Justin W. Earley. The Common Rule. Inter-Varsity, 2019.

A minister whom I know and respect enthusiastically recommended The Common Rule. This young man is under thirty. As I read this, I felt the book should not be titled The Common Rule, but Common Sense. Doesn’t anyone who is serious about his or her faith do these things? I guess I am an older generation. We already learned the lessons presented here. Maybe they were not transmitted clearly to the next generation.

Earley chooses the term rule deliberately. The rule, such as the Rule of St. Benedict, was the set of regulations and schedules that monks in a monastery would live by. Earley’s daily rule is simple enough: Pray three times a day, at least one meal a day with others, one hour with the phone off, read Scripture each day before turning your phone on.

The weekly rule is also basic: One hour of conversation with a friend, limit media to four hours, fast from something for 24 hours, take a Sabbath rest.

My reaction was pretty much this: Doesn’t everyone do this? Or at least something similar?

The answer is apparently not. I apologize if I sound self-righteous, but I guess even though I started using the Internet because I was writing computer programs, I still view the cell phone as basically a telephone. And why would anyone want to carry a telephone with them all the time? “Bible before breakfast” was a common expression. And doesn’t anyone who does not have in-house paid cook share meals together?

I recognize that such things are habits which need to be deliberately pursued. I observe that some of my high school students appear to be addicted to their cell phones. After a 45 minute class, they breathlessly grab their cell phones to see…who knows what? One hour off a day would, I suppose, be a real exercise in self-control. I read that one middle school that required students to surrender their cell phones before each class discovered that placing the phones in a transparent bag made the students more relaxed because at least they could see their phones.

The weekly habits, I confess, I may not be so diligent with, but I get it. I do succeed to do no school work at least one day on most weekends. That is deliberate. Some weeks an hour conversation with a friend is a challenge—excluding a spouse, that is. Friendship is important. And, yes, we do need a break in our busy lives. These are things to live by.

This is certainly a good review of what is important in our quotidian activities. And Earley tells a good story. This is not done in a lecture or sermon style. There are graphs and pictures. He shares how he had to discover these things in his own life. I can sympathize. He works for an international law firm, and he had to keep in touch with the London office which is five or six hours ahead of where he lives in Virginia. But no one really cared if he did not log on to his phone at 8 a.m. rather than 6 a.m. In other words, relax, people. Like so many other things, phones and jobs are like our emotions: They are good servants but poor masters.

That, then, becomes the ultimate question, who or what ultimately is your master? I guess most of us have to learn that the hard way. Earley is providing a service to help others. God knows we all need help in some ways.