Extra! Extra! Read all about it!!!
Let me be the first with this scoop (at least the first to post here about it): Our Hero, Rod Dreher, has a gig back at BeliefNet again.
His blog is humbly entitled The Secret of a Good Life, by Rod Dreher.
So far, it appears that the Secret is to buy his book about his sister.
I now turn this topic over to the rest of you . . . .
Isn't this what he always writes about.
ReplyDeleteWherever he is and whatever he's doing is the definition of the "good life" If you aren't doing what he is doing, you aren't a real "conservative | christian | environmentalist | whatever."
Except when he becomes disenchanted.
Then only a fool would follow that path. He now is following the truth and ... repeat step 1. Now he finds out that the sister he couldn't get along with and who didn't accept him was a saint all along. Her untimely death was a true tragedy for those close to her but elevating her to sainthood which is what he is doing is a road that only and egoist would travel.
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It's funny because my family and I were up at Bearden's for $1 beer night yesterday when I saw Pikkumatti's post pop up in my email. "Here we go again," I thought, hat-tip to Captain Underpants.
ReplyDeleteSo he's blogging the book on Beliefnet. Pretty funny; the illustrations are all rainbows and sunsets; they're definitely aiming for the Therapeutic Deism crowd with those landscapes.
FYI: He is going to be on Andrew Sullivan's website hawking his book. The same Andrew Sullivan who said Pope Benedict is gay and quite a few other Cardinals are gay. It shows his bias.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ask-me-anything-on-the-dish/#post-comments
Jonathan Carpenter
Bearden's! Some of my first memories are of going there, and watching the train go around the track. Very exciting when you are only about four years old.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Dreher, he reminds me of a certain rich man approaching Jesus and asking what he, himself, had to do to obtain eternal life. So sure he could do it all.
"The good life"? If that recent creepy pic exemplifies his idea of the good life, then thanks but no thanks. ICK.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't call Matthew 6:33 -- "Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you" -- a secret.
ReplyDeleteOn Saturday, the Wall Street Journal gave Dreher some space to describe his critical thought process in entitling his book.
ReplyDeletePresented without comment.
As much as I like Rod (although sometimes there are things not worthy of him), I have to admit the relentless promotion of his book does get to be a little bit irritating.
ReplyDeleteTo me, Oengus, it is not so much the quantity of promotion, but its nature.
ReplyDeleteTo wit, check out the self-description of Dreher's book (emphasis added by me):
THE LITTLE WAY OF RUTHIE LEMING follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. . . . In Louisiana for Ruthie's funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations-Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting.
As David Brooks poignantly described Dreher's journey homeward in a recent New York Times column, Dreher and his wife Julie "decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being part of a community."
To me (tainted, of course, with the Crunchy history), that blurb drips with condescension -- the horrors of "having" their children grow up "amidst" such things as LSU football games and icky deer hunting, not to mention the "limitations" of small-town life.
P.S. The blurb also (unintentionally?) raises an odd question. Did Dreher move back to "explore []his revelation", or was it to "help with family responsibilities"? IOW, is this admitting that he would have fallen short of his responsibilities had he not moved back to service his own curiosity?
P.P.S. I was raised in small towns (in MN, of the kind so condesceningly treated by Garrison Keillor), and my mom died of cancer in her 40s (with much dignity, I might add), so maybe I am hyper-sensitized to Dreher tackling this topic.
Tom, that was the first thing I thought. Why, if you're a Christian, is the way to live a good life a secret? Of course, that's a common usage for the word secret. E.g., people have "secrets" for getting old windows to open or to get ketchup to come out of the glass bottle. It's a "trick" you have to learn; someone has to show you the trick. But in the case of Dreher I really think that he is serious about all these other trimmings and trappings from his own life being part of "the secret". Like drinking certain types of wine, moving back to your home town, making sure your house has a front porch with a rocking chair, etc.
ReplyDeleteSeemingly in Dreher's world, those are all part of the secret to being a good person. If you live in the suburbs and eat at a chain restaurant you are a SELFISH person who would never hold a bake sale for someone with cancer. This is how he comes across, even if he denied stating it this bluntly. This point is near the heart of my ongoing disagreement with Rod's world view. He is effectively turning taste into dogma. It's a temptation for many people with strong opinions, but he fell into it years ago and has never pulled himself out of it.
In this way I think he actually might, maybe, perhaps -- I'm not sure of this -- but possibly Dreher is making the Gospel message less attractive to people exposed to it for the first time. Like in the early church where you see the Judaizers who insisted that males who wanted to be baptized had to be circumcised first. They obviously wanted to keep the church in a boutique mode, in a bonsai state if you will, whereas Christ seemed to envision an enormous, sprawling tree with all kinds of different birds nesting in it. This would explain why he prefers the little Orthodox denominations to the Catholic church. The rumor is that he has a visiting priest coming in to do the liturgy in an out-building on his property. I think even most Orthodox Christians have a more "catholic" view of the Church than Rod does.
I haven't paid Rod much attention since he left the Catholic Church, apart from reading the occasional post about him here and on Mark Shea's blog. The indirect and spotty impression this gives me is that, not only hasn't he grown up in the last five or six years, even his errors haven't matured much.
