Apology: Love as the State of Things (Hardcover)

If the greatest threat to human happiness is comfort and conformity, Apology: Love as the State of Things offers a means to overcome it. Under the literary form of Justin Martyr’s second-century defense of the Christian faith, Stephen Bujno’s speculative narrative girds the reader with a spiritual armor and strategy to win the field against the compromising minions of apathy and indifference. To wit: finding peace in the world is not possible by making peace with the world, and goods contrary to human nature will pacify only its restlessness. Even as no society can be reformed without self-reform, no Christianity can be reformed without reformed Christians.

Under the guise of a letter to a secular authority by an imprisoned member of the “Weak,” this prescient and timely book invites the reader to consider how this modern crisis is voluntarily self-imposed. It reimagines the Christian landscape as divided among three rivals: the Compromised, who under a mantle of eminence nonetheless stealthily conform; the Radicals, who nonetheless bow to rational thought; and the Weak, who maintain orthodoxy by embracing voluntary precarity. Hope overcomes apathy as mercy tempers indifference. This path to justice offers love as the Absolute’s self-attraction, becoming a liturgy of the will. Only by risking comfort and conformity can the human person live a Gospel that demands everything.

Hardcover. 178 pages.

Size: 5.25 x 0.56 x 8 (in)