Rod Dreher's Blog, page 658

The Loss of Islamic Asceticism

Fantastic comment by a Muslim reader who posts under the name “Jones.” He begins by quoting a Russian Orthodox bishop from a previous post of mine:

“The last Glinsk elders were dying—those spiritual giants with enormous experience and priceless treasures that they wanted to pass on to us. But we, he says, were not able to receive it; because of our feebleness we couldn’t take it on.2

People have become weaker, they can’t receive this rich spiritual experience, because it is a cross—a very heavy cross.

This break between elders and novices can be seen now: Why are there practically no elders left? Because there are no obedient disciples, no people who are capable of receiving this wealth of experience.”

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier, when I was talking about my concerns about the next generation being unable to receive the wisdom of the previous one. Of course if I understand correctly, “elders” is here being used in a specific religious sense, but our “elders” are still our best reserve of spiritual wisdom and experience.

This means a lot to me right now. The whole idea that we are increasingly incapable of asceticism feels like a personal call to action for me. I’ve been increasingly struggling, in recent weeks, with my own failures in this regard. I’ve been noticing the failures only because I’m now trying to do better.

For my entire life I’ve been concerned about how to maintain an ascetic perspective in a deeply hedonistic society. For a long time I’ve lamented the spiritual vacuousness of secular liberal society. The evidence used to be all around me — God, you couldn’t do anything to get me to go back to high school and college and be around that again.

Now I’m around a different kind of person, guilty of a slightly different kind of sin. These are some of the smartest and most talented people the US produces. They radiate success, and they are utterly steadfast in their discipline. So base hedonism is not at all their sin. Their characteristic sin is idolatry. Their morality is typified by what Plato called the “oligarchic soul.” Their god lives in the world, among them. I’m not sure what, exactly, it is. I’m not sure that they know. Some form of socially dispensed prestige and status, which gets defined by different authority figures at different times. But if the world is all you have, then when you lose something materially, you stand to lose everything. I’ve realized that, for them, the quest of career success is aimed at a religious verdict on their moral worth, which is the only way to account for the zeal with which career success is pursued. I can’t make that conflation, because I think it’s idolatrous. But as a result I am not as invested in worldly success as they are. I can only infer that many of these people have had an upbringing that conflated moral worth with worldly success in a way that my upbringing did not.

As I grow older my life has become more comfortable. When I was young I was poor, surrounded by the children of the rich. It was easy to see that wealth and status would never be paths to happiness for me. Now the difference between me and those people is not so easy to see. I don’t get the easy reminders. I also don’t feel the day-to-day struggle against a recalcitrant world constantly decaying into disorder. And I no longer have easy access to that world of working class immigrants at the mosque, the pious, humble crowd I could quietly slip into, stand shoulder to shoulder with, and become just another humble worshipper.

Jones, how I wish you lived in my town so we could be friends and talk about these things! I am passing through the Charlotte airport now, but I will add more to this later. I wanted to get it out to you readers first.

Leftists, the Pope, and Child Abuse

Here’s something shocking mentioned in a John Allen column about Pope Francis and the Synod. Allen is making a point about how this pope benefits from having a certain narrative associated with him. Allen begins by talking about what an international scandal it was when Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops, including one who was a Holocaust denier. Benedict had to apologize. Here’s Allen:

Flash forward to 2015, when Pope Francis named a new bishop for the diocese of Osorno in Chile who critics believe covered up crimes by his country’s most notorious abuser priest. The appointment triggered protests in Chile and objections from some of the pontiff’s own advisors on anti-abuse efforts, but has had little echo anywhere else.

Francis hasn’t responded with a heartfelt mea culpa like Benedict, but with defiance.

In a five-month-old video, Francis is heard telling an employee of the Chilean bishops’ conference that people criticizing his move are being “led around by the nose by leftists,” and that the country has “lost its head.”

While the substance of the two situations may be very different, the potential for backlash is eerily similar. Just imagine what the reaction would have been had Benedict blamed his own woes on “leftists,” and you’ll understand the difference between the narratives the two pontiffs carry around.

It’s striking that outside the Spanish-speaking media, there’s been relatively little reaction to the Barros affair, certainly nothing like the firestorm Benedict faced six years ago.

When Bishop Barros was installed, most of his own priests boycotted the ceremony. Some 650 people tried to prevent him from entering his own cathedral. The accusation is that Barros covered up for a popular priest who mentored him, but who was later found guilty by the Vatican itself of child molestation.

Here’s the video, in Spanish:

I knew that the Pope backed Barros, but I had no idea that he dismissed those protesting him as nothing but a pack of leftists. Yes, just imagine what would have happened had Benedict done this. Lucky man, Pope Francis. Lucky man.

Hauerwas on MacIntyre

Stanley Hauerwas:

Because we know essences only through effects, for MacIntyre there is no place to begin but in the middle. MacIntyre’s position is, I think, similar to his characterization of Rosenzweig’s in Edith Stein: ‘We do not begin with some adequate grasp of the concepts of knowledge and truth and in the light of these pass judgment on whether or not we know something of God or whether or not it is true God exists, but rather it is from our encounters with God—and with the world and with human beings—that we learn what it is to have knowledge of what truth is.’

And:

Conservatives who think they have found an ally in MacIntyre fail to attend to his understanding of the kind of politics necessary to sustain the virtues. He makes clear that his problem with most forms of contemporary conservatism is that conservatives mirror the fundamental characteristics of liberalism. The conservative commitment to a way of life structured by a free market results in an individualism, and in particular a moral psychology, that is as antithetical to the tradition of the virtues as is liberalism. Conservatives and liberals, moreover, both try to employ the power of the modern state to support their positions in a manner alien to MacIntyre’s understanding of the social practices necessary for the common good.

Finally:

The “plain person” is the character MacIntyre has identified to display the unavoidability of the virtues. Plain persons are those characterized by everyday practices such as sustaining families, schools, and local forms of political community. They engage in trades and professions that have required them to learn skills constitutive of a craft. Such people are the readers he hopes his books may reach. Grounded as they are in concrete practices necessary to sustain a common life, they acquire the virtues that make them capable of recognizing the principles of natural law and why those principles call into question the legitimating modes of modernity.

MacIntyre has sought, within the world we necessarily inhabit, to help us recover resources to enable us to act intelligibly. From beginning to end, he has attempted to help us locate those forms of life that can sustain lives well lived. In Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, Thomas D. D’Andrea quotes the preface MacIntyre wrote to the Polish edition of After Virtue:

The flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place with the lives of each individual, or each household, and in the life of the community at large. Because, implicitly or explicitly, it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered, the life of every individual, household or community by its orderings gives expression, wittingly or unwittingly, to some conception of the human good. And it is when goods are ordered in terms of an adequate conception of human good that the virtues genuinely flourish. “Politics” is the Aristotelian name for the set of activities through which goods are ordered in the life of the ­community.

