Book details

  • Genre:political science
  • Sub-genre:Religion, Politics & State
  • Language:English
  • Pages:268
  • eBook ISBN:9798317843144

For Maya

Overview

There is a child, somewhere in the world, who will inherit what you leave behind. She is not your descendant. You will never meet her. She may not even be born for another hundred years. But what you do with the years you have left will, in some small but real way, decide what kind of world she is born into. For Maya is Jim Parker's argument for taking that responsibility seriously. The book offers a new moral compass — one Parker calls a horizontal faith. Most religions point vertically, toward the heavens. This one points sideways, across time, toward a single future child who has no claim on you and will never know your name. It asks nothing of the faith you already hold or do not, and it works for readers of any political stripe. If you have felt that something important is slipping, and that no one is naming it plainly, this book was written for you.
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Description

There is a child, somewhere in the world, who will inherit what you leave behind. She is not your descendant. You will never meet her. She may not even be born for another hundred years. But what you do with the years you have left will, in some small but real way, decide what kind of world she is born into. For Maya is Jim Parker's argument for taking that responsibility seriously. The book offers a new moral compass — one that does not require belief in any deity, does not ask you to abandon a faith you already hold, and works for readers of any political stripe. Parker calls it a horizontal faith. Most religions point vertically, up toward the heavens. This one points sideways, across time, toward a single future child who has no claim on you and will never know your name. That is what makes the responsibility meaningful. The moral weight of choosing only matters when the person you choose has no claim on you. Across six parts and twenty chapters, Parker takes a single moral test — does this choice make that child's world better or worse? — and applies it to one fight after another. The book is unsparing about what the country has become, hopeful about what it can still be, and direct about what each reader is being asked to do. This is not a manifesto and not a memoir. It is a serious, sustained, conversational reckoning with what citizens owe each other and the generations they will never meet. By the end, the question is no longer whether the moral compass works. It is whether you will follow where it points.
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About The Author

Jim Parker is the author of For Maya. It is his third book — Cowards and Traitors and By Their Fruits came before it, and Education: The Woke Vaccine is scheduled for 2027. But the writing chapter is the recent one. Before it, Jim had a long and faintly improbable working life. His first paying job was behind the counter of a small-town drugstore — soda jerk in the strict and literal sense, mixing milkshakes and pulling sodas. Sit with that one for a moment; he certainly has. From there: counselor at an overnight YMCA camp in western Massachusetts, ten years in the United States Army (both enlisted and commissioned, with overseas tours of three years in Germany and one in South Korea), police officer, and, for the long second act of his working life, salesman. He earned a liberal arts education across four institutions on three continents — Hiram College in Ohio, the University of Maryland's Far East Division, American Technological University in Texas (now part of Tarleton State), and the University of Southern California's campus in Germany. He was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, and grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts — the same town where his ancestor, Reverend Stephen Williams, ministered for more than fifty years after surviving captivity as a child in the 1704 raid on Deerfield. Stephen's father, Reverend John Williams, wrote one of the first American bestsellers about that ordeal. The instinct to write about what one has lived through runs in the family. Along the way Jim has called Ohio, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas home. He and his wife — an author in her own right — now live in Jarrell, Texas. Between them they have raised four children and count five grandchildren. At seventy-five, he still rides horses and still travels. There was a time when he'd swing up onto Diablo and gallop off to see where the day went. These days he is perfectly content to settle into the saddle on Buttercup and let the trail come to him. The view, it turns out, is better at that pace anyway.
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