Theology That Bites Back
Let me break this down for you. There is a revolution in progress. This is what a revolution looks like. The revolutionaries have been preparing it for decades, following out the logic of Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions.” They are in the process of making what they believe is their final concerted push. They …
Rod Dreher is to be commended for many aspects of The Benedict Option. But at the end of the day, it reminds me of a fistful of pearls, with no thread available to make the necklace. I am glad I read it, and I am glad for the stand that Dreher is taking against various …
I will not have a lot to say about this next chapter of The Benedict Option, the chapter on “Eros and the New Christian Counterculture.” I do have some cavils here and there about how much monastics have to teach us about human sexuality, but in the main this is a really solid chapter. Dreher …
The next chapter of The Benedict Option is entitled “Preparing for Hard Labor.” It is an informative chapter, and quite solid in diagnosing what we are currently up against. In this chapter, Dreher describes the stranglehold that advocates of the new order have managed to get on the old economy. He begins by noting that …
Introduction The secular West has got a bad case of the staggers. And if I might engage in a little bit of cultural appropriation of my own—which is almost as bad as selling burritos in Portland while white—I would like to take a comment by Chesterton, jigger it just a bit, and then apply it …
In his next chapter, Rod Dreher spends a good bit of time singing a song I am very familiar with, and he says many good things. The cultural key is education, and what Dreher urges is, from one standpoint, very heartening. “This is why we have to focus tightly and without hesitation on education” (Loc. …
In the next chapter of The Benedict Option, Dreher makes a number of shrewd observations about the role of community in resisting the encroachments of the Leviathan state. What Hillary Clinton famously said in promotion of that devouring Leviathan turns out actually to be true in another sense—“it takes a village to raise a child.” …
The next chapter in The Benedict Option is well written, and makes many pertinent observations. A lot of true and necessary things are said, largely concerning the need for older doctrine and need for a liturgical worship that shapes cultures. But there is still a problem, and it is largely architectonic. The chapter has a …
I begin by noting something by Samuel Johnson in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a little something for us to keep in reserve. How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. In this next chapter, Rod Dreher says many good and pertinent things, but these …
In the next chapter, Rod Dreher outlines a modern description of and rationale for the Benedictine order. And in the particulars, he says a number of wise and good things. Dreher sees one of the most essential things. “We need to embed ourselves in stable communities of faith” (Loc. 760). And living by rule is …
