The Household and the War for the Cosmos

Your household is not just a shelter from a war zone; it is the command center from where you launch your attacks. It's this vision of the world, with the Christian family at the heart, that modern parents desperately need to recover.

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In this truly original book, C.R. Wiley shows that, although the family has become dislocated and pushed to the side by modern society, this wasn't always the case. At one time, the world was not seen as a random assortment of time and matter, but as an ordered whole—as a Cosmos.

Because people saw themselves as part of an ordered whole, they also believed that they had obligations to the people around them. They were not just autonomous individuals, but members of households with unique duties to past and future generations. Words like "piety" and "religion" did not refer to what you did in your quiet time, but were more like the seemingly obsolete values of "duty" and "honor."

C.R. Wiley illustrates these ancient values through the Roman Aeneas, and shows how this founding myth inspired people to things we need. However, he also shows how this myth failed and it was succeeded by a greater myth—the myth of Abraham and His God's war for the cosmos.

You can also purchase this as an audiobook here or on audible,*

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What People Are Saying: 

"It's easy to see how the household as a foundational institution is crumbling, and Wiley puts forth a robust macro-level vision for why it's worth saving. He dissects words—their origins, implications, and context within history and Scripture—like piety, duty, cosmos, and household. Put together, a picture emerges of the family not as a personal lifestyle choice, but as a microcosm with interconnected duties and dependencies intended to reflect how the Church—the household of God—operates. This book has encouragement for fathers, for family enterprise, and for weary, modern parents in need of restored vision." -WORLD Magazine

"Today the true revolutionaries are not feminists, homosexual activists, or other progressives but those who are seeking to halt any further erosion of the family, and even reverse the process—families who are intentionally working to restore at least some of the traditional functions of the household." -Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and Love Thy Body

"C.R. Wiley is calling upon us to remember that we have duties that go by the name of piety, what those duties are, why they have gone unregarded in our time, how they are founded in our human and bodily nature, and why they are essential for the Christian to practice…. And he is cheerful about it, more cheerful by far than our obliviousness deserves." -Anthony Esolen, author of Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

"What is needed ...is an account of creaturely life in the world that sees the health of the person linked to the health of the place, the life of man linked to the life of the earth. In his new book The Household and the War for the Cosmos, Connecticut pastor C. R. Wiley takes a major step toward defining what such a relationship ought to be." -Mere Orthodoxy

"This book is the good beans... Wiley’s book is one, long sustained argument, and you find yourself on the edge of your seat as you approach the end of it, leaning toward the conclusion. And my best way of summarizing that conclusion is this. He shows—to take the book of Ephesians for my example—that the New Testament “household code” instructions are not some extraneous thing dragged in, disrupting the flow of the book. No, husbands loving their wives and wives respecting their husbands has a tight connection to the fact of our spiritual warfare, as we wrestle with the principalities and powers." -Douglas Wilson, pastor and author of Reforming Marriage, Future Men, and Father Hunger