What do you think?
Rate this book
Living Against the Grain: How to Make Decisions That Lead to an Authentic Life
2019 Best Book Awards, Christianity
2018 Catholic Press Association Book Awards, Second Children’s Books and Books for Teens
By discerning our deepest desires, we discover our truest selves.
Today’s popular culture thrives on telling us what we should do and who we should be. We need to have the prestigious job, the perfect relationship, the jam-packed social life, and we need to show it all off on social media. But can achieving those things provide the fulfillment that we all long for? Is there something bigger and better out there waiting for us?
Tim Muldoon has counseled countless young adults on this very issue. In Living Against the Grain , Muldoon offers a field-tested strategy for those facing a time of transition to help them discern their deepest desires and discover their true purpose in and for this world. Each chapter focuses on a crucial aspect of decision making, such as traveling the unpaved road, discovering your calling, finding inner freedom, and loving authentically. Throughout the chapters, Muldoon poses reflective questions that make the material both personal and practical.
By engaging in the unique discernment process found in this book, you’ll be wholly equipped to find the path you were meant to follow and become the person you were created to be.
2018 Catholic Press Association Book Awards, Second Children’s Books and Books for Teens
By discerning our deepest desires, we discover our truest selves.
Today’s popular culture thrives on telling us what we should do and who we should be. We need to have the prestigious job, the perfect relationship, the jam-packed social life, and we need to show it all off on social media. But can achieving those things provide the fulfillment that we all long for? Is there something bigger and better out there waiting for us?
Tim Muldoon has counseled countless young adults on this very issue. In Living Against the Grain , Muldoon offers a field-tested strategy for those facing a time of transition to help them discern their deepest desires and discover their true purpose in and for this world. Each chapter focuses on a crucial aspect of decision making, such as traveling the unpaved road, discovering your calling, finding inner freedom, and loving authentically. Throughout the chapters, Muldoon poses reflective questions that make the material both personal and practical.
By engaging in the unique discernment process found in this book, you’ll be wholly equipped to find the path you were meant to follow and become the person you were created to be.
- GenresNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2017
13 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 7, 2017
I received an e-copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I couldn't finish this book. This book seemed less about how to live an authentic life, and more about how to live the author's version of Christianity. The preaching and bible lessons throughout the book buried the messages the author tried to make. I also struggled to make sense of the flow of the book--it jumped from bible verses, to stories, to studies, to questions with no sense of direction.
I couldn't finish this book. This book seemed less about how to live an authentic life, and more about how to live the author's version of Christianity. The preaching and bible lessons throughout the book buried the messages the author tried to make. I also struggled to make sense of the flow of the book--it jumped from bible verses, to stories, to studies, to questions with no sense of direction.
September 20, 2023
I owe this book a partial apology. I read it (and reviewed it over time) with reluctance. It’s the “Royal Read” for campus this year, and that means we’re asking all of our First-Years to read it…as well as those of us teaching First Year Seminars.
I’m a big believer – and seldom endorsed for it – that our Royal Reads should be fiction. As I see it, if we get one crack at asking everyone to read the same book, we should make it a book that inspires people to want to read more books. A lot of people are bored by most of the fiction they read – I’m not naïve – but I also know that the vast majority of people, when asked, will cite a work of fiction as their favorite book. When it works, fiction is about joy.
Judging by its cover – an old mistake – this looks like a McBook. That is, it looks like something written in a self-help mode, a book you would not want to read but that someone would twist your arm to pick up.
So, for the first half of my apology, I do find the opening chapters here one of the best overviews I know for the Jesuit practice of Discernment. Muldoon is articulate, and he quotes widely. To that degree this is an impressive introduction to the concept that I consider the central tenet of Jesuit/Ignatian thought.
I like Muldoon’s notion, taken largely from Gerard Manley Hopkins articulation of it, that beauty is a crucial element of Discernment. When we take time – in what he calls “Graced Understanding” and urges us to practice in stillness – to find what strikes us as beautiful, we push “against the grain of a contemporary culture that pushes us toward a false happiness we determine by comparison to others.
There’s a beauty in that articulation, and it’s reassuring to see so elegant a description of what I have long worked to describe in my role as introducer of the Jesuit tradition to First Year Students.
But my apology goes only halfway. After the opening three or four chapters, Muldoon becomes more and more of what I think of – with a dollop of exaggeration – as a scold. It mostly works to have him critique the impulse toward “hyperlink thinking,” the distraction of a busy contemporary world.
But that’s the thin edge of a wedge when it comes to dismissing contemporary life. He follows with what I experience as easy and unexamined condemnation of sexual exploration (he seems to see it as almost entirely hedonistic rather than possibly a form of growth for some). And he casually slips in anti-choice rhetoric suggesting that anything outside a portion of Catholic orthodoxy is inauthentic thinking.
