Time-Bettering Days and Other Essays
Time-Bettering Days and Other Essays is a feast of ideas in nine essays written between 1937 and 1961. Heretofore the collection has been available in English only as bound photocopies of original typescripts; this new edition has been edited by Norman Fiering, published by Wipf and Stock, and comes with a lively foreword by . Rosenstock-Huessy’s voice remains prophetic, urgent, compelling, and relevant; while they make diverse and delightful digressions, these nine essays primarily address science, education, and religious discourse.
Rosenstock-Huessy describes the progress of scientific knowledge as a human social endeavor, rather than as a search for proper methods or as the product of lone genius. Human beings take up particular roles and positions relative to others in the process of inquiry hence, Michael Faraday was a “classic” and Paracelsus a “founder” in their own times. Given that the 1980s and 1990s have witnessed a national and international interdisciplinary movement to study the rhetoric of science, Rosenstock-Huessy’s essays, “A Classic and a Founder,” “The Science of Bodies and the Appeal to Somebody,” and “The Metabolism of Science,” written many years ago deserve a wide reading today.
“Man Must Teach,” his reflection on Augustine’s De Magistro, and “Time Bettering Days” are two of his profound contributions to educational thought, and both focus on time as their main theme. Rosenstock-Huessy argues persuasively in these essays that education is a meeting of people with different generational experiences. He also outlines why school must have a calendar that sets it apart from the workaday world.
In “Liturgical Thinking” and “The Generations of the Faith,” Rosenstock-Huessy illustrates the complexity of both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. These essays, plus “Our Urban Goggles” and “The Future Way of Life” make evident that most people today have settled for an impoverished version of Christianity that is a compromise with modernist dogmas. Rosenstock-Huessy urges each new generation to refound Christianity by bringing it to bear critically on the events of modern life.
Available in hardcover, softcover, and as an ebook, 320 pages.