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Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity (Book 1/Collected Works)

by Carol Jackson Robinson

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•   Description
•   About the Author

• This is Book 1 of the Collected Works of Carol Jackson Robinson (1911–2002).   

  From the Introduction:

  "The articles in this little book, Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity, will discomfort the complacent Catholic. Though written seventy years ago, their urgent call has not lost any relevance: the Catholic life does not consist in a mechanical, mediocre practice of the Faith—one that simply meets the minimum requirements of being a Catholic in “good standing”—but in a fully-realized Catholicism that penetrates into every facet of one’s existence. Unabashedly Catholic, the ideas formulated in this work may well challenge the reader to confront his own spiritual mediocrity.  Robinson’s diagnoses and prescriptions were conditioned by her time and place, but they remain valid for us today, because human nature and our conditions are fundamentally similar. Indeed, when Robinson writes of “perfecting men and their talents rather than deadening the human thing in the interests of mechanical monsters,” can we not say today, having witnessed the brutalizing effects of systems that do not allow for this perfection, that her words were prescient?  This book touches upon only a fraction of the ideas Robinson explored throughout her nearly fifty years of writing, much of which has only been rediscovered recently. We hope that with this book, the first volume in our Collected Works series, Carol Robinson should be ranked among the most perceptive of 20th century American Catholic essayists. Her insights have remained in obscurity far too long." 

  Read Roger Buck's review here:  Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity by Carol Jackson Robinson (Review) (corjesusacratissimum.org) He is the author of Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, The Gentle Traditionalist, and The Gentle Traditionalist Returns all available from Angelico Press. 

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  Arouca Press Author Page

  CJR

  Carol Jackson Robinson

  Catholic Writer · Editor · Lecturer · Lay Thomist

  May 5, 1911 – August 23, 2002

   

  A recovered Catholic voice of unusual force: clear, humorous, unsentimental, and deeply formed by the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas.

  Thomistic lay witness Integrity magazine Catholic Action Lay vocation Collected Works

  For many years, Carol Jackson Robinson’s books, articles, letters, and Integrity writings were scattered, difficult to obtain, and largely absent from Catholic memory. Arouca Press has undertaken the recovery of her complete works, restoring one of the most original and Thomistically grounded Catholic lay writers of the twentieth century to the readers who need her now.

  St. Thomas Aquinas · Catholic culture · the lay state · spiritual realism · postwar America

   

  ✠ BIOGRAPHY ✠

  Carol Jackson Robinson was an American Catholic writer, editor, lecturer, and public speaker. Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and raised in West Redding, Connecticut, she studied at Wellesley College, passed for a time through atheism, and graduated in 1937. After attending a lecture on Catholic Action by Paul McGuire in New York City, she converted to the Catholic Faith in 1941.

  Her conversion gave lasting direction to her intellectual and literary life. Writing frequently under the pseudonym Peter Michaels, Robinson became known for her criticism of spiritual mediocrity, secular modernity, and the tendency to reduce Catholic life to private piety. Her work is marked by a fierce confidence that grace is real, that the lay vocation has its own dignity, and that Catholic intelligence must be formed by St. Thomas Aquinas.

  In 1946, together with artist and writer Ed Willock, she founded Integrity, one of the most distinctive Catholic journals of postwar America. The magazine gathered a circle of serious Catholic writers and thinkers and sought to articulate a complete Catholic life: doctrinal, cultural, social, liturgical, familial, and public. Robinson worked with Integrity until 1952.

  In 1956 she married Maurie Leigh Robinson, a former NBC writer. She later returned to formal study and received an M.A. in Theology from St. John’s University in Queens, New York, in 1967. In 1975, she received the Wanderer Award for her work in promoting the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. From 1971 to 1987 she wrote more than sixty articles for The Wanderer, including a substantial six-part critique of Karl Rahner.

  The governing conviction

  Robinson wrote as a laywoman convinced that sanctity is not a clerical specialty, nor a monastic costume adopted by the laity, but the normal vocation of Catholics living in the real conditions of family, work, culture, and public life.