Read the whole thing. I’ll be traveling to Washington today. Speaking on Capitol Hill tomorrow at the Faith & Law meeting, and then on Saturday, with Ken Myers, at the Benedict Option event at Georgetown (10am-12:30pm, 3700 O St., NW). Come out to Georgetown and meet your fellow Ben Oppers. If you’ve never heard Ken Myers speak, you are in for a big treat.

Ghosts for Atheists

Ross Douthat has a great take on the knockout ghost story in Elle magazine (about which I blogged here). He writes that despite the growing irreligion of our culture in this secular age, many people who are otherwise unreligious still believe in the paranormal, because it jibes with their experience. These things cannot be rationalized away. I mean, they can be, and often are, but if something like this happens to you, you know instantly how insufficient are the usual rationalist strategies to explain that what happened to you really didn’t happen. Douthat writes:

My suspicion is that eventually someone will figure out a new or refashioned or revivalist message that resonates with the fallen-away but still spiritually-inclined; man is a religious animal, nature abhors a vacuum, people want community and common purpose, and above all people keep having metaphysical experiences and it’s only human to want to make sense out of them and not just compartmentalize them away from the remainder of your life.

But what you see in the Elle piece is that in the absence of strong institutions and theological systems dedicated to the Mysteries, human beings and human society can still make sense of these experiences through informal networks, private channels, personalized interpreters. And to the extent that these informal networks succeed in satisfying the human hunger for interpretation, understanding and reassurance — as they seem to have partially satisfied Peter Kaplan’s widow — then secularism might be more resilient, more capable of dealing effectively with the incorrigibility of the spiritual impulse, than its more arid and strictly materialist manifestations might suggest.

A few years back, I wrote a column about a fascinating book by a religious studies scholar. From that column:

And yet, countless people — of all faiths, and of no faith at all — have paranormal experiences, and know they are not crazy. “Just how long can we go on like this until we admit that there is real data, and that we haven’t the slightest idea where to put it?” asks Jeffrey Kripal, head of Rice University’s religious studies department. Kripal poses the question in his provocative new book “Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred,” in which he contends that both orthodox religion and orthodox science foolishly deny things like ghosts, UFOs, telepathy and suchlike because manifestations of the paranormal may violate both religious dogma and what Max Weber (quoted by Kripal) calls “the iron cage of modern rationalism, order, and routinization.”

Kripal’s personal viewpoint on all this is slippery. He says he neither believes nor disbelieves —  not because he’s trying to avoid taking a position, but because of his theory about what the mind and human personality are. This requires some unpacking. In Kripal’s view, the mind and consciousness are far more complex than science and religion think, which renders our various interpretive models inadequate to explain reality. Kripal doesn’t propose a clear alternative, though he does propose that in some way, human consciousness helps create reality through its interaction with the material world, much as we have learned from quantum physics the fantastical lesson that a conscious observer helps determine physical outcomes at the quantum level. He doesn’t believe UFOs are hallucinations or creatures from outer space, for example, but theorizes that UFOs are a a real phenomenon that is, in some dimly understood way, a result of human consciousness interacting with the universe.

If this sounds impossibly New Age, well, it kind of is. But this is precisely where Kripal wants to take the reader by the collar and say, “Not so fast!” The kind of characters we dismiss as kooks may in fact be kooky — but their very distance from the mainstream may help them to see things as they are more clearly, or at least to ask questions that are important, but embarrassing to the right-minded. This is why he turns to a handful of outsider figures, both historical and contemporary, in his search for forgotten insights. One of them, the 20th century American eccentric Charles Fort, described as “damned” information and phenomena discarded by dominant intellectual paradigms. Fort was a legendary curator of the damned, and though he entertained some thoroughly crackpot notions, Kripal values him for paying attention to things respectable intellectuals ignored.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 19th century, Kripal shows, leading scientists and thinkers turned their powers to investigating and analyzing what we now call the paranormal. At some point, however, a dogmatic materialism suppressed genuinely scientific curiosity about these strange phenomena. This is partly, Kripal says, because the paranormal typically cannot be reproduced in laboratory settings. But can we really afford to say that nothing that can be measured or reproduced scientifically can be said to exist? This, according to Kripal, is to succumb to an unreasonable rationalism.

In the end, “Authors of the Impossible” is not a book about “The X Files” and spiritualist ooga-booga, but one about epistemology. How do we know what we know? How do we know that we are refusing to ask the right questions because we are afraid of the answers? Have we set up our modes of inquiry such that we cannot possibly penetrate these mysteries?

Read that whole column here. If memory serves, Kripal is also hard on religious people who deny paranormal events and manifestations if these phenomena do not strictly line up with dogma.

At a recent dinner, a well-respected, highly intellectual Catholic priest who had been confronted by a possessed woman recounted the incident. He was sitting next to me, and I could see his right hand shaking on his lap as he told the story. For those who have seen and heard and been part of such encounters, no convincing is necessary. You may not know exactly what you are dealing with, but the fact that you are dealing with something beyond mere rationality is not in doubt. Sometimes, it takes more faith to believe a thing did not happen than to believe it did.

Taking Chronic Fatigue Seriously

Here’s a terribly sad story about a healthy, active young man who developed an utterly debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome:

But now, at 31, Whitney lies in bed in a darkened room in his parents’ home, unable to talk, walk or eat. He is fed intravenously and is barely able to tolerate light, sounds or being touched. His parents and the medical personnel who see him wear plain clothing when they enter his room because bright colors, shapes or any kind of print make him feel even worse, as does any movement that he’s not expecting.

“It’s hard to explain how fragile he is,” says his mother, Janet Dafoe.

This isn’t the picture that people imagine when they hear “chronic fatigue syndrome,” which is often viewed by the public and the health-care community as a trivial or primarily psychological complaint.

One of the world’s top biomedical scientists is now working on understanding the disease. That scientist is Whitney Dafoe’s father, a Stanford medical researcher named Ronald Davis, who is trying to raise money to fund the undertaking. More from the story:

For some patients, ME/CFS starts suddenly, with an illness or a trauma from which they never fully recover. For others, like Whitney,the illness follows a series of ailments. He was healthy as a child but caught a bad case of mononucleosis in high school and had a spell of headaches and dizziness after a trip to Jamaica during college. He eventually recovered from both.

He’d been in India for several months in 2006 when he began experiencing stomach pain, bloating and nausea. He returned weighing just 115 pounds on his 6-foot-3 frame. Then, two years later, he developed what seemed like a cold and never felt normal again.

“He went downhill from there,” his mother says.

Whitney’s is an extreme case. I’m interested in this story, though, because I’m still dealing with a version of this, and I suppose I always will be. I became sick with mononucleosis in the spring of 2010, though it was misdiagnosed for two years. It turns out that the condition overtook me at a period of intense stress. We had just moved to Philadelphia, but we couldn’t sell our house in Dallas, which meant we were watching our bank account dwindle as we paid Philly rent and a Dallas mortgage. My sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer in this time, and things began to go south at my new job. Apparently all that stress gave mononucleosis an opportunity to strike.

