Category: Culture War
Responding to Alan Jacobs on the Benedict Option
Alan Jacobs has some very good questions for critics of the Benedict Option, and at the risk of possibly digging myself into a deeper hole with yet another BenOp post I would like to offer some answers. My only grounds...
The Culture War Is Interested in You
Last summer, David Brooks wrote that the social conflicts “oriented around the Sexual revolution” were over. Legal same-sex marriage and the declining influence of traditional Christianity had combined, he wrote, to put the goals of the culture wars of the last few decades out...
Evangelicalism After Trump: The religious left isn’t a solution.
Ruth Graham’s latest in Slate is, to the surprise of no one who reads her regularly, a well-done, interesting take on the future of American Christianity. You should read the whole thing, but the excerpts below gets at the key...
Boycotts and the End of Neighborliness
It’s happening again: Someone did something bad and now other people are threatening not to do business with them. But in this case the target for the boycott is not Starbucks or Chick-fil-a or JC Penney or Forever 21; it’s...
Against Donald Trump: Why Evangelicals Must Not Support Trump
The rise of Donald Trump among some evangelicals is an understandable, even if unsettling phenomenon. The alienation and despair that he has both fostered and exploited is a pervasive feature of some corners of American life. But no one is...
Neo-Anabaptists and the Benedict Option
One of the underlying questions behind much of Rod Dreher’s discussion of the Benedict Option so far concerns how we ought to think about a limited withdrawal from mainstream America in order to protect ourselves as orthodox believers against “corrosive...
The Blinkered Benedict Option
Rod Dreher was very kind to put more thought into his response to my joke post at First Things at the Benedict Option. I did have a point—which he gets, and has written about before (although I think Jake summed...
Benedict, Patrick, Jeremiah, and Other Nouns as Well
One of the persistent challenges to the ongoing discussion of the Benedict Option is the claim that the BenOp is primarily a retreat from public life and is, therefore, wrong-headed. Though they are presented under separate names, this seems to be...
The Benedict Option and the Pace of Middle Class Life
NOTE: If you are a reader in the DC area interested in further discussion about the BenOp, consider attending an event this Saturday at Georgetown University featuring Rod Dreher and Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio. You can learn more about...
Race and the Benedict Option
In one of its clumsier formulations, the Benedict Option might be understood as the response of orthodox Christians to the United States taking a decisive turn to, for the first time in its history, oppose orthodox Christians for their faith....