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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rod Dreher
Started reading
February 23, 2018
The secular liturgy of the shopping mall is designed to call forth and cultivate certain desires within those who enter the mall. It promises to deliver personal fulfillment through purchasing. In Smith’s telling, advertising images of beautiful people convey the subliminal message that you could be just as happy and attractive as they are if you would purchase the product. If the mall liturgy does what it is supposed to do, the desire that the images and rituals of shopping evoke will lead the shopper to exchange money for products, then leave the mall fulfilled—until longing
The lesson here is that various elements present in the ritual of shopping at a mall activate particular desires and direct them toward certain objects, the purchase of which promises to deliver satisfaction.
Many Christians today (including some in liturgical churches) believe that Sunday worship is merely expressive—that is, it’s only about what we the people have to say to God. However, in the Christian tradition, liturgy is primarily, though not exclusively, about what God has to say to us. Liturgy reveals something of the divine, transcendent order, and when we submit to it, it draws us into closer harmony with that order.
This is in part because Evangelicalism has historically been focused not on institution building but on revivalism, making it inherently unstable.
It has also taken an individualistic approach to faith that leaves it vulnerable to pop culture trends.
Chan believes that a worship approach that focuses on seeking spiritual highs—church as pep rally—is unsustainable. If you want to build
faith capable of maintaining stability and continuity, you need to regularly attend a church that celebrates a fixed liturgy. That’s how individuals come to be “shaped by the Christian story.”
“We detest entertainment as worship. We believe that God is to be worshipped in a way that communicates his transcendence, as well as the warmth of the Gospel,” Martin says. “Contemporary worship manipulates. God is not a fad or a hipster deity. To attach him to our own little slice of popular culture fails to do justice to him as the transcendent
God over all history and cultures.”
Benedictine monks take seriously the New Testament’s teaching that attachment to wealth and earthly things impedes the journey to holiness. Brother Ignatius explains that monks place high value on ascetical discipline. He describes it as spiritual housecleaning—one that can have an evangelical effect, if done with humility.
In a society that values comfort and well-being over anything else, there may be no more essential Christian formative practice than regular fasting.
“It’s one thing to form a moral majority and lobby politically for public morality, but nobody really cares if the churches themselves have no integrity,” says Burk. “If that doesn’t happen, there will be no difference between the church and the world.”
The first Christians gained converts not because their arguments were better than those of the pagans but because people saw in them and their communities something good and beautiful—and they wanted it. This led them to the Truth.
We’re really leading people to change their love.
Wurmbrand wrote that there are two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments.”13
We should stop trying to meet the world on its own terms and focus on building up fidelity in distinct community.
Instead of being seeker-friendly, we should be finder-friendly, offering those who come to us a n...
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A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist.
A few years later, married and expecting my firstborn child, I was corresponding with the conservative radio talker Michael Medved and received an e-mail from him that I have never forgotten. I had mentioned to him that my wife and I were planning to homeschool our children. Well and good, Medved replied, but you should both understand that homeschooling is only a partial measure. “You need to make sure you live in a community that shares your faith and your values,” he advised. “When your child leaves home to go
play with the neighborhood kids, you have to be able to trust that the values in your home are not undermined by the company he keeps.”
The fate of religion in America is inextricably tied to the fate of the family, and the fate of the family is tied to the fate of the community.
Eberstadt is one of a long line of religious thinkers to recognize that when concrete embodiments of the relationship to God crumble, it becomes very hard to hold on to Him in the abstract.
Orthodox Rabbi Mark Gottlieb says that Christians living apart from mainstream culture need “raw, roll-up-your-sleeves dedication to create deep structures of community.” If we are to survive, we need to develop a “laser-like focus and dedication to seeing themselves as the next link in the chain of the Christian story.”
Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery Just as the monastery’s life is ordered toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty.) If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family’s life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members. That means maintaining regular times of family prayer. That means regular readings of Scripture and stories from the lives of the saints—Christian heroes and
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Don’t Take Your Kids’ Friends for Granted
Peer pressure really begins to happen in middle childhood. Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris, in her classic book The Nurture Assumption, says that kids at that age model their own behavior around their peer group’s.
The public personality is the one that a child adopts when he or she is not at home. It is the one that will develop into the adult personality.”3
“Cultures are not passed on from parents to children; the children of immigrant parents adopt the culture of their peers.”4
When members of the family consider its existence to be an end in itself, as opposed to a means to the end of unity with God, the family risks becoming tyrannical.
As newcomers to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Alaskans Shelley and Jerry Finkler found that living twenty minutes from the cathedral in Eagle River inhibited their ability to partake of the fullness of church life.
The LDS Church lives out that principle in a unique way. The Mormon practice of “home teaching” directs two designated Mormon holders
of the church’s priestly office to visit every individual or family in a ward at least once a month, to hear their concerns and offer counsel. A parallel program called Relief Society involves women ministering to women as “visiting teachers.” These have become a major source of establishing and strengthening local community bonds.
the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.
Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart. That axiom must be at the center of every Christian community, keeping it humble and sane.
Václav Benda reflected on what he and his allies in the dissident movement had accomplished to that point. Benda was disappointed by their failure to establish much of a parallel polis, but one failure he described as catastrophic: their inability to establish a schooling system that would provide an alternative education to the state’s.
“Education has to be at the core of Christian survival—as it always was,” says Michael Hanby, a professor of religion and philosophy of science at Washington’s Pontifical John Paul II Institute.
“Jews committed to traditional life put schooling above almost anything. There are families that will do just about anything short of bankrupting themselves to give their children an Orthodox Jewish education.” Christians have not been nearly as alert to the importance of education, and it’s time to change that.
To that end, one of the most important pieces of the Benedict Option movement is the spread of classical Christian schools. Rather than letting their children spend forty
a few hours of worldview education slapped on top, parents need to pull them from public schools and provide them with an education that is rightly ordered—that is, one based on the premise that there is a God-given, unified structure to reality and that it is discoverable. They need to teach them Scripture and history. And they sh...
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For serious Christian parents, education cannot be simply a matter of building their child’s transcript to boost her chance of making it into the Ivy League. If this is the model your family follows (perhaps with a sprinkle of God on top for seasoning), you will be hard-pressed to form countercultural Christian adults capable of resisting the disorders of our time.
Today our education system fills students’ heads with facts, with no higher aspiration than success in worldly endeavor. Since the High Middle Ages, the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has been slowly separated from the pursuit of virtue. Today the break is clean.
The progressivism of the 1920s involved using schools to change the culture.
The vocationalism of the
1940s and 1950s tried to use schools to conform children to the culture. But the traditional way of education, which reigned from the Greco-Roman period until the modern era, was about passing on a culture and one culture in particular: the cu...
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The separation of learning from virtue creates a society that esteems people for their success in manipulating science, law, money, images, words, and so forth. Whether or not their accomplishments are morally worthy is a secondary question, one that will seem naïve to many if it occurs to them at all.
Consider the recent lament of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. In an essay published in an online education blog, Deneen said
his students are nice, pleasant, decent young men and women, but they are also “know-nothings” whose “brains are largely empty” of any meaningful knowledge. “They are the culmination of Western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture,” he wrote.
“Barbarians are people without historical memory. Barbarism is the real meaning of radical contemporaneity. Released from all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it.”
“People rear their