   

  ❦ A THOMISTIC MIND FOR THE MODERN CRISIS ❦

  St. Thomas as master

  Robinson’s essays consistently return to Thomistic clarity: nature and grace, virtue, the common good, the Beatitudes, and the lay vocation.

  Against mediocrity

  She attacked tepid Catholicism, anti-intellectual piety, and the surrender of Catholic life to Americanized habits of thought.

  The lay state

  Her famous criticism of “nunks” defended a properly lay holiness rooted in one’s real duties, not imitation of religious life.

  Cultural combat

  Her later work brought Thomistic judgment to bear on secular humanism, postconciliar confusion, and false theories of progress.

   

  ✦ THE CAROL JACKSON ROBINSON LIBRARY FROM AROUCA PRESS ✦

  Arouca Press has brought Carol Jackson Robinson’s writings back into print as a coherent library rather than as isolated reprints. The volumes below recover her major books, her essays on the Beatitudes and the lay vocation, her cultural criticism, and her later work on the postconciliar crisis.

  Main Collected Works Series

  The central sequence of Robinson’s recovered books and major essay collections.

  Volume I

  Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity

  Robinson’s bracing call to Catholic seriousness, spiritual maturity, and resistance to the habits of mediocrity.

  Volume II

  The Eightfold Kingdom Within

  Essays on the Beatitudes and the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, presenting Thomistic spiritual theology for ordinary Catholics.

  Volume III

  Designs for Christian Living

  A practical account of Christian life, culture, and the habits needed for a fully Catholic home and society.

  Volume IV

  This Perverse Generation

  A sharp critique of lukewarm Catholicism, modern culture, and the evasions by which Christians avoid conversion.

  Volume V

  Thy Faith Hath Made Thee Whole

  A substantial collection on Catholic wholeness, spiritual sanity, the Incarnation, and the healing of modern fragmentation.

  Volume VI

  The Salt of the Earth

  Robinson’s preconciliar essays on the Catholic vocation to preserve, season, and resist corruption in the world.

  Forthcoming Volume

  An Embattled Mind

  Robinson’s later essays from The Wanderer, including her critique of postconciliar confusion, secular humanism, and false progress.

  Additional Robinson Projects from Arouca Press

  Beyond the numbered volumes, Arouca Press has also recovered the wider Robinson circle and archive.

  The Integrity writings

  Integrity: Writings of Carol Jackson Robinson and the Integrity Circle

  A recovery of the postwar Catholic journal Robinson helped found with Ed Willock, including essays that shaped her vision of the lay vocation.

  Letters and related writings

  The Collected Letters of Carol Jackson Robinson

  A developing archive of Robinson’s correspondence and related materials, illuminating her friendships, convictions, and intellectual development.

  The purpose of the recovery

  Together these books show Robinson as a spiritual writer, cultural critic, editor, controversialist, and lay theologian whose work is unified by a Thomistic understanding of grace, nature, virtue, and the vocation of the laity.

   

  ❦ WHY SHE MATTERS NOW ❦

  Robinson’s work is not merely a document of postwar American Catholicism. It remains alive because the problems she confronted remain alive: Catholic mediocrity, cultural surrender, confusion about the lay vocation, sentimental spirituality, intellectual laziness, and the temptation to replace the hard clarity of doctrine with fashionable language.

  Her answer was never nostalgia. It was Catholic realism: grace perfecting nature, truth disciplining the mind, the virtues ordering the soul, and the lay Catholic taking up the duties of sanctity in the middle of the world. In this sense Robinson is not only an important recovered writer; she is a guide for Catholic renewal.

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  Arouca Press restores a forgotten Catholic voice

   

  In Robinson’s writings, the reader meets a convert, a laywoman, a cultural critic, and a Thomist whose work still teaches Catholics how to think, live, and fight for holiness in the modern world.

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