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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rod Dreher
Read between
June 4 - June 11, 2019
In a post-virtue society, individuals hold maximal freedom of thought and action, and society itself becomes “a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.”
Achieving this kind of society requires abandoning objective moral standards; refusing to accept any religiously or culturally binding narrative originating outside oneself, except as chosen; repudiating memory of the past as irrelevant; and distancing oneself from community as well as any unchosen social obligations. This state of mind approximates the condition known as barbarism.
What these orthodox Christians are doing now are the seeds of what I call the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church to embrace “exile in place” and form a vibrant counterculture.
The main thing that helps a culture survive, Rieff wrote, is “the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” A culture begins to die, he went on, “when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.”
the West was attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief in a higher order that commanded our obedience. In other words, we were creating an “anti-culture,” one that made the foundation for a stable culture impossible.
decision reaffirming abortion rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the pro-choice majority, explained (no doubt unintentionally) how the Sexual Revolution depends on a radical, even nihilistic, conception of freedom: At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Here is the end point of modernity: the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.
The defeat of metaphysical realism by nominalism in medieval theological debates removed the linchpin linking the transcendent and the material worlds.
The long journey from a medieval world wracked with suffering but pregnant with meaning has delivered us to a place of once unimaginable comfort but emptied of significance and connection. The West has lost the golden thread that binds us to God, Creation, and each other.
Benedict had a noteworthy sense of compassion for human frailty, saying in the prologue to the Rule that he hoped to introduce “nothing harsh and burdensome” but only to be strict enough to strengthen the hearts of the brothers “to run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness and love.”
You can achieve the peace and order you seek only by making a place within your heart and within your daily life for the grace of God to take root. Divine grace is freely given, but God will not force us to receive it. It takes constant effort on our part to get out of God’s way and let His grace heal us and change us. To this end, what we think does not matter as much as what we do—and how faithfully we do it.
He will have trained his heart to desire the good.
If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, then the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order.
If we don’t have internal order, we will be controlled by our human passions and by the powerful outside forces who are in greater control of directing liquid modernity’s deep currents.
“if one can accept that God’s will is made manifest in everything one does all day long, then one’s whole day becomes a prayer.”
The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan, a practicing Christian, once said that everyone he knew who lost his faith began by ceasing to pray. If we are to live rightly ordered Christian lives, then prayer must be the basis of everything we do.
This is how we must approach our jobs: as opportunities to glorify God.
we men and women are participants in God’s unfolding Creation, by ordering the world according to His will.
“Any time we take something neutral, something material, and we make something out of it for the sake of giving glory to God, it becomes sacramental, it becomes a channel of grace.”
Work is not something I do in order to get something. Doing it is good for me, it’s constitutive of my happiness, because in it and through it I show love for others.
In Bauman’s pitiless analysis, to succeed today, you need to be free of all commitments, unbound by the past or the future, living in an everlasting present.
A Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation.
A community that cannot face its faults and love each other through to healing is not truly Christian.
Without real contact with other human persons, there is no love.
“our hearts expand, and we shall run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love.”
total abandonment of the self-will for the will of God.
It is a paradox of the Christian life that the holier one becomes, the more acutely aware one is of one’s lack, and therefore one’s total dependence on God’s mercy.
Levin: The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there. . . . Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts. In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from
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A civilization in which no one felt an obligation to the past, to the future, to each other, or to anything higher than self-gratification is one that is dangerously fragile.
Because it prescribes government of the people, liberal democracy can be only as strong as the people who live under it.
We have reached a culminating moment when it is less a political movement that is needed—as important as it might be to seek certain public goods—than a revival of culture, of sustainable practices and defensible ways of life born of shared experience, memory and trust.
As the West declines into spiritual acedia, there will be more and more people who are seeking something real, something meaningful, and yes, something wholesome. It is our mandate as Christians to offer it to them.
“The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances, our own land, to drive it out of contemporary humankind,” said Václav Havel.
As scholar Robert Inchausti pithily puts it, McLuhan’s famous slogan is “just another way of saying ‘the Word become flesh.’”
A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist.
Robert Nisbet, who said that religious liberty itself depends on strong religious communities. Despots, he said, “have never worried about religion that is confined mutely to individual minds. It is religion as community, or rather as a plurality of communities, that has always bestirred the reprisals of rulers engaged in the work of political tyranny.”2
In traditional Christianity, the ultimate goal of the soul is to love and serve God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind, to achieve unity with Him in eternity.
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.
“At the end of this tremendous cultural development, we moderns shall arrive at barbarism,” Rieff 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.”3
The best way to create a generation of aimless know-nothings who feel no sense of obligation beyond themselves is to deprive them of a past.
Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be “salt and light” to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she’ll save another drowning child.
“The classical Christian does not ask, ‘What can I do with this learning?’ but ‘What will this learning do to me?’”
Classical education accepts the Great Tradition’s fundamental understanding that all of reality is grounded in transcendental ideals—in fact, in the One in Whom we move and live and have our being.
For a Christian, there is only one right way to use the gift of sex: within marriage between one man and one woman. This is heresy to the modern world, and a hard saying upon which hearts, friendships, families, and even churches have been broken. There is no core teaching of the Christian faith that is less popular today, and perhaps none more important to obey.
As Wendell Berry puts it, “The point about temperance, including sexual discipline, is not that it reduces pleasure, but that it safeguards abundance.”1
Christianity is not a disembodied faith but an incarnational one. God came to us in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, and redeems us body and soul.
Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun. In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating
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Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.
Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.
Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together?
The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood.
