Dave

“The moment the Benedict Option becomes about anything other than communion with Christ and dwelling with our neighbors in love, it ceases to be Benedictine,” he said. “It can’t be a strategy for self-improvement or for saving the church or the world.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“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. Recognizing the toxins of modern secularism, as well as the fragmentation caused by relativism, Benedict Option Christians look to Scripture and to Benedict’s Rule for ways to cultivate practices and communities. Rather than panicking or remaining complacent, they recognize that the new order is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived with.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“But it can’t be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Medieval man held that reality—what was really real—was outside himself and that dwelling in the darkness of the Fall, he could not fully perceive it. But he could relate to it intellectually through faith and reason, and know it through conversion of the heart. The entire universe was woven into God’s own Being, in ways that are difficult for modern people, even believing Christians, to grasp. Christians of the Middle Ages took Paul’s words recorded in Acts—“in Him we live and move and have our being”—and in his letter to the Colossians—“He is before all things and in Him all things hold together”—in a much more literal sense than we do.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation