Christopher Zehnder

--------------

Praise for the book: 

The path of holiness is filled with dangerous presumptions and illusions, but it is ensconced in fire and light.  It burns, that much is true, but it is also luminous, it is “design” and “order” – completely contradicting the modern notion of religion, in which all is seen as mere sentiment or social communality.

The contemporary version of this confusion is manifest in the present pandemic, which is seen as a loss to religion because “we can no longer gather,” but it is much more horrific than that and it is, in truth, a loss of the vital contact with the Divine Mystery than can only be effected in the Holy Sacraments.  We delude ourselves to think that Divine Mystery can be televised or “streamed.”  It must be touched, received, and embraced.  Recorded, perhaps, but It can never be captured, digitalized, and transmitted.  It is immediate or it is nothing.

The Hidden God of majesty creatively touches all, but He manifested Himself historically as a Man from Nazareth, asking to be touched in His Resurrection.  Order, purpose, and design are inevitable in the intelligent Catholic.  At times the Christian journey is painful, but it always consoles in truth; it is a living reality that leads to Hidden Beauty, the Origin of all things, and the Vision of Truth.  Enter herein to find a thoughtful application of the ever-ancient quest, fitted to modernity. - Rev. Fr. James Doran, Saint Joseph Antiochene Syriac Maronite Catholic Church

Perhaps the best way to understand this prescient collection of essays is to see them as precisely what the title of this marvelous book describes them as being: a series of proposals for the building up of the Kingdom of God in today’s world. Robinson sketches out for her reader what this might mean on the individual and societal level, presenting a series of imaginative vignettes wherein ordinary Catholics, utilizing their ordinary talents alongside the extraordinary gifts of supernatural grace, transform the life around them. In every chapter Robinson speculates on what we could do if only we lived out our faith intentionally, integrating our mundane and spiritual lives in such a manner that everything we did—even down to the most seemingly trivial activities—would manifest our overriding concern to subordinate all things pertaining to the temporal order to the providential power of God. I call the book prescient because its clear-eyed yet mystical call to everyday holiness is even more relevant now than it was when the book first appeared almost three-quarters of a century ago. Without doubt, the need for Catholics to embrace the call of Christ and lead lives of bold integrity in the service of the faith is our primary task at the present moment. This book is at once both a clarion call and a blueprint for such transformationally Christ-centered lives. – Gregorio Montejo, PhD, Assistant Professor of Historical Theology, Boston College

Carol Robinson is largely forgotten today, but she is not only interesting but much more than interesting. This book is far from being a mere period piece. It has something to say, to say to its own time and to ours, very much of which we need to take to heart. – Thomas Storck, author of An Economics of Justice and Charity