At the Values & Capitalism blog, Jacqueline Otto Isaacs reviews Jordan Ballor’s Get Your Hands Dirty. Isaacs explains how Ballor articulates a vision for the proper orientation for our lives:
In his recent release, “Get Your Hands Dirty,” Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute lays out a clear case for why Christians ought to have rightly ordered lives and what that might look like. While the book took shape around a collection of essays, this message was as hard to miss as the bright orange cover itself. Having a rightly ordered, God-centered life allows us to be more efficient in our work and more effective as “salt and light” in our world. The title is derived from this call to “get involved deeply and meaningfully in the messiness of the world,” and also probably from Ballor’s affinity for quoting Mike Rowe of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs, whose thoughts about work make several appearances throughout the book.
Ballor describes an ordinate life as one that is “rightly ordered relative to other loves, regards, and interests” (62). He illustrates in great depth the perspective that this type of life will give us in regard to our vocations. He also speaks about how institutions—namely the government— can have a negative effect on our work when they are out of their rightly ordered positions in our lives. “We need to put politics and political life in its proper place,” he says. “That is, we need to properly relate the political to everything else (culture, business, family, charity, church)” (206).
