angelo
Junior Member
Posts: 67 
|
Post by angelo on May 7, 2017 15:42:41 GMT
I am currently reading The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. It is probably the most discussed religious book at the moment. Has anyone read it?
|
|
|
|
Post by Maolsheachlann on May 7, 2017 22:40:55 GMT
No, though I have heard a great deal about it. In fact, someone today emailed me links to various reviews. What are you making of it?
I have read some of Rod Dreher's articles on the subject, over the years, and I think he makes a pretty compelling case. It is increasingly hard to be "in the world, but not of the world", and although culture battles remain to be fought, they seem like losing battles from the outset.
|
|
|
|
Post by rogerbuck on May 8, 2017 8:16:37 GMT
Have not read it, but am intrigued. From what I know of the book, I see that on an INDIVIDUAL level, I have naturally gravitated to a life like he describes, I think. No television, mobile phone or other devices and a need to avoid the internet as much as possible, lest I lose my sanity.
But I think he is not simply speaking of individual fasting from our modern, toxic culture, but new SOCIAL forms of Christian community? I am not only interested in this, but would love to hear any thoughts at all, from you Angelo or others, about how much his recommendations are applicable to Ireland's situation.
IOW: should the Irish faithful be seriously working with what this book proposes?
|
|
angelo
Junior Member
Posts: 67
|
Post by angelo on May 9, 2017 21:40:21 GMT
I am half way through it. I don't want to make any specific comment until I finished it but it is definitively a book to be read and discussed.
By the way, the book is available at the Central Catholic Library.
|
|
|
|
Post by Maolsheachlann on May 9, 2017 21:59:37 GMT
I have not read the book but I definitely believe Irish people should be creating enclaves of Catholic culture; groups of families and civil assocations. We need to support each other, and not just online or in a mystical way, but face-to-face and in as close-knit a manner as possible.
|
|
|
|
Post by caritas on May 12, 2017 13:39:27 GMT
Just over ten years ago my wife and our nine year old daughter came to Ireland to live near other catholic families. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then but I have never regretted the decision and neither has my wife who unlike myself is not Irish. My daughter has grown up surrounded by and immersed in a Catholic culture which is unknown in the local parishes. The centre of our Catholic life was and is not a monastery but a chapel run by the Society of St. Pius X. It is incontrovertible that these small communities need to exist in our time as monasteries were necessary in times past since the surrounding culture is so antipathetic to the Catholic Faith. We also wanted to live a more natural life and we now have pigs, ducks, chickens and grow our own food on a smallholding of 2 acres. There is of course no such thing as paradise on earth but it is possible to live simply and worship with others while being willing to carry the crosses given to us. I certainly see no other way forward for those faithful Catholics today.
|
|
|
|
Post by Maolsheachlann on May 12, 2017 13:47:59 GMT
I have mixed feelings. A good few years ago I found myself attending Mass and meeting fellow Catholics in Richmond, Virginia, where there is a thriving, young and traditionally-minded Catholic community, centred on a church called St. Benedict's. It was so wonderful to be there and the memories of Masses and interactions in St. Benedict's has always nourished my faith...and yet I prefer to be in the thick of secularism, "behind enemy lines" as it were. I feel my place is there. Which is not to say I would not like more of a Catholic support network here.
|
|
|
|
Post by rogerbuck on May 13, 2017 10:04:47 GMT
We all have different callings, as reflected in the fact that the Church has everything from hermits and religious to priests, bishops and missionaries. I am very grateful for your outpost "behind enemy lines" Maolsheachlann, from which I learn much that my own "married hermit" life does not so easily afford.
At the same time, Caritas, I am moved by what you write. The courage and initiative of Archbishop Lefebvre after the Council has been so unfathomably important for the Church, even if I am someone who prays that the 1988 situation will be resolved in full, complete reconciliation. I am very grateful you have found a way to protect your daughter and would be grateful for any more that you might say about this traditional network, which, I take it, is around Athlone. (I do very much want to visit the chapel and the area when I can. Although whenever we go south, usually to ICKSP in Limerick, we always take the route through Knock.)