It took two years and a move to Louisiana — which, unexpectedly, turned out to be like jumping into a swimming hole of anxiety — to figure out what was really wrong. By then, I was really sick. Not Whitney Dafoe sick, or even close, but still sick. Sleeping four to six hours in the middle of the day. Periods of profound weakness. Constant inflammation. The other day in New Orleans, Julie and I passed by a hotel in which I’d stayed a couple of years ago while in the city for a board meeting. I told her one day I had to cancel my participation in the meeting, because I was too weak to walk the three blocks from the hotel to the gathering. It made me remember how difficult that whole period was.

What brought me to healing was, as you know, the journey with Dante through the Commedia, which for me became a journey out of the dark wood of anxiety (a rheumatologist told me that my intense anxiety was triggering my chronic mono). I’m so much better off than I was, I can hardly tell you. And yet, I’m still struggling. The inflammation never goes away, and I still have to sleep in the middle of the day more often than I care to admit. I don’t feel stress at all, so I’m guessing that this immune-system condition I have must be permanent. A couple of days ago, Julie asked me to clean up a dusty corner in which I had stacked piles and piles of books (pointing to the messy mountain, I told her, “That’s how my mind looks”). After ten minutes of work, I sneezed once, then had a massive allergic reaction, and had to sleep for four hours. The fragility of my immune system is such a pain in the butt.

My fear is that something will tip me over into Whitney Dafoe territory one day.

It is claimed that we are undergoing an epidemic of autoimmune disorders today:

Yet few of today’s practicing physicians are aware of the escalating tsunami of epidemiological evidence that now concerns top scientists at every major research institute around the world: evidence that autoimmune diseases such as lupus, MS, scleroderma, and many others are on the rise and have been for the past four decades in industrialized countries around the world.

Mayo Clinic researchers report that the incidence of lupus has nearly tripled in the United States over the past four decades. Their findings are all the more alarming when you consider that their research has been conducted among a primarily white population at a time when many researchers believe lupus rates are rising most significantly among African Americans.

Over the past fifty years multiple sclerosis rates have tripled in Finland. Rates have likewise been rising in Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, where the number of people with MS has been rising at nearly 3 percent a year. Multiple sclerosis rates in Norway have risen 30 percent since 1963, echoing trends in Germany, Italy, and Greece, where MS rates have doubled over the past thirty to forty years.

Rates of type 1 diabetes are perhaps the most telling. Data over the past forty years show that type 1 diabetes, a disease in which immune cells attack the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, has increased fivefold. The story regarding childhood-onset type 1 diabetes is more disturbing. Studies show that the number of children with type 1 diabetes is skyrocketing, with rates increasing 6 percent a year in children four and under and 4 percent in children aged 10 to 14.

Rates of numerous other autoimmune diseases — scleroderma, Crohn’s disease, autoimmune Addison’s disease, and polymyositis — show the same alarming pattern.

As with all epidemiological research, it can be more art than science to tease out what percentage of these rising rates is the result of more people being diagnosed with a disease because physicians are more aware of it, versus the increase from a genuine rise in the number of people falling ill. Yet the researchers behind these epidemiological studies hold that something more than an improved ability among doctors to diagnose autoimmune diseases is driving these numbers upward.

I notice that increasingly, I am sensitive to all kinds of triggers. The chemical smell of a cheap scented candle can provoke an allergic reaction, for example. Stuff that I used to be able to tolerate easily. I used to roll my eyes at people who said that they could not tolerate fragrances, until it started happening to me. To be sure, most fragrances don’t bother me a bit, but those that have a strong chemical smell do. Cleaning fluid is another, as is paint. Is the autoimmune epidemic, if indeed there is one, a disease of modernity?

What do you think? Open thread…

‘Pink Christianity’

Yesterday I was talking with a friend, a well-known professor who has done a lot of thinking about Christianity in modernity. I told him I was preparing to speak on the Benedict Option this weekend at Georgetown (about which, come see Ken Myers and me talk Ben Op, 10am-12:30pm, 3700 O St, NW, this Saturday Oct 10), and was curious about his thoughts on the matter. I was taking notes. Here’s one thing he said that really stayed with me:

It’s painfully obvious to me how fragile things are. How fragile — we’ve spent so much time, a millennium, building our institutions, and it turns out that they are very fragile. Things can change in an instant. We are going to have to come to grips with the question of whether or not our faith is prepared to endure suffering and loss. Because we are going to face a lot of that in the years to come.

Whatever Benedict Option communities end up being as we pass through all this, they are going to have to bear witness to suffering and loss, in a way we [in the West] have not had to do for a great long time. As you talk about the Ben Op, I think you might draw on what you have learned from Dante about how to bear suffering in a Christian way. We are going to have to be patient for a restoration of justice, and develop the kind of faith and understanding required for that.

The Benedict Option has to be about what discipleship looks like and must contain in this present reality. It can’t be simply about Christian survival within the liberal order. That in itself concedes too much. Has to come from a renewed quest for God and the nature of man in the ruins of this civilization – and that that quest is going to require specific forms and practices.

That was extraordinarily helpful to me. Among the many things Dante taught me in my own difficult, unfixable situation here was how to bear it like a Christian, and how to turn that suffering into an occasion of grace and conversion. The key was not simply that Dante taught me the skills for enduring the situation, but more than that, he taught me how to embrace it as an opportunity to become more Christ-like. It was hard road to walk, and required a lot of dying to self and self-righteousness, and meant that I had to reconcile myself to the fact that things were never going to be just in this world. But in the end, on the day my father died, I thanked God for all the pain He allowed me to endure over the last four years, because it really was for my salvation. Had He not taken me through it, I never would have been able to be present holding my father’s hand as he breathed his last, and I never would have been able to thank him, and thank God, for all things.

I see now what my professor friend meant about the Benedict Option. It has to be about building a Christianity — and Christians — who can not only endure, but embrace the trials to come as the will of God, for our purification and salvation. Stoics can endure, but it takes a Christian to rejoice amid suffering.

This morning, a Catholic friend sent me this interview from a Russian Orthodox website, with an Orthodox bishop in Tajikistan. In it, he criticizes what he calls “pink Christianity,” which sounds a lot like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Here’s how it starts:

Your Eminence, what are the “comfortable Christianity” and “pink Christianity” you talk about in your sermons that we publish on our site [Pravoslavie.ru]? Could it be said that comfortable Christianity is the spiritual illness of our times?

What did the Lord say? Take up your cross and follow Me. This is the meaning of Christianity. Comfortable Christianity is, first of all, not wanting to carry your cross.

This illness is endemic not only of our times, but began immediately. As soon as Christianity came to be, there were both zealous Christians and lazy Christians.

The first centuries of Christianity were by nature very uncomfortable—there were persecutions, and only the most zealous remained Christians. But those who were among the Christians simply by chance either renounced Christ, or, as many philosophers or scholars, did not want to change themselves to conform to Christian teaching. They instead wanted to change Christian teaching to suit themselves.

That is how the first heresies arose among the Gnostics. This was also a form of comfort—they wanted the convenience of thinking however they liked, without denying themselves anything.

And when Christianity became a permitted religion, from the time of St. Constantine the Great, this phenomenon of “comfortable Christianity” began. Why did monasteries become so widespread then? Because zealous Christians left the cities, where it had become impossible to preserve zeal.

Comfortable Christianity has always been around. But what I was talking about in my sermon was “pink Christianity”. This term appeared in the nineteenth century among the Slavophiles—thinking people who roused an interest in Christianity in an already quite secular society (similar to they way it was here in Russia at the end of the Soviet era), and there were people who wanted to live however they liked, denying themselves nothing, but nevertheless calling themselves Christians.

“Pink Christianity” is a kind of diluted Christianity. At the beginning of the twentieth century it led to renovationism, but fell under the grindstone of atheistic ideology. Not finding any response from the people it withered on the boundless spaces of the Soviet empire.

At the end of the twentieth century—in the late ‘80’s, early ‘90’s—many intellectuals again ran to the Church. But why did they run? Not to follow Christ, but because it was fashionable. The Church was regarded as an opponent to the government—although the soviet government had always been an opponent of the Church, and not the other way around.

So this huge number of people from the intelligentsia poured into the Church, not coming for Christ but for something else. Now these people are leaving the Church.

A similar situation can be seen in the monasteries. In the 1990’s, many people came to the monasteries. They lived there for ten to fifteen years, some even became priests, but now they are leaving. This is because they came not for Christ but rather to escape difficult lives, because they had nowhere else to go. Many people came from impoverished republics to join Russian monasteries. Their spiritual directors blessed them to join the monasteries. So a person having no monastic calling ended up in a monastery, suffered through it for ten to fifteen years, and then left.

People are now leaving who came to the Church for something else, and not for the sake of salvation. And of course, sooner or later they are disappointed. If they don’t come to the Church for Christ, temptations begin immediately.

Some don’t even make it in the door—they come and some granny leaps at them, and they walk away. These grannies are a crude filter in the church. They are often scorned and criticized, but they filter out those who came to Church not for Christ but for something else.

Many today want the Church to be a “Church of good people.” But the Church is a hospital. Here all the masks, all the curtains fall away, and a person is seen for what he is. And of course what he is rather unsightly.

People who don’t come to Church for Christ are looking for some kind of comfort, a peaceful state of being. There will be a peaceful state, and comfort—but a different kind. However, we have to grow into that state.

More:

But the tragedy of our times is that we are incapable of being disciples.

Fr. Raphael (Karelin) said it well: The last Glinsk elders were dying—those spiritual giants with enormous experience and priceless treasures that they wanted to pass on to us. But we, he says, were not able to receive it; because of our feebleness we couldn’t take it on.2

People have become weaker, they can’t receive this rich spiritual experience, because it is a cross—a very heavy cross.

This break between elders and novices can be seen now: Why are there practically no elders left? Because there are no obedient disciples, no people who are capable of receiving this wealth of experience.

Everyone has become very feeble. This whole aggressive informational milieu, modern technology, computers—all makes us very feeble. Young people never put down their telephones, they are constantly looking at something or playing computer games, and this paralyzes the will.

This is all aimed at entangling people in cunningly placed nets, so that they can’t break out of them.

Specifically the will for asceticism is paralyzed. Everyone knows and understands all this very well but they can hardly do anything about it. It is because this web has ensnared all of us, and only the Lord can somehow interfere and change it all. Thus have we gotten stuck in these nets—and this includes you and me.

That definitely includes me. This bishop, +Pitirim, goes on to say that the young people of Tajikistan are Islamizing very quickly, becoming zealous in their practice of Islam because it is so demanding of them:

In Tadjikistan, I have seen people who lived through the civil war. This is a terrible thing; they are scarred for life. But the youth who have never seen war have gone mad over ISIS!

Just today I heard information that some teenagers in Tadjikistan hung out an ISIS flag. They don’t understand, and it’s useless to explain anything to them. They now have a goal, a reason to exist.

They now have a goal, a reason to exist.

One more thing Bishop Pitirim says, one that ought to speak to us in our situation:

You see, you have to take one thing into consideration—something mysterious, metaphorical, if you will. The situation now is very much like what we had on the eve of the 1917 revolution.

Before the revolution, it was also as if people did not understand what they were doing. They couldn’t imagine at all what lay ahead for them—that hideous catastrophe—how it would all end. They were like madmen, fighting for freedom. Everyone was fighting, every social class, including many of the clergy. They were fighting against autocracy. The best ones became new martyrs, and others only began to understand—in the prison camps—just what sort of freedom they were fighting for.

And there is one aspect that has never been specially researched: it would be very interesting to follow the fates of these people—what those who were against the autocracy said, and what turns their lives took after the revolution. It is as if each one who participated in the revolution was preparing a horrible tragedy for himself in the future.

Read the whole thing. Many of you are not going to like it.

This exiling of Christianity from public life that we are now undertaking in the West, and this hollowing-out of Christianity from within via MTD — it is preparing a horrible tragedy for the future in what St. John Paul II called a Culture of Death, and Pope Benedict XVI called a “dictatorship of relativism.” I believe this, and I believe it cannot be stopped at this point, only endured. God will give us modern people what we want, but I think of Teresa of Avila’s line about more tears being shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

The Benedict Option must be about not only enduring what is to come, but finding the blessing in it, and the means of deepening our conversion. The only way the Ben Op can do what it is supposed to do is if it makes unity with Christ our absolute telos, and orders everything else to that goal, guiding us in the practices necessary to keep ourselves on the straight path into the light despite the growing chaos and darkness around us.

I think of Forese Donati, emaciated on the terrace of the Gluttons in Dante’s Purgatorio, but filled with light and joy. He tells the pilgrim Dante:

“All these people who weep while they are singing

followed their appetites beyond all measure,

and here regain, in thirst and hunger, holiness.

“The fragrance coming from the fruit

and from the water sprinkled on green boughs

kindles our craving to eat and drink,

“and not once only, circling in this space,

is our pain renewed.

I speak of pain but should say solace,

“for the same desire leads us to the trees

that led Christ to utter Eli with such bliss

when with the blood from His own veins He made us free.”

The Message Through the Medium

A reader sends this most excellent Dreher bait: the story of Lisa Chase, a woman whose dead husband contacted her in eerie and undeniable ways. Excerpts:

Up until a year ago, I’d never visited a psychic, never had my palms or tarot cards read. I wasn’t exactly a skeptic, but you have to trust the people who practice such things, you have to buy into their cosmologies, and I didn’t, quite.

But for a few years, in my thirties, I called an astrologer around my birthday. I had a hippie aunt who, when I was 16, gave me a present of an astrological chart. It was fun; it seemed to confirm who I am—a pragmatic Capricorn—and the ancientness of the art, the systematicness of it, the universality, appealed to me.

