Andy Crouch - The Life Were Looking For : Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

The Life Were Looking For is, and this is saying something, Andy Crouchs best book: a deeply moving meditation on the human need to find true personhood, which means, among other things, to know as we are known.

Alan Jacobs , author of How to Think and Breaking Bread with the Dead

Technology is, and always has been, both an opportunity and a threat to human flourishing. This short and profound book finds the middle waythe right way forwardthrough personhood, community, and love.

Tyler VanderWeele , director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University

In this truly brilliant book, Crouch uncovers why more and more people feel themselves to be living in an impersonal, unsatisfying, and lonely world. Filled with insightful analysis and wise counsel, The Life Were Looking For takes us into the heart of a more meaningful, shared, and joyous life that is inspired by the love of God. Reading it, you will discover what it takes to be human.

Norman Wirzba , Duke Divinity School professor, author of This Sacred Life

As I read this breathtaking book, I was surprised to find myself tearing up often. Surprised, that is, because it is not a book about tragedy or loss. But as I read, I realized that my tears flowed because Crouch, perhaps more than any other writer of our day, perceives and names the deepest and most vulnerable longings of the human heart. The Life Were Looking For describes the confusion, contradictions, frustrations, and dilemmas of our cultural moment in clear and resonant ways, and, more importantly, it offers hope that we might find a profoundly beautiful way of living amidst them. Crouchs depth of understanding, practical brilliance, and compelling vision of human wholeness and flourishing is evident on every page.

Tish Harrison Warren , Anglican priest, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night

With warmth and erudition, The Life Were Looking For engages readers in a personal meditation on the hidden costs of our technological dreams. What are we not seeing, hearing, tasting, experiencing because we have partnered with devices? What would it take to insist that personal technologies become personal instruments of wonder? Crouch asks us to summon the intelligence, resolve, and faith to regain lost ground.

Sherry Turkle , MIT professor, bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and The Empathy Diaries

None of us can build a joyful and well-lived life alone. We are in this together, and becoming fully human persons is a collective project. Crouch offers real help for that problem by giving us a potent reframe to restore our personhoodindividually and collectively. His artfully deep empathy dive on the true nature of persons and technologys impact upon us can empower us to better design a pathway to becoming our true selves and nurturing others in that worthy project.

Dave Evans , cofounder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, bestselling coauthor of Designing Your Life

Crouchs trustworthy voice diagnoses our culture and gives a vision for us to redeem it. He is a leader of leaders, and Im grateful he stays out in front of the pack issuing wisdom.

Jennie Allen , bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head, Founder of IF:Gathering

Technology that promised to bring us together is driving us apart. Crouch doesnt offer cheap slogans or easy fixes. Instead, he works to understand the roots of our alienation and despair. He gets the big picture of our digital age and helps families navigate the day-to-day. A thought-provoking look at the subtle, daily tradeoffs all of us makebetween comfort and fulfillment, between shallow connection and deep relationshipand how we can push back against the forces pulling us apart.

Ben Sasse , U.S. senator, bestselling author of Them

Recognition is the first human quest.

After an ordinary delivery, after the first few startled cries, newborn infants typically spend an hour or so in the stage doctors call quiet alert. Though they can only focus their vision roughly eight to twelve inches away, their eyes are wide open. They are searching, with an instinct far deeper than intention. They are looking for a face, and when they find oneespecially a face that gazes back at themthey fix their eyes on it, having found what they were most urgently looking for.

Recognition is the primary task of infancy. Feeding, crying, and even sleeping are just the support system for this most essential work of figuring out who we are, and where we are, by making contact with other people, seeing them seeing us, gradually beginning to build our sense of self through their eyes.

As we nursed, our eyes found another pair of eyes and held on to them. When we were handed over to a father or a grandmother or an aunt or a cousin, we found their faces as well, gradually distinguishing them from one another. We looked at them with the steady, uninterrupted gaze of a baby, and because we were a babyso very helpless and so very unable to cause harm, with those magnificently large eyes and that impossibly soft skinthey looked back at us with that same endless attention, unhindered and unafraid.