|
|
|
|
Post by bryanreynolds on May 15, 2017 12:02:56 GMT
A review purports to criticise Dreher on the grounds that he doesn't read deeply enough into the philosopher he touts as his main influence; excerpt below says the option is inoffensive, won't transform the culture (some would call it "Larping"):— Reading Rod Dreher's Benedict Option with MacIntyre and Schmemannwww.catholicworldreport.com/Item/5618/reading_rod_drehers_ibenedict_optioni_with_macintyre_and_schmemann.aspx[...] But what kind of solution is this? Here remedy and disease seem almost indistinguishable, and here a deeper appreciation of MacIntyre could, perhaps, have rescued Dreher's project at the moment of its conception. For Dreher's project seems ab initio to have fallen into the very pit MacIntyre predicted not in After Virtue but in a 1979 essay "Theology, Ethics, and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care: Comments on Papers by Novak, Mouw, Roach, Cahill, and Hartt" in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 4 (4): 435-443. There MacIntyre recognized the dangers of "the peculiarly deep secularization of our pluralist culture," which Dreher is clearly in the latter category, offering a reactionary take on this moment in our history. Like too many reactionaries he is a member of the bourgeoisie, proof of which can be seen in the very notion of a Benedict option, which can be dismissed as both harmless and irrelevant precisely because it has failed to offer us—as MacIntyre continues later in the same essay—"a theological critique of secular morality and culture," including, of course, the economics of late capitalism. The "Benedict option," then, seems to participate too much in the fatalistic neoliberal economics of the culture it claims to resist. Dreher's whole project seems an example of the "normal nihilism" Stanley Hauerwas, himself hugely influenced by MacIntyre of course (but here, instead, drawing on James Edwards) describes thus: The whole "Benedict option" smacks of just such a "transformation of life into lifestyle," and its uses and abuses of Benedict have turned that great saint into a commodity to be marketed to "anonymous and rootless [Christian] consumers," alas. |
|
|
|
Post by Maolsheachlann on May 15, 2017 12:35:36 GMT
That's very deep. I'm not sure I understand it. I tried to read After Virtue but gave up after a few pages.
However, I do wonder whether the author is making too much of "neoliberal economics", as though they were the primary antagonist of a Christian way of life.
|
|
|
|
Post by bryanreynolds on May 15, 2017 21:32:13 GMT
I'm not smart enough to say whether or not neoliberal economics are the primary antagonist of a Christian way of life.
Suffice to say that the point strikes a chord with me:
I'd recommend reading the full review, linked above, if that quote strikes you, too.
|
|
|
|
Post by kj on May 16, 2017 8:52:26 GMT
That's a major problem. It's always Either/Or, no nuance, no appreciation of the benefits of modern society, it's always extremes.
|
|
|
|
Post by rogerbuck on May 16, 2017 11:25:10 GMT
Thank you for all this, bryanreynolds. Good to see you here! I can't comment much as to Dreher vs MacIntyre, as I have not read either. However what you have here regarding "the people working three jobs just to pay rent and forced to relocate every few years when jobs disappear." rips my heart. Apart from 3 weeks in NYC, I haven't been in America since 1985. But things like the above sound much, much worse now than they did. I hear about Americans struggling to pay hospital bills, incredibly expensive prescription medicines, crippling college debts and really I feel horrified. Even in 1985 when I went back to America to look after my dying mother, the hospital charged something like $300-400 (which is like $1000 in 2017 dollars) - for a 25 minute NON_EMERGENCY ambulance ride. This glorified taxi ride could only be paid by the sale of her house ... I digress a bit but in regards to this ... I'm not smart enough to say whether or not neoliberal economics are the primary antagonist of a Christian way of life. I'm not smart enough either.  But I think that these American style neoliberal economics are not only crushing the poor, but seriously destroying Christianity everywhere. I am not only talking about things like pornography and gratuitous sexuality everywhere (because "sex sells") but more subtle things, such as what is now being MARKETED to CHILDREN from their earliest years ... all to make the greatest possible profit. |
|
|
|
Post by bryanreynolds on May 16, 2017 12:26:28 GMT
The desire to get away from the pernicious influence of marketing makes the Benedict Option understandable, in a way, to me, yet I also think that it seems like a sort of escapism. I think we should ask how _sustainable_ is a small "intentional community." We might look at the communal living movement of only a few decades ago (these occurred in Ireland too, right?) and how those "intentional communities" fared.
A comment from one Fr Peter Morello:
|
|
|
|
Post by Maolsheachlann on May 17, 2017 8:29:13 GMT
I'm not a fan of the kind of untrammeled free market we see in America, however I'm not so sure it's crushing Christianity. Just compare America to first-world countries which are less free-market driven. I can't think of a case where America wouldn't be the more religious country by comparison. And that includes Catholicism.
|
|
But I think that these American style neoliberal economics are not only crushing the poor, but seriously destroying Christianity everywhere.