Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World

Book excerpt: The first edition of Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World became one of the founding and guiding texts for new monastic communities. In this revised edition, Jonathan Wilson focuses more directly on lessons for these communities from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. In the midst of the unsettling cultural shifts from modernity to postmodernity, a new monastic movement is arising that strives to be a faithful witness to the gospel. These new monastic communities seek to participate in Christ's life in the world and bear witness by learning to live intentionally as the church in Western culture. This movement is about finding the church's center in Christ in the midst of a fragmented world, overcoming the failure of the Enlightenment project and our complicity with it, resisting the temptation to Nietzschean power, and building communities of disciples. This new edition is greatly enlarged from the original volume. It includes responses to critics of the new monasticism such as D. A. Carson, an entirely new chapter on the Nietzschean temptation, an afterword on properly understanding the new monastic movement, the dangers it faces, and the work yet to be done, as well as an appendix on the supposed post-modern agenda of Jonathan Wilson and Brian McLaren. For those striving to understand the path the church should take in this fragmented world, this book is essential reading.