Acton Institute has an eBook initiative underway and today we launch the first title on Amazon Kindle: Lester DeKoster’s “Work: The Meaning of Your Life.” Get yourself to the Kindle store to purchase this Christian’s Library Press work for $3.99 or to download a free sample.

Soon to be added to the Kindle store is Jordan Ballor’s Ecumenical Babel, now available in hardcover from the Acton Book Shoppe and Amazon.

Excerpt from “Work: The Meaning of Your Life” by Lester DeKoster (read his new Religion & Liberty profile here):

THE POWER

We know, as soon as reminded, that work spins the wheels of the world.

No work? Then nothing else either. Culture and civilization don’t just happen. They are made to happen, and to keep happening — by God the Holy Spirit, through our work.

Imagine that everyone quits working, right now! What happens? Civilized life quickly melts away. Food vanishes from the stores’ shelves, gas dries up at the pumps, streets are no longer patrolled, and fires burn themselves out. Communication and transportation services end, utilities go dead. Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfires, sleeping in caves, clothed in raw animal hides.

The difference between barbarism and culture is, simply, work. One of the mystifying facts of history is why certain peoples do create progressive cultures while others lag behind. Whatever that explanation, the power lies in work.

An interesting thing, too: if all workers did quit, it would not make too much difference which quit first — front office, board room, assembly line, custodial staff…. Civilized living is so closely knit that when any pieces drop out the whole fabric begins to crumple. Let city sanitation workers go out this week and by next week streets are smothered in garbage. Give home-making mothers leave, and a lot of us suddenly go hungry and see our kids running wild. Civilization is so fragile that we either all hang together or, as Ben Franklin warned during the American Revolution, we all swing separately.

Incidentally, let’s not make the mistake, if ever we are tempted, of estimating the importance of our work, or of any kind of work, by the public esteem it enjoys. Up front types make news, but only workers create civilized life. The mosaic of culture, like all mosaics, derives its beauty from the contribution of each tiny bit.