If there are two words that seem not to fit together they are "society" and "sanity". Spend twenty minutes on the freeway or ten minutes reading the newspaper, or ponder the religious and political conflicts in some regions of the world, and you will understand the point.
Yet if people are to thrive-to live fully and together in peace-we must have sanity when it comes to society. And that requires sanity when it comes to thinking about man. Sanity involves seeing things as they really are. Social sanity requires seeing man as he really is-to grasp who and what human beings are and what sort of social arrangements help or hinder human flourishing.
In this classic work, Society and Sanity, Catholic thinker Frank Sheed brings his brilliant mind and lucid writing style to bear on the good human society. By explaining perennial truths about human nature based on the wisdom of Catholic social ethics, Sheed's book is as pertinent today with our controversies about love, the nature of marriage, the role of government, the relationship of law and morality and of Church and State, and the duties of the citizen, as when he penned the work over a half a century ago.
In our own day there is not a single human institution that is not under fire. Every question under discussion, every revolutionary idea and every conservative reaction-all boil down to the question how should man be treated, and we can only answer this in the light of our view of what man is. No society can be united, if it is not united about this fundamental question.
- Frank Sheed, from Society and Sanity
