Made for Here

Modern life has given us more space-and less place.

We have houses without shared life, neighborhoods without neighbors, parishes filled with people who remain strangers, workplaces separated from meaningful work, and landscapes treated chiefly as surfaces for traffic, development, and consumption. We can obtain almost anything from almost anywhere, yet many of us feel increasingly powerless to cultivate, repair, govern, or care for the world immediately around us.

In Made for Here, Jim Garlits offers a sweeping Catholic vision for recovering the human scale of life.

Drawing upon Catholic social teaching, theology, philosophy, economics, education, urbanism, agriculture, permaculture, and the wisdom of writers such as John Senior, E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, Josef Pieper, and Saint John Paul II, Garlits asks a deceptively simple question:

What do human beings need in order to remain fully human?

The answer begins close to home.

Human beings need places where they can know and be known, accept responsibility, practice hospitality, perform meaningful work, form children, honor elders, worship together, care for creation, and hand something good to the next generation. We need households that produce more than private comfort, parishes that become genuine communities, economies that serve persons, technologies that remain human tools, and neighborhoods shaped for belonging rather than mere circulation.

Made for Here is not a nostalgic demand that everyone return to an imagined past. Nor is it a blueprint for one ideal lifestyle. It is an invitation to move from consumption toward cultivation-from passing through the world as customers, clients, spectators, and users toward inhabiting it as neighbors, stewards, makers, citizens, parishioners, and friends.

Whether you live on a farm, in a small town, in a suburb, or in an apartment, some portion of the world has been entrusted to you.

A household. A street. A parish. A classroom. A workplace. A garden. A craft. A neighbor who needs to be remembered.

You are not responsible for everything, but you are responsible for something.

Begin where you are.