"Attacks from a Scriptural foundation the root things that are wrong with our society.... The devil, secularism, man merely animal, birth control, emotional problems, labor relations, all are covered briefly and in a stirring style that compels our attention" - James F. Cunningham, Catholic World. Carol Jackson Robinson (1911-2003) wrote numerous books pamphlets and articles, some under the pseudonym of Peter Michaels. She was a founder and editor of the underground yet influential Catholic journal Integrity.

This Perverse Generation

Robinson, Carol Jackson

Religion & Spirituality

Catholic Authors Press

Thy Faith Hath Made Thee Whole: The Integrity Years (1946-1956) (Collected Works)

Thy Faith Hath Made Thee Whole includes all of the articles Carol Jackson Robinson (1911-2002) wrote for Integrity, the magazine she co-founded with Ed Willock and others in 1946. A collection of many of her articles was published by The Angelus Press in the book, My Life with Thomas Aquinas, in two editions (1992 & 1995). This volume not only includes all of her articles for Integrity but also all her book reviews and editorials (October 1951-March 1952). The preface has been taken from an article she wrote in 1962 in which she reflects on her work as editor of Integrity. In the preface, she stated: "...we were essentially right all the way across the board, but these are no longer burning issues." We beg to differ and believe that many of the issues she raises in this book are still of concern for any thinking Catholic, so much has the world been taken in by a technocratic, liberal, impersonal, and un-Christian spirit. For Carol Robinson, mammon had replaced what should be the true object of our love and worship. As rational creatures we have as a natural end the perfection of our souls, and as baptized Christians, the Beatific Vision. Our lives are not meant to be lived on the purely natural level but on one which takes cognizance of grace. It is grace that will re-orient our lives towards God and, as a consequence, will re-orient the social order. Our priorities no longer lie where they should.

Arouca Press

This Perverse Generation (Collected Works)

"This book is a treasure trove of profoundly practical insights for living and loving faithfully in the twenty-first century. Just as St. Francis saw Assisi more accurately not as a fortified stronghold of safety and wealth but as a city hanging upside down by a providential thread, so does Carol Robinson evaluate the tenuous state of America. With Thomistic clarity and Chestertonian wit, she pierces through our current clouded state of affairs. In this small and efficient book, Robinson's language is clear; and so are her ideas as she probes philosophical and theological truths in a very accessible way. Reminiscent of Frank Sheed (this book was first published by Sheed & Ward), Robinson offers us sanity. As Sheed put it around the time this book was published, "seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity, because God is everywhere and all things are upheld by Him. What we do about it may be sanctity, but merely seeing it is sanity." It might surprise you as you read this book just how much continuity exists between Robinson's 1949 world and our own. But the insanity has heightened exponentially. Her clarity was prophetic for those in her day; it is a lifeboat for us today." - From the Foreword

Designs for Christian Living (Collected Works)

From the Foreword: "In Designs for Christian Living, Robinson practices what she preaches. Designs is not primarily a theological work but an essay into what Catholics can do in the here and now to begin the transformation of society. Interestingly, Robinson does not propose the formation of Catholic political parties or movements; she avoids the fallacy of urging the erection of a political house on the foundation of a cultural morass. Rather, she asks us to examine how we might transform what we do in everyday life so that it may better reflect Christian mores and ideas. She asks us to imagine how we may rebuild the structure of a Christian society one brick at a time. Written in an engaging journalistic style, Designs for Christian Living offers various scenarios or stories of imaginary Catholics doing unimagined things. To counter the influence of bad books, one group of Catholics opens a Catholic library or reading room. As an alternative to unhealthy and bland food, another Catholic opens a restaurant called the Refectory, which not only nourishes the body and satisfies the taste buds but feeds the spirit with good culture and real human fellowship. Another apostolic soul, seeking to address economic injustice and a system based on avarice, opens a grocery store that operates on the principles of solidarity with customers and producers, pays just wages, and charges just prices. A Catholic radio station broadcasts not only religious but cultural programming that inculcates good culture and addresses economic and social problems from the perspective of Catholic social teaching not secularist political partisanship. Other scenarios imagine what would happen if Catholics addressed the problems of immodest dress, agnostic education, access to affordable and good medical care, immoral and shallow films, mental health, and charity. In none of these scenarios does Robinson provide a blueprint for would-be reformers. Designs in Christian Living is not a political or social program, but a kind of vade mecum for those Christians, who like Robinson, want to fulfill Our Lord's Great Commission. Indeed, one may find some of her suggestions anachronistic or, at least in our time, impractical. One may disagree, too, with some of both her prescriptions and proscriptions. The point of Designs is not to tell us what exactly to do but to challenge us to throw off our lethargy, to engage our minds and our imaginations to explore how we may begin the task of extending God's eternal reign through a renewal of the temporal order. Designs in 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."