The last time I talked to the astrologer, I was told two significant things. One delighted me. The other I put deep in the vault of my subconscious. That’s how we in this Anthropocene era interface with the paranormal and the metaphysical. If we get a prophecy we like, we keep it at our fingertips, bring it out at dinner parties, tweet it to our followers: “@amazingpsychic told me I’d meet my soul mate next month. #cosmic #blessed.” If we get bad news, we can decide that it was delivered by a charlatan and disregard it. Because our navel-gazing, technology-is-God culture doesn’t fundamentally believe in anything bigger than ourselves (What could be bigger?), we don’t have any rules of the road to evaluate what we hear and who is delivering our para-, meta-messages. We’re each on our own recognizance.

It was a little over a decade ago. I was 39 years old, 10 weeks pregnant with my son—though after a previous miscarriage, I wasn’t telling anyone about this pregnancy. The astrologer read my chart and said, “You’re having a baby now or very soon.” Wow, she is good, I thought. We talked about how Aquarius was in my marriage house, and so it was no surprise that my partner was an Aquarius. She told me that he was “a difficult path.” Was I sure I needed to go down it? I assured her I did, because for all the difficulties, there were many more amazing moments in my life with him. Okay, the astrologer conceded; maybe he was my “destiny.” Then she told me that something “wild” was going to happen around the time I was 50. “It’s almost like someone around you is murdered.”

That’s the one I sent deep into my Gringotts vault, to be ignored and nearly forgotten.

Well, her husband Peter died of cancer. And then the crazy synchronicities began. You have to read the piece to see the screen grab of the time her phone sent a message to itself. They kept building up, and Lisa Chase couldn’t escape the sense that Peter was trying to contact her. On the advice of a couple of friends, she telephoned a medium named Lisa Kay. The widow was skeptical, but then things started pouring out of the medium, things she couldn’t possibly have known about him and his marriage:

Lisa would be talking to me directly, then talking to … Peter? And sometimes it was if she were Peter, talking to us both. Channeling would probably be the best verb. Sometimes she said things that made no sense to me. Maybe a third of what she said could apply to anyone who’d lost a spouse; things like, “I want you to marry again,” and “It’s okay that you cried in front of me.” But there were many more specific things she said that she couldn’t have known or Googled, as several people have suggested to me.

Anyway, try Googling the name of a person you know nothing about. It takes a lot more than five minutes to navigate to the page with the right information and absorb it all—the names and details and events.



LK: He says he controlled too much. He says, ‘Take the good with the bad. I had my faults.’ He’s learning to be better at not criticizing.

Then she said something that shocked me.

LK: ‘I’m a lucky guoy. I got the better end of the deal.’

What was amazing about this was the way Lisa pronounced it: “guoy,” not “guy.” It was precisely the way Peter said it, with an exaggerated Brooklyn accent. He’d use that expression when we were making up after a fight: I’m a lucky guoy…to have you. At this point I began speaking directly to him; I couldn’t help myself.

The story gets even weirder. Finally, Lisa Chase meets the medium, Lisa Kay, for lunch:

I began to ask her about how it works, the mechanics of reading, of seeing spirits.

“First,” she said, “I don’t talk to dead people. I don’t see dead people. I hate that.” It drives her nuts. “Spirits are energy—energy can’t be destroyed, just read the quantum physicists. Max Planck. They’re just on a higher vibrational frequency, and I have to tune in to that.”

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it. I don’t know what to make of it, frankly.

I certainly don’t dismiss it as false, though I do believe that we are strictly forbidden from trying to contact the dead. In my view, this really did happen. It’s only a question of whether it is what it seems to be, or if it is a deception worked by malevolent spirits.

If this account is valid, and I’m inclined to believe that it is, the story suggests that there is a transitional state, a kind of Purgatory. This would explain how Peter is “learning.” As a believing Christian, I am naturally troubled by the lack of any Christian content in this phenomenon, but I was just the other night talking with a group of Christians, including a Catholic priest, about stories like this, and I said that some of the things I’ve seen myself don’t fit easily into my theology. I mentioned that a well-known Catholic priest once heard a ghost story from me, then shared one of his own. That priest told me that he has simply accepted that there are some things from that world that are real, but for which our theology has no adequate account.

This story of Peter and Lisa could be one of them. I hesitate to endorse the story, not because I think it’s untrue, but because I have a strong belief that God forbids us to consult mediums (Witch of Endor, ‘memba her?). I don’t want at all to be read as endorsing that kind of thing. That said, a friend of mine once inadvertently found herself accompanying a friend to a consultation with a medium (my friend didn’t know that’s where they were going until they arrived). Things happened that opened the door to contact with someone they both knew well, who had died decades earlier. I can’t give more details, because my friend swore me to secrecy, but it all ended in an old abandoned barn, with something discovered buried where the spirit of the dead man said it would be. Except when my friend and those accompanying her stood on the indicated spot and felt the ground give way slightly, indicating that something was under the surface, they became terrified, and ran away.

They never returned. The barn was eventually torn down, and grass grew over the site. They couldn’t find it now if they wanted to. They never learned what was buried there. After that, the spirit of the dead man stopped coming to my friend.

I dunno. This is a world of wonders. I’ve told the story here many times of the Cajun Catholic grandmother who had a powerful gift of spiritual discernment, one that she only used in serving a priest as he helped people with supernatural, er, problems. In How Dante Can Save Your Life, I tell the tale of how she and the priest helped resolve the difficult situation of my grandfather’s spirit lingering around my father immediately after his death. I hadn’t thought of it till now, but that woman, who passed away years ago, was a medium. I wouldn’t have used that term to describe her, because she was deeply, deeply Catholic, and would have objected to linking her work to anything that smacked of the occult. She only used her gift under the direction of her priest, and then only in specific situations. Still, that’s what she was: a medium. And it was through her that my father learned that his father could not move on until he, my dad, forgave him for the way he mistreated my dad in the final years of my grandfather’s life.

I say stay away from this stuff if you at all can; this book, about the spiritual darkness that enveloped a Greek man once he began fooling with the occult, is a very good reminder not to go looking for trouble. But sometimes, this stuff finds you. I once asked Father Termini, the old priest who ministered to people suffering from spiritual oppression, how he convinced people that these things were real. He said, quietly, “By the time they find me, they don’t need convincing.” True dat.

What do you make of Lisa Chase’s story?

UPDATE: A Twitter follower sends in this 10-minute short narrative film by the Dominicans, warning against opening doors that cannot be easily closed. It’s pretty scary:

Benedict Option FAQ

What is the Benedict Option?

Start with this famous paragraph from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

The “Benedict Option” refers to Christians in the contemporary West who cease to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of American empire, and who therefore are keen to construct local forms of community as loci of Christian resistance against what the empire represents. Put less grandly, the Benedict Option — or “Ben Op” — is an umbrella term for Christians who accept MacIntyre’s critique of modernity, and who also recognize that forming Christians who live out Christianity according to Great Tradition requires embedding within communities and institutions dedicated to that formation.

What is MacIntyre’s critique? Be succinct.

MacIntyre says that the Enlightenment project cut Western man off from his roots in tradition, but failed to produce a binding morality based on Reason alone. Plus, the Enlightenment extolled the autonomous individual. Consequently, we live in a culture of moral chaos and fragmentation, in which many questions are simply impossible to settle. MacIntyre says that our contemporary world is a dark wood, and that finding our way back to the straight path will require establishing new forms of community that have as their ends a life of virtue.

