Quick Hitter: How Enchanted Was the Medieval World, Really?
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...