If you thought the Catholic Church and American culture were doing just fine up until Vatican II, you won't think so after reading the devastating critique of Carol Jackson Robinson. Robinson is truly the American Chesterton, yet even more militant and provocative, combining profound spiritual wisdom, penetrating analysis, and an exquisite sensus catholicus. Reading her laments about the degraded and compromised state of American parish life, work, psychology, education, morality, and spirituality, one would swear she was describing today's world. Yet, she is a woman of hope, and the supernatural solutions she prescribed for her time are even more the solutions for our time. This is a book all Catholics need to read. - Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski, author of Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos (Angelico Press, 2019) Robinson shows her superb eye for social and moral detail and offers an unsparing analysis of faults and opportunities. It is penetrating, energetic, concise writing, full of telling insights, and pithy zingers to wake the mind from torpor. It shows how much the pre-Vatican II Church, lay and clerical, needed renewal and reform, and how misguided as a result nostalgia for that Church really is. - Dr. Peter Simpson, Professor of Philosophy and Classics, Graduate Center, CUNY; author of the Authenticity of the Gospels (HarperCollins) Her observations are as useful now as then. The human wreckage and outright insanity are more obvious today, but the same principles were accepted 70 years ago, even among mass-going Catholics. Basics change very slowly, so our world gives us the same choice she saw between heroism and the open-ended accommodation that leads to dissolution. May we have the grace to choose rightly! - James Kalb, author of The Tyranny of Liberalism (ISI, 2008), and Against Inclusiveness (Angelico Press, 2013) Carol Robinson is a cartographer of the most rare kind. If Plato's famous allegory was fundamentally right about the nature of education or the lack thereof, then Robinson has drawn us a map to find our way out of the modern American cave. By illuminating the soul-destroying shadows that have beguiled and enslaved us, Robinson shows us to ourselves in This Perverse Generation, and thereby charts us a path to Heaven. Certainly such a claim will be met with skepticism, especially by an American audience subject, Robinson reminds us, to two grave errors: rugged individualism and the right to private judgment. Fully indoctrinated by these twin shadows of the American cave, the response of most American readers will be one of outraged arrogance: "Who is this woman to tell me what to do or what to think?" - Jeffrey Bond, Ph.D, University of Chicago

Product Description Thy Faith Hath Made Thee Whole includes all of the articles Carol Jackson Robinson (1911-2002) wrote for Integrity, the magazine she co-founded with Ed Willock and others in 1946. A collection of many of her articles was published by The Angelus Press in the book, My Life with Thomas Aquinas, in two editions (1992 & 1995). This volume not only includes all of her articles for Integrity but also all her book reviews and editorials (October 1951-March 1952). The preface has been taken from an article she wrote in 1962 in which she reflects on her work as editor of Integrity. In the preface, she stated: "...we were essentially right all the way across the board, but these are no longer burning issues." We beg to differ and believe that many of the issues she raises in this book are still of concern for any thinking Catholic, so much has the world been taken in by a technocratic, liberal, impersonal, and un-Christian spirit. For Carol Robinson, mammon had replaced what should be the true object of our love and worship. As rational creatures we have as a natural end the perfection of our souls, and as baptized Christians, the Beatific Vision. Our lives are not meant to be lived on the purely natural level but on one which takes cognizance of grace. It is grace that will re-orient our lives towards God and, as a consequence, will re-orient the social order. Our priorities no longer lie where they should. Review Praise for Thy Faith Hath Made Thee WholeReflecting upon these pages, one will draw much inspiration for how to take up today-doubtlessly in a renewed manner, though sharing much with Integrity's sane wisdom-the task of articulating the Christian life in the midst of a culture that is even more anti-Christian than that which Robinson et al. critiqued with such insight, force, and true charity. - Matthew K. Minerd, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Moral Theology, Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Pittsburgh, PAThough written seventy and more years ago, these essays come across as amazingly fresh and timely. Indeed, Carol Robinson wrote in such a way that her contemporaries don't seem to be Jacques Maritain and Thomas Merton so much as Rod Dreher and Eugene McCarraher. Running throughout the essays and reviews here collected is an earnest and sincere search for a properly Catholic anthropology as Robinson interrogates many of the spectres of the age-Capitalism no less than Communism, psychoanalysis no less than materialism. She does so with the combined zeal of a convert conjoined to the perspicacity of a resolute seeker after the truth. - Michael Martin, author of Transfiguration: Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. Carol Robinson's vigor and independence of mind is on full display in this collection, along with her love for the Faith and her concern for her fellow-countrymen. The pieces provide a vivid picture of the period after the Second World War and before the Sixties-of our failings as moderns and Americans, and the diversity, vitality, and seriousness of attempts among Catholic thinkers and activists to find a remedy. The result is a comprehensive collection, with never a dull moment and no end of lessons for Catholics today. - James Kalb, author of The Tyranny of Liberalism (ISI, 2008), and Against Inclusiveness (Angelico Press, 2013)With a penetrating intellect and a deep knowledge of Catholic teaching (and especially the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas), Robinson's writing is eminently readable, at once both clear and refreshingly bold! This collection is a veritable treasure trove of wisdom on culture, morality, the spiritual life, and all subjects of import to the thinking Christian. Certainly, the reader will not only read but will come back to this book time and again. - Taylor Patrick O'Neill, Ph.D., Teaching Faculty, Thomas Aquinas College, Northfield, MA.

Excerpt 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. Carol Jackson Robinson (1911-2002), wrote these five articles for the Marianist magazine at the beginning of her literary career, while she was as yet unmarried, and just several years after her conversion in 1941. Although she was still wrestling with how to view the world through a Catholic lens, she was at the same time co-editor, with Edward Willock, of the intrepid Catholic periodical, Integrity (Volume 1 of which is available from Arouca Press).... 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.

Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity: Carol Robinson's Marianist Articles (Collected Works)

This book is the second in Carol Robinson's Collected Works series. Her penetrating and original analysis of the modern world show the fruit of a mind absorbed in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas - her life-long companion. We hope that these essays will help Catholics understand how the Faith has importance for the totality of their lives which must not be hidden away from the public square.Excerpt from the Foreword"Christianity, when it is orthodox, is a religion of the heart, but not one of sentimentality. Catholicism in all its tradition has been a religion illuminating the mind so that the spirit might find dwelling with God.Confusion and discomfort: this is the prospect of embracing the Gospel in the modern world. Add to these the incomprehension or enmity from others, and you have a potent source of discouragement to living an integral and integrated Catholic life today.Must it be so?The Good One of course remains ever the same in charity and omnipotence, so the root and source of all holiness is still sound. The unknown factor then must lie in the hearts of men if Christianity is to be put into action. There will always be some - "the world" - who will consistently resist the grace and action of the Almighty. Holding this book, it must be otherwise with us. Faith has been given, grace has taken root, and so must the flourishing of fidelity and holiness. Is this the happiness we seek?....The Beatitudes act as a defibrillator to these lethal conditions, should we choose to listen. They re-animate the soul by enkindling charity and warmth within a heart that has grown cold. And everyone knows that without a healthy heart one eventually dies for good." - Fr. James DoranExcerpt from the Introduction"Carol Jackson Robinson's Eightfold Kingdom Within is a noteworthy attempt to communicate Thomas' developed thought of the Beatitudes to a non-academic audience, and while she does eschew any discussion of the intricacies of doctrinal development, subjects of undoubted interest to the historical theologians, nonetheless her series of remarkable articles reveal that Robinson was a careful and highly insightful reader of Aquinas. Over the course of her essays, Robinson rightly focuses on the task of placing the Beatitudes and their attendant Gifts once again at the center of Christian spiritual life. Perhaps Robinson's insightfulness is most evident in the way she grasps that for Thomas, and indeed for much of the Christian tradition both East and West, the purpose and aim of the spiritual life is deification, what she refers to as the ongoing process of "being supernaturalized." Moreover, Robinson stresses that this process of conversion, of becoming progressively more deiform, perforce requires our adoption as earthly children of the heavenly Father. If truth be told, that the process cannot proceed at all unless, like obedient children, we meekly receive the divine instigation of the Spirit, for only in this manner will we be established "firmly in the family of God our Father." - Gregorio Montejo, PhD (Assistant Professor of Historical Theology, Boston College)

The Eightfold Kingdom Within: Essays on the Beatitudes & The Gifts of the Holy Ghost (Collected Works)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Robinson, Carol Jackson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Robinson, Carol Jackson

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Robinson, Carol Jackson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Perverse Generation

Thy Faith Hath Made Thee Whole: The Integrity Years (1946-1956) (Collected Works)

This Perverse Generation (Collected Works)

Designs for Christian Living (Collected Works)

This Perverse Generation (Collected Works)

Thy Faith Hath Made Thee Whole: The Integrity Years (1946-1956) (Collected Works)

Designs for Christian Living (Collected Works)

Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity: Carol Robinson's Marianist Articles (Collected Works)

The Eightfold Kingdom Within: Essays on the Beatitudes & The Gifts of the Holy Ghost (Collected Works)