Why can’t we Christians just make up our mind to be good, and join a church with good people in it?

Well, what is the Good? How can you tell good from bad? How does your community makes decisions on right from wrong? How do you? Our culture has become so overwhelmingly individualist that we inevitably end up worshiping the Self. The sociologist Christian Smith’s work on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has shown how historical Christianity has been revolutionized from within by modernity, and has become pseudo-Christian. To oversimplify, modern forms of Christianity do not challenge modernity’s assumptions, and are therefore highly susceptible to being colonized by it. This, in fact, is what has happened to most churches, and most individual believers. As MacIntyre would put it, the lack of awareness of this fact is part of our problem.

We Christians are forgetting our story. This is not a bug of modernity; it is its purpose. As the church historian Robert Louis Wilken has put it:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

So what does St. Benedict have to do with any of this?

Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480-537) was an educated young Christian who left Rome, the city of the recently fallen Empire, out of disgust with its decadence. He went south, into the forest near Subiaco, to live as a hermit and to pray. Eventually, he gathered around him some like-minded men, and formed monasteries. Benedict wrote his famous Rule, which became the guiding constitution of most monasteries in western Europe in the Middle Ages. The monasteries were incubators of Christian and classical culture, and outposts of evangelization in the barbarian kingdoms. As Cardinal Newman wrote:

St Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it [the caveat], not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction or conversion. The new work which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city.

Are you saying that contemporary Christians ought to be monks? How would that work?

Well, the world would be a lot better off if more men and women today became monastics, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. Remember, MacIntyre says that we await a “new and very different St. Benedict” — meaning a charismatic religious figure, or figures, who can help us form these new communities. The Baptist theologian Jonathan Wilson, in his book on what MacIntyre has to say to the churches, says the question contemporary Christians should ask ourselves is this: “What must the church do in order to live and witness faithfully as a minority in a culture in which we were once the majority?”

As we try to determine which forms of community, which institutions, and which ways of life, can answer that question, we should draw on the wisdom of St. Benedict and his Rule. We should innovate ways to adapt it to forms of non-monastic living in the world.

Here are some basic Benedictine principles that we might think of as tools for living the Christian life:

1. Order. Benedict described the monastery as a “school for the service of the Lord.” The entire way of life of the monastic community was ordered by this telos, or end. The primary purpose of Christian community life is to form Christians. The Benedict Option must teach us to make every other goal in our lives secondary to serving God. Christianity is not simply a “worldview” or an add-on to our lives, as it is in modernity; it must be our lives, or it is something less than Christianity.

2. Prayer and work. Life as a Christian requires both contemplation and action. Both depend on the other. There is a reason Jesus retired to the desert after teaching the crowds. Work is as sacred as prayer. Ordinary life can and should be hallowed.

3. Stability. The Rule ordinarily requires monks to stay put in the monastery where they professed their vows. The idea is that moving around constantly, following our own desires, prevents us from becoming faithful to our calling. True, we must be prepared to follow God’s calling, even if He leads us away from home. But the far greater challenge for us in the 21st century is learning how to stay put — literally and metaphorically — and to bind ourselves to a place, a tradition, a people. Only within the limits of stability can we find true freedom.

4. Community. It really does take a village to raise a child. That is, we learn who we are and who we are called to be in large part through our communities and their institutions. We Americans have to unlearn some of the ways of individualism that we absorb uncritically, and must relearn the craft of community living.

Not every community is equally capable of forming Christians. Communities must have boundaries, and must build these metaphorical walls because, as the New Monastic pioneer Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove writes, “we cannot become the gift to others we are called to be until we embrace the limits that are necessary to our vocation.” In other words, we must withdraw behind some communal boundaries not for the sake of our own purity, but so we can first become who God wants us to be, precisely for the sake of the world. Beliefs and practices that are antithetical to achieving the community’s telos must be excluded.

5. Hospitality. That said, we must be open to outsiders, and receive them “as Christ,” according to the Rule. For Benedictine monks, this had a specific meaning, with regard to welcoming visitors to the monastery. For modern laypersons, this will likely have to do with their relationship to people outside the community. The Benedictines are instructed to welcome outsiders so long as they don’t interrupt communal life. It should be that way with us, too. We should always be open to others, in charity, to share what we have with them, including our faith.

6. Balance. The Rule of St. Benedict is marked by a sense of balance, of common sense. As Ben Oppers experiment with building and/or reforming communities and institutions in a more intentional way, we must be vigilant against the temptations to fall intorigid legalism, cults of personality, and other distortions that have been the ruin of intentional communities. There must be workable forms of accountability for leadership, and the cultivation of an anti-utopian sensibility among the faithful. A community that is too lax will dissolve, or at least be ineffective, but one that is too strict will also produce disorder. A Benedict Option community must be joyful and confident, not dour and fearful.

Can you point to any contemporary examples of Ben Op communities? 

Yes. There is a Catholic agrarian community around Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in eastern Oklahoma. The lay community gathered around St. John Orthodox cathedral in Eagle River, Alaska, is another. Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, is working towards incorporating a version of the Rule of St. Benedict within its congregational life. Rutba House, a New Monastic community in Durham, North Carolina, and its School for Conversion, is still another. I recently met a couple in Waco, Texas — Baylor philosophy professor Scott Moore and his wife Andrea — who bought a property near Crawford, Texas, and who are rehabilitating it into a family home and a Christian retreat called Benedict Farm. There is the Bruderhof.

I think schools can be a form of the Benedict Option. Consider St. Jerome’s, a classical school in the Catholic tradition, in Hyattsville, Maryland, or the Scuola G.K. Chesterton in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, which is run by Catholics for Catholic children, following the vision of the late Stratford Caldecott (see his essay, “A Question of Purpose”). Homeschool groups can be motivated by the Ben Op.

I am certain that there is no such thing as a perfect Ben Op community, and that each and every one of them will have struggled with similar problems. In working on the Benedict Option book, I intend to visit as many of these communities as I can, to find out what they are doing right, what they wish they did better, and what we can all learn from them. The Benedict Option has to be something that ordinary people can do in their own circumstances.

Do you really think you can just run away from the world and live off in a compound somewhere? Get real!

No, I don’t think that at all. While I wouldn’t necessarily fault people who sought geographical isolation, that will be neither possible nor desirable for most of us. The early Church lived in cities, and formed its distinct life there. Most of the Ben Op communities that come to mind today are not radically isolated, in geography or otherwise, from the broader community. It’s simply nonsense to say that Ben Oppers want to hide from the world and live in some sort of fundamentalist enclave. Some do, and it’s not hard to find examples of how this sort of thing has gone bad. But that is not what we should aim for. In fact, I think it’s all too easy for people to paint the Benedict Option as utopian escapism so they can safely wall it off and not have to think about it.

Isn’t this a violation of the Great Commission? How can we preach the Gospel to the nations when we’re living in these neo-monastic communities?