The point of departure for me comes clear in chapter five when he asserts – as many other fine Jesuit thinkers do – that “All true desires lead to God.” As someone outside the Christian faith but deeply appreciative of (and committed to) the Jesuit model of Discernment as a frame for a college education, I see that as a faith-in-faith. That is, you have to believe that God somehow distinguishes the authentic, the “true,” in one’s practice of Discernment. Or, as I like to put it, Ignatius believed that God promised that the inner search would sit in harmony with the truths of revelation.
That equation is itself a matter of faith, though. I hope it happens, but – as a Jew – I’m all too aware of the frequency with which well-intentioned people emerge from self-reflection with what I take to be false or inauthentic experience.
So, I have found this book less disappointing than I imagined. There is much to offer to our students. But, as Muldoon extends his thought, I find this edging closer than I’d like to what I feared it would be – a book that asserts they ‘should’ be a certain way rather than invites them fully into the wonder and beauty of adult life.
I’m a big believer – and seldom endorsed for it – that our Royal Reads should be fiction. As I see it, if we get one crack at asking everyone to read the same book, we should make it a book that inspires people to want to read more books. A lot of people are bored by most of the fiction they read – I’m not naïve – but I also know that the vast majority of people, when asked, will cite a work of fiction as their favorite book. When it works, fiction is about joy.
Judging by its cover – an old mistake – this looks like a McBook. That is, it looks like something written in a self-help mode, a book you would not want to read but that someone would twist your arm to pick up.
So, for the first half of my apology, I do find the opening chapters here one of the best overviews I know for the Jesuit practice of Discernment. Muldoon is articulate, and he quotes widely. To that degree this is an impressive introduction to the concept that I consider the central tenet of Jesuit/Ignatian thought.
I like Muldoon’s notion, taken largely from Gerard Manley Hopkins articulation of it, that beauty is a crucial element of Discernment. When we take time – in what he calls “Graced Understanding” and urges us to practice in stillness – to find what strikes us as beautiful, we push “against the grain of a contemporary culture that pushes us toward a false happiness we determine by comparison to others.
There’s a beauty in that articulation, and it’s reassuring to see so elegant a description of what I have long worked to describe in my role as introducer of the Jesuit tradition to First Year Students.
But my apology goes only halfway. After the opening three or four chapters, Muldoon becomes more and more of what I think of – with a dollop of exaggeration – as a scold. It mostly works to have him critique the impulse toward “hyperlink thinking,” the distraction of a busy contemporary world.
But that’s the thin edge of a wedge when it comes to dismissing contemporary life. He follows with what I experience as easy and unexamined condemnation of sexual exploration (he seems to see it as almost entirely hedonistic rather than possibly a form of growth for some). And he casually slips in anti-choice rhetoric suggesting that anything outside a portion of Catholic orthodoxy is inauthentic thinking.
The point of departure for me comes clear in chapter five when he asserts – as many other fine Jesuit thinkers do – that “All true desires lead to God.” As someone outside the Christian faith but deeply appreciative of (and committed to) the Jesuit model of Discernment as a frame for a college education, I see that as a faith-in-faith. That is, you have to believe that God somehow distinguishes the authentic, the “true,” in one’s practice of Discernment. Or, as I like to put it, Ignatius believed that God promised that the inner search would sit in harmony with the truths of revelation.
That equation is itself a matter of faith, though. I hope it happens, but – as a Jew – I’m all too aware of the frequency with which well-intentioned people emerge from self-reflection with what I take to be false or inauthentic experience.
So, I have found this book less disappointing than I imagined. There is much to offer to our students. But, as Muldoon extends his thought, I find this edging closer than I’d like to what I feared it would be – a book that asserts they ‘should’ be a certain way rather than invites them fully into the wonder and beauty of adult life.
May 19, 2020
Great mix of theology and practical application. Tim Muldoon adds reflection questions throughout to help readers process what he is discussing and apply it to their own lives. And each chapter ends with a set of "Next Steps" to take on to build your more authentic life. Use this with a notebook/journal to get the most out of it. And I think it's useful no matter what phase in life you are -- just starting out, midway through a career, or anytime you think you may have gotten off track a bit.
October 8, 2019
Muldoon at his best
Read this book for some of my research for school, but it was an absolute joy. First learned about Dr. Muldoon through a lead true series I found covering some of this material. The book was even better. Top notch!
Read this book for some of my research for school, but it was an absolute joy. First learned about Dr. Muldoon through a lead true series I found covering some of this material. The book was even better. Top notch!
February 3, 2023
I wish there was a selection that states ‘finished with’ or just plain stopped reading. Reading this book tends to make me sleepy. I have read several books on the concept of Jesuit discernment AND have enjoyed them. This one just doesn’t work for me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews