An Anthology In Natural Relations
by Thomas Achord and Darrell Dow

From the Foreword

Some time ago, the West lost its way in the order of things.

This Way was a long-known set of experiences concerning the world’s shared perception of being human. The modern mind imagines a grand diversity of interpretations of these once-given axioms. With such variance comes doubt of truth and skepticism of traditional knowledge. These, in turn, misdirect our political and social life from objective and formalized to subjective and relativized. Once-strong structures guided our being in the world, but now all that is solid melts into air.

C.S. Lewis's Abolition Of Man argued against this pluralist, subjectivized view, claiming that all humans have known some things to be universally true. This universal Way he called the natural law or the Tao. Once known to all humans, modern sentiments challenge this Way, deny it, and replace it with new, abstract ideas of theory or Right. More recently, late modernity replaces it with nothing but perceived reality.

To prove this universal Way and lead us back to it, the appendix of Lewis’ book contains an index of universally acknowledged norms among all human societies. Our present work picks up just one of the themes in his work and continues it more exhaustively in an area particularly under attack in our time: natural social relations.

About the Authors

Thomas Achord lives in the rural South with his wife and four children. He has an M.Div. from Southern Seminary and is the headmaster of a Christian Classical school. He has published The Soul And The City, an anthology on political and moral thought. He is also the co-host of the Ars Politica podcast.

Darrell Dow lives with his wife and children in flyover country. His formal education is in history and economics and he presently works as a statistician. Mr. Dow has contributed to various politically-right magazines and journals. You can find his work at Chronicles, American Remnant, and Antiwar.

584 pages