In Lost in Thought, Hitz seeks to revive an appreciation for intellectual pursuit as inherently good and fundamental to human happiness. - Rachel K. Alexander, Tablet Magazine" For Sertillanges, the intellectual vocation is a calling to discover, articulate, and transmit truth. How far this is from the understanding and practice of the intellectual life in contemporary academia, in which one’s soul becomes grist for the collective academic mill, the function of which is to recuperate a perpetually dying, artificial, stillborn “intellectual life” of truth-indifferent and jargon-ridden journals, ruthless career-worship, status-quo opportunism, and inner-circle gossip-mongering. Try to live a genuinely intellectual life in the midst of that!

We’re losing the connection between work and service. Work, as I understand it, whether paid or unpaid, is serving others, acting for the good of one’s neighbor, producing some good for our community. In fact, those women who feel that the intellectual sphere has no space for them might be suited in a special way for the life of the mind. In her contribution to this volume, “The Joy of Thinking,” Emily Stimpson Chapman recounts her growth from a precocious child into a young woman who craved the good opinion of teachers. She shares how the “desire for praise slowly overtook delight as [her] primary motivation for reading.”In other ways, Sertillanges puts us in a frame of mind to work out our vocations with fear and trembling. He does not mince words when describing the factors that make the difference between the intellectual and the pseudo-intellectual, which are primarily spiritual: Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges (1917), "La paix française", discours prononcé en l'église Sainte-Madeleine le lundi 10 décembre 1917, en la cérémonie religieuse et patriotique prédisée par S.E. le Cardinal Archevêque de Paris, Paris: Blond et Gay. As for the critical evaluation of the book, there are some positive advantages this book contains. First, it includes great, practical advice. For instance, when he speaks of guarding your valuable study time, and not letting anything interfere with it, it reminds a person to guard one’s study time, and think of it as precious. Second, he has great metaphors/analogies to explain his points. One example I can think of is how he calls studying the “prayer for truth.” Lastly, an advantage this book contains is that it is easy to read. The words are comprehensible, his sentences are well-written, and the vocabulary is not too difficult to comprehend. Christian women are accustomed, even now, to being made to feel small by those who assert that the vocation of a woman must look one specific way. Feeling victimized by those who would try brashly to narrow our understanding of feminine vocation, many women proceed defensively to wield the choices that they have made for themselves and their families against their fellow women.

Lost in Thought is a rhetorical case for the loveliness of learning for its own sake . . . insightful."—Pavlos Papadopoulos, Athwart.org ZH: One of the things in the book that doesn’t come off as clearly as I might like is that I actually believe in work—I’m not anti-work. I do think that we work for the sake of leisure, and we can get those things out of balance. Our conception of work is distorted, just like our conception of leisure is distorted; we think of leisure as binging Netflix or what have you, pure distraction instead of doing something in which we’re really focused and alive. The “they” to whom MacIntyre refers here are St. Benedict and his followers in the sixth century, who did all they could to preserve the precious Christian and classical civilization, the literature, history, philosophy, and spirituality that had formed the basis of civilized society up to then. “We,” however, are charged with preserving the existence and character of, not just the artifacts of intellect, but intellect itself, which seems in real danger of being supplanted and replaced with some sort of communal electric brain a la The Matrix or C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength of which individual human persons are to be its willing, mindless circuits. The barbarians are not just among us but have been ruling us for some time, as MacIntyre has pointed out, and if we want our culture once again to be ruled by Intellect, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, then we ourselves must be so ruled, and so we must read Sertillanges. The top of the hierarchy among these readings are works by “men of genius.” A common question posed to me by devoutly Christian students of the Great Books is why exactly they should be reading, and paying to read, the writings of heretics, apostates, pagans, and atheists. Why not just St. Thomas, the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Catholic novelists and essayists? Sertillanges provides a splendid answer: So, talking about a book on a blog isn’t the worst thing one could do, for we might be talking about a blog-about-a-blog on a blog, or some such ridiculous cyber-iteration. Indeed, talking about a book that was written before computers existed, let alone the Internet, by an old-school, French, Dominican Thomist, with the title The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods is, all-things-considered, about the best thing one could be talking about on a blog. Such talk is bound to shed rare light on our contemporary situation as virtual intellectuals. Let me begin this four-part series of reflections on Sertillanges’ magnificent book with some words of his that provide a profound critique of and warning against our blog culture with regard to soulcraft:

PART VIII.

Lost in Thought is] full of wonder, full of the joyful smiles of somebody who’s been saved, or saved herself, from empty toils of ledger-sheet learning. In her good-natured way, Hitz chastises the increasing commodification of intellectual endeavor. . . . This is a book to savor in your quietest reading nook. Which is very much the point."—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review La Science et les Sciences Spéculatives d'Après S. Thomas d'Aquin," Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, 1, pp.5–20. Do you want to have an intellectual life? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worthwhile. A] lovely . . . meditation . . . [in Lost in Thought] Hitz defends learning for its own sake and takes aim polemically at the canard that such learning is “elitist” or draws necessary attention away from the properly activist bent of intellectual inquiry . . . accessible [and] jargon-free."—Matt Dinan, The Hedgehog Review L'Idée Générale de la Connaissance dans saint Thomas d'Aquin," Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, 3, pp.449–465.

Sertillanges has done the best job of anyone of solving this dilemma in his chapter “The Field of Work.” And here, in condensation, is his solution:

Sertillanges is precisely the “good teacher” we need now to form our minds and teach us to keep the framework of our thought well adjusted and firmly joined. Error is ubiquitous, more so than ever in this history of human existence, and “existence-in-untruth,” to use Voegelin’s phrase, is the default position for the ordinary denizen of our techno-totalitarian, anti-intellect regime. He needs our help, and so do we. The Intellectual Life is our battle plan, Sertillanges is our general, and our comatose culture is both battlefield and hospital. We are the soldiers and medics.

An] elegant and absorbing argument. . . .The remarkable thing about Lost in Thought is that it makes. . .rather dreary propositions not only palatable but also compelling. Hitz doesn’t just want to persuade you; she wants to win over your heart. . . .You might walk away from it with a little more clarity, a little more conviction, and a little more dedication to what really matters in your life."—Roosevelt Montás, American Political Thought Zena Hitz's] account is persuasive, not least because it is personal."—Peter Costello, Irish Catholic ZH: I try to make this case in the book: There’s a part of our nature that longs for distraction. We like to be comfortable. We have an autopilot that chooses the lesser challenge over the greater challenge. This is why we need ascetical practices, discipline, and a community life with structure to do the best things we can do. What’s been going on for, say, the past ten to fifteen years, is a dramatic increase in the degree to which that weakness in our nature is being exploited for profit. Huge industries, whole sectors of economies, are dedicated to preying on our attention and focus. In the Jewish tradition of Shabbat, people don’t use any devices one day a week. What a source of strength that everyone does this every week! That’s an old tradition in a particular religion, but any of us can devise with our friends, our families, and our smaller communities ways to break free of our devices, to spend more time with ourselves. The more we see how much healthier we are, the easier it becomes.

PART IX.

In Lost in Thought] Hitz is asking the right questions. . . . The question at its heart is disarmingly simple and deeply engaging: What should we do with ourselves."—Jonathan Marks, Wall Street Journal The fact is that there would be no place between God and the multitude, except for the Man-God, and for the man of God, the man of truth, who is ready to give. He who thinks himself united with God without being united with his brothers is a liar, says the apostle; he is but a false mystic, and, intellectually, a false thinker; but he who is united to men and to nature without being hiddenly united to God—without being a lover of silence and solitude—is but the subject of a kingdom of death.