Book Review: Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in the Family Life
The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in the Family Life, Vol. 1 – Home Culture By Leila Lawler is a 3 part book set curated from Leila Lawler’s blog that she hosts along with two of her grown daughters: Like Mother, Like Daughter. Their goal is to rebuild and reforge the cultural memory of home and family.
This first book is her foundation: how she got here, what she believes and why, and before going into the nuts and bolts of homemaking, she wisely covers marriage and childrearing. Husbands are the biggest part of our homemaking and our homes typically contain children for a time.
This book covers so much that I feel like I’m gonna need to re-read it all again. At one point, I grabbed a little notebook and started outlining chapters and copying down quotes. There is a lot of practical, hands-on advice here. Smart, everyday advice. Leila’s main goal is to rebuild our cultural memory. The things we used to be taught and that we used to see in our culture, but that are now lost, unseen, sponged away by so many so-called experts and the mass exodus of women from their homes.
Leila shares her story, her philosophy, and her theology of home. She has some of the most down-to-earth parenting and marriage advice I’ve ever read. She talks about nursing and teenagers. She’s snarky and sarcastic. Seriously ladies, some absolutely solid parenting advice can be found in this book. She also covers homeschooling a bit and how to build a community.
There was a lot to take in and ponder, a lot to cheer over, and several times I just laughed because she was so right. Some discernment is necessary, as always. She has a strong “we’re saving America for the Lord” mentality and an obvious works-based view of salvation. She assumes you’re helping your kids work their way into heaven by teaching them to live virtuously. She quotes popes and saints. She’s Roman Catholic to the core. But she’s also smart, engaged, logical, and clear. She makes no apologies for following her husband and spanking her children.
The book is structured with relatively short chapters, so it’s easy to just read a little at a time.
I’m looking forward to reading her other two books and I’m thankful for the work she’s done to teach younger women. It says a lot when a woman presents not just herself, but the children she has raised. It was encouraging to read her descriptions of conversations she’s had where she just up and says “I’m a homemaker” and then argues for its validity. And it was wonderful to have an older homemaker talk about the importance of guarding Sundays as a day of rest and having a big picture perspective on childrearing.
I wholeheartedly agree with her principle of retraining the cultural memory. We lost a lot of generational knowledge when women left their hearths. It’s time we relight them.
On a totally personal note, Thomas Aquinas is one of my husband’s historical heroes. He got a good chuckle out of the title of this set and it garnered his interest faster than any other homemaking book I’ve ever read.
