If you long for more meaningful connections to other people…

We've never needed this book more than we do right now. Most of us are involved with people all day long, every day, but rarely do we feel a part of real community in our lives.

In A Good Neighbour Robert Benson takes an intimate look at how others are defining, discovering, nurturing and sustaining life and love right where they are. Facing the confusing conflictions of modern life head on, Benson shows what it means to live in our neighborhoods, work at our jobs, be family, and friends, in ways that build places of relationship, love and mutual support.

Praise for Robert Benson:

"Robert Benson's writing reminds us of things we have half forgotten. It opens our eyes to things we have only half seen."
-Frederick Buechner

"Benson's writing is spare, simple, understated, always faintly humurous, and very forceful without seeming to be."
-Paula D'Arcy

Full of practical insights about community, this small book draws on personal experiences, Scripture and the Rule of Benedict. Each of us lives in several communities at the same time, with varying degrees of commitment, and Benson gives examples of how the Rule of Benedict can help in these various relationships. Humility and obedience are not popular words or values in American culture today. Obedience may be best understood as listening, and “humility is what creates the space within us … for obedience to grow." Humility is called for in order to better listen and serve the needs of those around us.The author points out the danger of neglecting the community in which we live, in search of more distant communities where there are more folks who think like us, and with whom we feel more comfortable. We can then fail to see Christ in the stranger or a neighbor we scarcely know. Serving those in community with us is at the heart of Benedict’s Rule, and it is in ordinary, everyday things that we best serve one another and build community.

Sr. Lenora Black, OSB

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We still thirst to know what goes on behind the walls of closed religious communities, even as vocations for those communities dwindle. Sweeney has written an account of his visits to a number of Cistercians and Benedictines, who gradually draw him closer to the experience of contemplation, to "be quiet, sit down, and listen." Benson, a member of an ecumenical lay order, asks us to consider the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia-the founding document of the Benedictines-as an oblique guide to the more loosely knit modern communities we wish to build or of which we are a part. VERDICT Reaching well beyond Catholic readership, these will be valuable to the thoughtful reader, Christian and non-Christian.

Library Journal
Starred Review
July 15, 2009