A Sound of Sheer Silence

Over the course of the last week, the Take-O-Sphere has been awash with reactions to Rod Dreher's long promised book on the Benedict Option, titled, well, The Benedict Option.   Elizabeth Bruenig had a good review , that I talked about briefly here .  Rachel Held Evans had some reasonable reactions on Twitter, provoking Dreher's now reflexive response of accusing her of preparing to become informant for some hypothetical anti-Christian Gestapo , a charge we recall he leveled on David Gushee some time ago .   Damon Linker and the New York Times's David Brooks  also wrote thoughtful responses, and it is those two pieces that I want to talk about for a bit. I have stated my objections to the entire enterprise of the Benedict Option in the past , and I stand by those objections .  But what I think gets the least amount of attention in thinking about Dreher's project is how monomanically focused his vision of Christianity is.  Linker's piece hits on the key fa...

So, Rod Dreher's long promised tome on the Benedict Option--entitled The Benedict Option --has been released, and the great Elizabeth Brueing has a review/reflection that is (not surprisingly) very much worth reading.  Bruenig hits on one of the core problems with Dreher's thesis, which is whether it is truly possible, desirable, or authentically Christian to withdraw from political life in the way Dreher suggests.  That critique is an important one, and I think Bruenig is 100% correct. But as I was reading Bruenig's review, I was struck again by how much I don't buy the basic conceptual premise that underlines all of this Benedict Option talk.  The master narrative here goes, as Bruenig well sets it out, something like this: [T]he Christian West began to lose its way in the fourteenth century, when the English Franciscan friar William of Ockham pioneered the theory of nominalism, which held there is no inherent order or purpose encoded into the material world. Thi...

Over the course of the last twenty-four hours, I have come across three articles that have left me shaking my head.  On the surface, the articles cover unrelated topics, but I think they are all at their core about the same topic.  That topic is the degree to which we are seeing the opening up of a broad and increasingly unbridgeable chasm between two identifiable "sides."  I believe this chasm is fundamentally an intramural divide among Christians, but given the fact that the U.S. is 70% Christian it also plays out in the broader culture as well.  The problem is not that the two sides don't agree  on things; the problem is that they increasingly can no longer even relate to one another.  The two sides stare at each other with a look of mutual incomprehension. 1.  The first article is clearly the least significant-- the ever-strident Fr. Dwight Longenecker's praise of "militant American Catholic men."   As I read the piece, my overwhelming thou...

One of those code phrases that one hears from conservative Christian people, particularly those of a more intellectual bent, is "the Benedict Option."   Rod Dreher is big on this concept.  As far as I am aware, it was coined by the philosopher Alistair MacIntyre in his influential book After Virtue  and then picked up and spun out from there.  The notion is that the (somewhat amorphous concept called the) "West" is either entering, or is about to enter, a period similar to the Dark Ages of the first millennium of European history.  This Dark Ages 2.0 is the product of the decline of Christian values in the West in favor of "secular" values, in the form of the standard conservative talking points--gay rights, feminism, abortion, Obama, Hillary, etc. In the face of this threat, the proper solution is to do what they did in the face of the first Dark Ages, and that is to separate from the world and build institutions that will weather the storm and be prepa...