A Sound of Sheer Silence

As long-time readers know, I often engage with the work of Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist.  And, often, I disagree with what Douthat has to say, especially when he talks about religion (I mostly disagree with his politics takes as well, but I rarely find them worth talking about).   Sometimes I have a laugh with/at the expense of Mr. Douthat .   But this Sunday's column was the first time I really got mad reading a Douthat column.  But, the key was I wasn't sure why  I was mad--it just rubbed me the wrong way.  And, upon reading it again, while I understand what about it rubbed me the wrong way, I think Douthat is basically right.  And so, in the spirit of the column, I would like to offer a Modest Proposal of my own to go in tandem with Ross's Modest Proposal. Douthat's premise for the column is that the kinds of educated, "coastal elites" that in the main read the New York Times really should start going to the more progressive Protestan...

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...

Professor David Gushee, who I have mentioned before in this space, wrote a column recently entitled "On LGBT Equality, Middle Ground is Disappearing."   Yesterday, he penned a follow-up column , in which he attempted (apparently unsuccessfully, though not from lack of trying) to clarify what he was getting at in the first column.  These columns, the reactions to them, and especially the reaction from Rod Dreher , bring into focus what I think is the state of play for Christianity in 2016 in North America.  We would do well to acknowledge where we are and where we are probably going in the near term. To begin, Gushee asserts in the second column that his first column was an attempt to provide a descriptive framework for the state of the United States in 2016 with regard to LGBT issues.  In other words, let us put aside for now whether you think this state is good or bad , and let's talk about what is .  Gushee's picture of what is has four primary components. ...

If you have followed the discussion about the Synod on the Family, or any discussion about sexual morality in Christianity, surely you have heard some reference to the "hard sayings" of Jesus.  These discussions go something like this--someone will make a point about how difficult or impractical this or that traditional bit of sexual morality is to actually and fairly implement and live, and someone will respond "well, sure, these are hard sayings of Jesus, but Jesus is calling us to do the hard thing."  The implication, of course, is that the person who is expressing concerns about the stance at issue is looking to take the easy way out, to avoid the challenge of Gospel living.  It is a way to take the moral high ground. No doubt, there are many hard sayings of Jesus, and many hard sayings throughout the Scriptures.  Here is another one--"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 22:21, as well a...