Well, what is evangelizing? Is it merely dispersing information? Or is there something more to it. The Benedict Option is about discipleship, which is itself an indirect form of evangelism. Pagans converted to the early Church not simply because of the words the first Christians spoke, but because of the witness of the kinds of lives they lived. It has to be that way with us too.

Pope Benedict XVI said something important in this respect. He said that the best apologetic arguments for the truth of the Christian faith are the art that the Church has produced as a form of witness, and the lives of its saints:

Yet, the beauty of Christian life is even more effective than art and imagery in the communication of the Gospel message. In the end, love alone is worthy of faith, and proves credible. The lives of the saints and martyrs demonstrate a singular beauty which fascinates and attracts, because a Christian life lived in fullness speaks without words. We need men and women whose lives are eloquent, and who know how to proclaim the Gospel with clarity and courage, with transparency of action, and with the joyful passion of charity.

The Benedict Option is about forming communities that teach us and help us to live in such a way that our entire lives are witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel.

It sounds like you are simply asking for the Church to be the Church. Why do you need to brand it “the Benedict Option”?

That’s a great point, actually. If all the churches did what they were supposed to do, we wouldn’t need the Ben Op. Thing is, they don’t. The term “Benedict Option” symbolizes a historically conscious, antimodernist return to roots, an undertaking that occurs with the awareness that Christians have to cultivate a sense of separation, of living as what Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon call “resident aliens” in a “Christian colony,” in order to be faithful to our calling. And, “Benedict Option” calls to mind monastic disciplines that we can appropriate in our own time.

It also draws attention to the centrality of practices in shaping our Christian lives. The Reformed theologian James K.A. Smith, in his great books Imagining the Kingdom and Desiring the Kingdom, speaks of these things. A recent secular book by Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, talks about the critical importance of practice as a way of knowledge. Here is Crawford writing about tradition and organ making:

When the sovereignty of the self requires that the inheritance of the past be disqualified as a guide to action and meaning, we confine ourselves in an eternal present. If subjectivism works against the coalescing of communities and traditions in which genuine individuals can arise, does the opposite follow? Do communities that look to established forms for the meanings of things somehow cultivate individuality?

… [C]onsider that when you go deep into some particular skill or art, it trains your powers of concentration and perception. You become more discerning about the objects you are dealing with and, if all goes well, begin to care viscerally about quality, because you have been initiated into an ethic of caring about what you are doing. Usually this happens by the example of some particular person, a mentor, who exemplifies that spirit of craftsmanship. You hear disgust in his voice, or see pleasure on his face, in response to some detail that would be literally invisible to someone not initiated. In this way, judgment develops alongside emotional involvement, unified in what Polanyi calls personal knowledge. Technical training in such a setting, though narrow in its immediate application, may be understood as part of education in the broadest sense: intellectual and moral formation.

… What emerged in my conversations at Taylor and Boody [a traditional organ-making shop] is that the historical inheritance of a long tradition of organ making seems not to burden these craftspeople, but rather to energize their efforts in innovation. They intend for their organs still be be in use four hundred years from now, and this orientation toward the future requires a critical engagement with the designs and building methods of the past. They learn from past masters, interrogate their wisdom, and push the conversation further in an ongoing dialectic of reverence and rebellion. Their own progress in skill and understanding is thus a contribution to something larger; their earned independence of judgment represents a deepening of the craft itself. This is a story about the progressive possibilities of tradition, then.

The Benedict Option is about how to rightly order the practices in our Christian lives, in light of tradition, for the sake of intellectual and moral formation in the way of Christ. You might even say that it’s a story about the progressive possibilities of tradition, and a return to roots in defiance of a rootless age.

It’s all about the gays, isn’t it? I didn’t hear a thing about the Benedict Option until the Obergefell ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. 

Now, now. I have been talking about the Ben Op in my writing for over a decade. You can find it in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons. If there were no such thing as gay marriage, we would still need the Benedict Option, because modernity is dissolving authentic Christianity. Hauerwas and Willimon are not theological conservatives, but a generation ago, they wrote their great book Resident Aliens in response to the effects of modernity on Christianity, at the practical, parish level.

That said, it is true that the rise of gay rights has provoked an intense interest in the Ben Op among conservative Christians. Why? I think there are several reasons.

For one, the it awakened many small-o orthodox Christians to something that ought to have been clear to them a long, long time ago: the West is truly a post-Christian civilization, and we had better come up with new ways of living if we are going to hold on to the faith in this new dark age. The reason gay rights were so quickly embraced by the American public is because the same public had already jettisoned traditional Christian teaching on the meaning of sex, of marriage, and even a Christian anthropology. Same-sex marriage is only the fulfillment of a radical change that had already taken place in Western culture.

For another, the way civil rights laws work in the US means that religious liberty is now and will increasingly be at grave risk from the progress of gay civil rights. Christian institutions will struggle to stay open in the years to come. Individual Christians will also face increased pressure to turn from the truth about sex, marriage, and the family, for the sake of participating in American cultural and economic life. We had better start forming now the institutions and communities within which we can live out our faith in a hostile culture, teach our children the faith and raise them to be resilient, and to support each other.

Finally, we are under a new set of conditions, in which the old ways of responding don’t work. Read Prof. Kingsfield on what we’re facing. Voting Republican, and expecting judges to save us, is over. It’s all about culture now.

But St. Benedict was a Catholic. I’m not. What’s in it for me?

Hey, I’m not Catholic either. So what? We Orthodox claim him as one of our own, as all the pre-schism saints are. But never mind. Evangelicals need to look deeply into Church history to find the resources to withstand the pressures of modernity. St. Benedict is one of them. Because of our varying ecclesiologies, a Catholic Ben Op is going to look different from a Protestant one, and an Orthodox one will look different too. That’s okay. Depending on the telos of the Ben Op institution, we may be able to work together ecumenically.

This is all rather gloomy, don’t you think? Where is your Christian hope?

You call it gloomy; I call it realistic. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. St. Benedict didn’t set out to Save Western Civilization™; all he wanted to do was create a space within which he could pray and worship God away from the chaos and decadence of the city. What he and his followers did, without knowing it, was to lay the foundation for the birth of a new civilization out of the ruins of the old. So it is with us. We need to learn to play the long game. Pope Benedict XVI said:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly she will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize her true center and experience the sacraments again as the worship of God and not as a subject of liturgical scholarship.

The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution—when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain—to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult…but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

He was talking about the Roman Catholic Church. I think it applies to all Christian churches in the West.

I don’t know. All this Benedict Option stuff sounds really radical to me. 

It is, but let me ask you: what else is there? To continue the path we’re traveling, hoping that things will get better, is to court disaster. Millennials are leaving Christianity is unprecedented numbers — and why shouldn’t they, given how wan and lukewarm Christianity is? De-Christianized Europe is our future in America. In fact,  Jean-Francois Mayer, a Swiss academic who studies religious movements, told me that among the Christian communities left in Europe, many are making plans right now for how to hold on through the long night. And Father Cassian Folsom, prior of the Benedictine community in Norcia, told me that the only Christians who are going to make it through what’s to come are those who embrace some form of the Benedict Option.

