 In addition to war and colonization, in The Need for Roots Weil points to money and to contemporary education as self-perpetuating forces that uproot human life. The longest section of the text describes modern uprootedness (déracinement), occurring when the imagined modern nation and money are the only binding forces in society, and she characterizes this condition as a threat to the human soul. Modern education is corrupted both by capitalism—such that it is nothing except “a machine for producing diplomas, in other words, jobs” (NR 118)—and by a Roman inheritance for cultivating prestige with respect to the nation: “It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism” (NR 137). As an alternative to modern uprootedness, Weil outlines a civilization based not on force, which turns a person into a thing, but on free labor, which in its engagement with and consent to necessary forces at play in the world, including time and death, allows for direct contact with reality. Moreover, Weil’s writing in The Need for Roots is refracted through her religious experience. In this later period, then, she no longer conceptualizes labor in the mechanical terms of a “pivot” as she did in her early writings; it is now the “spiritual core” of “a well-ordered social life” (NR 295). (In her late social-political philosophy, in fact, a spiritual revolution is more important than an economic one.) Contra the Greeks, who devalued physical work, her conception of labor serves to mediate between the natural and the supernatural. In her late writings, labor is fully inflected by her experiences with Christianity. As such, labor’s consent to and, moreover, working through natural forces (e.g., gravity) is in fact consent to God, who created the natural world. Labor’s kenotic activity, as energy is expended daily, is a kind of imitatio Christi.