Habits of the Heart is a moral adventure based on a real family's saga. A story within a story, it opens in the chaotic days of 1967 when Jim, a sophomore in college confused by the times, finds a respite from the storm at an Easter family gathering, and so much more. As he listens to his ninety-six-year-old great grandmother share stories from when she was young, he enters a world he never knew, one so captivating that he asks his grandfather to tell him more. Thereupon he discovers more than he could have imagined--an extraordinary story of the life an ordinary man of essential servitude forged on the unyielding anvil of life. Struck by what he hears, Jim realizes how important these stories are in the noise and chaos of 1967--perhaps even more so now--yet how easily they are lost. Habits is a lived picture of the "habits of the heart" Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came to America. Through his grandfather's story Jim discovers how good habits are formed and passed from generation to generation and woven into the fabric of life, and how important they are in life's perilous storms.
James M. Roseman is a writer living in Dallas, Texas. He is a fellow of the Lewis Tolkien Society, an elder at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, and is a lay theologian and philosopher as reflected in his first book, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story: In a Fragmented World of Pieces and Parts (2017). He had a long career in business as a banker and a management consultant before becoming a writer.
“Given the cultural and political crisis in which we find ourselves today, James Roseman has written a most timely and engaging novel that should speak to us all. Habits of the Heart summons us to encounter again traditions and values that are a vital part of our common heritage—regardless of race, creed, or origin—which can point us once more toward our rightful destiny as a people.”
—J. Larry Allums, executive director emeritus, Dallas Institute of the Humanities
“C. S. Lewis said, ‘Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.’ Philosophical truth becomes ‘real’ through metaphor and story. James Roseman has demonstrated this beautifully. This is a captivating, vibrant, compelling story. Yet it left me with so much more: a visceral understanding of and a deep longing for the good ‘habits of the heart’ that are essential for our thriving as a person and as a people. Marvelous!”
—Fred Durham, director, C. S. Lewis Institute - Dallas
“This book is unique and unusual. It is life lessons and character building in the form of a novel, a novel of messages delivered via a family saga. It’s full of sadness and realism, yet still a story about hope and perseverance. It’s tragic in a way, uplifting in another. And that’s the way real life is: bittersweet.”
—Ann Howard Creel, author of The Magic of Ordinary Days
“James Roseman’s Habits of the Heart is a significant, autobiographical story of the way in which a child of the sixties, a wanderer across the confusing terrain of modernity, claims his own past, the story of his forebears, confident in their own epic and sure in their faith.”
—James Patrick, chancellor emeritus, College of Saint Thomas More
Related Titles