In the end, it’s not really an option. It’s a necessity.

Twelve Syrian Martyrs

The latest from the Islamic Mordor:

Twelve Christians have been brutally executed by the Islamic State, including the 12-year-old son of a Syrian ministry team leader who had planted nine churches, because they refused to renounce the name of Jesus Christ and embrace Islam. The martyrs were faithful to the very end; right before one woman was beheaded by the terror group, she appeared to be smiling slightly as she said, “Jesus!”

According to Christian Aid Mission, a humanitarian group which assists indigenous Christian workers in their native countries, the horrific murders took place on August 28 in an unnamed village outside Aleppo, Syria.

“In front of the team leader and relatives in the crowd, the Islamic extremists cut off the fingertips of the boy and severely beat him, telling his father they would stop the torture only if he, the father, returned to Islam,” Christian Aid revealed, according to a report from Morning Star News. “When the team leader refused, relatives said, the ISIS militants also tortured and beat him and the two other ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their deaths in crucifixion.”

They were killed for refusing to return to Islam after embracing Christianity, as were the other eight aid workers, including two women, according to Christian Aid. The eight were taken to a separate site in the village and asked if they would return to Islam. However, after they refused to renounce Christ, the women, ages 29 and 33, were raped before the crowd summoned to watch, and then all eight were beheaded.

They prayed as they knelt before the Islamic State militants, according to the ministry leader Christian Aid assists, who spoke with relatives and villagers while visiting the site.

“Villagers said some were praying in the name of Jesus, others said some were praying the Lord’s Prayer, and others said some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to Jesus,” the ministry director told Christian Aid. “One of the women looked up and seemed to be almost smiling as she said, ‘Jesus!'”

From a 2014 report in Newsweek:

Grossing as much as $40 million or more over the past two years, ISIS has accepted funding from government or private sources in the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait—and a large network of private donors, including Persian Gulf royalty, businessmen and wealthy families.

Until recently, all three countries had openly given hefty sums to rebels fighting Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime, among them ISIS. Only after widespread criticism from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the international community did Saudi Arabia pass legislation in 2013 criminalizing financial support of terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra and ISIS.

In August, ISIS was declared “Enemy Number One” by the most senior Islamic cleric in Saudi Arabia, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, and Saudi Arabian bomber and fighter planes joined U.S. airstrikes against ISIS. So far, Qatar and Kuwait have not followed suit.

Why is the United States not opening its doors widely to give these Christians shelter? They have nowhere else to go.

Among the Liberal Fascists

A couple of weeks ago, we were talking around the dinner table with British friend visiting us, asking him about the Corbyn win among the Labourites. He got to talking about the general election, which the Tories won decisively, despite the polls. Why were the polls so wrong? I asked. You have to understand, said our friend (who is himself a Tory voter), that in the UK, if you publicly identify yourself as a Tory, you may have a brick thrown through your window. People keep their Tory sympathies to themselves.

Well. On Sunday, 60,000 leftists gathered in Manchester to protest the start of the Conservative Party’s meeting. Says the Guardian:

Up to 60,000 people are said to have joined the demonstration, which was largely peaceful, although a breakaway group pelted a young Tory with eggs, and spat at journalists and called them “scum”. The egging incident took place on Oxford Road as young delegates wearing Tory party conference lanyards weresurrounded by a group of protesters chanting “Tory scum.”

Earlier a man was arrested on suspicion of assault after a journalist from the Huffington Post was spat at as he left the conference venue. Another man was arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly, Greater Manchester police said.

Chief Superintendent John O’Hare of Greater Manchester Police said: “Today around 60,000 people took part in a demonstration and I would like to thank them for their cooperation. The overwhelming majority of people have exercised their democratic right to protest with dignity and good grace. The fact that only four arrests have been made throughout the day so far was particularly pleasing.”

The marchers represented a mix of specialist interest groups including steel workers from the mothballed SSI plant in Redcar, pro-cannabis activists from Greater Manchester, Jews for Palestine, anarchists, the hacktivist group Anonymous and a number of trade unions, as well as families with buggies and wheelchairs.

As Steve Sailer would say, just look at all that vibrancy.

Dan Hodges, writing in the Telegraph, says that the British Left is in a “death spiral. Excerpts:

Over the past 48 hours, delegates, MPs, journalists and exhibitors who are attending the annual gathering of the nation’s governing party have been punched, spat at, kicked, subjected to racist abuse, sexist abuse and other general threats of violence. Fascist street-craft is being deployed in the name of the progressive majority.

Actually, that might be a little unfair. Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, and Jeremy Corbyn both condemned the violence and intimidation. But condemnation after the fact is not enough. It is not the Conservative Party that is under assault here in Manchester – it is democracy.

More:

The Left seems to be busily locking itself into a death spiral. It is a dance of the macabre that goes something like this: the Labour Party – which if you recall was established solely for the purpose of securing the Labour movement parliamentary representation – is saddled by the Left with a series of leaders and policies that make it utterly unelectable. So an election is held, and the Labour Party duly loses it.

At this point, the Left says “See, we told you. The ballot box is not the answer. We must take to the streets”. So the Labour movement takes to the streets. Whereupon it effectively reinforces the view that that Labour movement and its representatives are not a government in waiting, they are simply an unelectable rabble. And so the dance continues.

This is hardly a slur. As Hodges writes:

Nor does it take a genius to predict what will happen while Labour leaders such as shadow chancellor John McDonnell continue to say things such as “There’s three ways in which we change society. One is through the ballot box, the democratic process and into Parliament. The second is trade union action, industrial action. The third is basically insurrection, but we now call it direct action.”

Rioting, in other words, backed by the man who would become chancellor in a Labour government. His words were first reported late last month:

At least three times between 2010 and 2012, he called for “insurrection” to “bring down” the government.

At a Liverpool conference on March 10 2012, he said: “There’s three ways in which we change society. One is through the ballot box, the democratic process and into Parliament. The second is trade union action, industrial action. The third is basically insurrection, but we now call it direct action…

“Don’t expect that change [to society] coming from Parliament…we have an elected dictatorship, so I think we have a democratic right to use whatever means to bring this government down. The real fight now is in our communities, it’s on the picket lines, it’s in the streets.”

In a speech in 2011 to a Right-to-Protest rally, he praised rioters who had “kicked the s—” out of the Conservative Party’s headquarters at Millbank Tower in Westminster.

And:

In another speech on May 10 2012, Mr McDonnell said workers should seize control of their workplaces. “If they want to occupy their factories, we’ll support them. We’re here to fight for every factory, every job and against every cut.”

“Direct action” is SJW-speak for “We will shut you up and put you down by force if you oppose us.”

Jeremy Corbyn, at a post-protest rally in Manchester, urged his followers to be “civilised.” But when he elevates a thug like McDonnell to a very senior position within his shadow government, how seriously will his violent, anti-democratic followers take him?