ReplyDeleteHis revelation that an ordinary life might be a path of hidden grandeur is certainly of a piece with his Crunch Con era solipsism, according to which whatever he is feeling at this exact moment is the single most important thing in the world. Maybe he'd never felt like reading *A Story of a Soul*, or a dozen other spiritual classics on sanctity in ordinary life, before his sister died. (May God grant her eternal life.)
In any case, either Rod's secret to a good life is Christ, or it isn't, and I trust Divine Providence will draw such good as can be drawn from whichever it happens to be. Since we're talking about little ways, though, I'll just suggest you don't find a lot of imported butter and sacramental truffles along the little way, by paraphrasing a line from Fr. William Hinnebusch, OP: "People think St. Therese's life was all poetry and roses. They don't know the rule of Carmel."
"decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being part of a community."
ReplyDeleteEwwww. As Mittens says at one point in the movie Bolt, which I've recently been rewatching), "That is a concern on so many levels."
We live in a small town, too. We just happen to like the country. There's nothing grand or sacrificial about it. We just like trees. That's all.
They obviously wanted to keep the church in a boutique mode, in a bonsai state if you will, whereas Christ seemed to envision an enormous, sprawling tree with all kinds of different birds nesting in it. This would explain why he prefers the little Orthodox denominations to the Catholic church.
ReplyDeleteDing! Ding! Ding! So incisive!
The rumor is that he has a visiting priest coming in to do the liturgy in an out-building on his property. I think even most Orthodox Christians have a more "catholic" view of the Church than Rod does.
It's more than just a rumor. This little mission-in-a-shed has a Facebook page, even!
If it's a "secret," then isn't it Gnosticism, not Christianity?
ReplyDeleteOh, one more thing...many of the critics calling out Dreher for his narcississm, pharisaism, etc. etc. etc., are Orthodox. So yes, Pauli, your point is spot-on: Most Orthodox Christians have a more "catholic" view of the Church than Rod does.
ReplyDeleteThe pictures aren't the only things that smell of Therapeutic Deism. There are Christian anecdotes and vague references to God's love, but little so far that would tell a "crunchy" Buddhist that he's on the wrong path, and a lot to validate a life of localism and community spirit, with or without a Savior.
ReplyDeleteAnd Rod Dreher still hasn't figured out how to write coherently.
"Not everyone should stay in their hometown, or should return, even if they can. But shouldn’t we be more skeptical about the restlessness that we accept as a normal part of modern American life? Our culture tells us mobility is a sign of our freedom. But it can also be a trap that leads to spiritual starvation.
"Ruthie’s life and death showed me the deep practical wisdom taught by the early Christian father Benedict: We need the discipline of stability in place, and in community, to become who God wants us to be."
We "need" the discipline of place to fulfill God's plan for us, but "Not everyone should stay in their hometown, or should return, even if they can."
Well, then, we don't really need to stay put, do we?
--
Suppose one young woman married a good Christian man, kind but not rich or exciting or even all that handsome, and her sister decided to live a selfish, single life. Years later, the sister might look on her life in regret and think that the mistake she made was not getting married.
Suppose a different young woman devoted her life to running a soup kitchen and never had time for a husband, while her sister eloped with the local bad boy. Years later, the sister might think that she made a mistake in not staying single.
In both cases, the problem wasn't marriage or the single life, per se, but short-sighted selfishness, and I wonder whether Dreher is focusing on the superficial differences in his sister's life and missing what really mattered.
I consider the life stories of Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, James and John who left their fishing business, Paul, and even Jesus Himself, and I find the big moral lesson to be "follow God," not necessarily "stay put."
God disciplined Jonah, not because he left his home, but because he didn't head for Ninevah.
i don't know. all the rainbows make the me think Ruthie might have been a unicorn.
ReplyDeleteI'd prefer Dreher's writing be limited to his meandering about what qualifies as the good life in general, because things do get a bit uncomfortable when he talks about his sister specifically.
ReplyDeleteIt's impossible to take anyone's subjective writings about his family and assume that they're A) true and B) the whole truth, but we can learn alot about the writer.
First, Rod writes about how his sister apparently refused to forgive him for his past offenses.
"Days after her terminal cancer diagnosis in 2011, I sat with her in the sunshine of her front porch, and asked her to forgive me every bad thing I had done to her over the years. I wanted to put our past behind us, to talk about the ways we had hurt each other, and to speak words of penitence and mercy to each other.
"Again, she wouldn’t have it. It was too hard to say these things. She waved my words away, offered none of her own, and embraced me. We cried on each other’s shoulder, and I thought this was her way of apologizing and forgiving...
"Several months after Ruthie died, her teenage daughter Hannah told me that it would be hard for her younger sisters to get close to me because their mother had often spoken ill of me to them – even in the last months of her life. Hannah said that she knew her mother’s judgments were not fair, but her sisters had no reason to distrust their mother. And this, Hannah said, would be a problem for me.
"I was crushed – and furious at Ruthie. She had not forgiven me after all. Nor had she ever been aware that she was not only sinned against, but also sinning. Her cancer diagnosis offered the opportunity for reconciliation and starting fresh. But she refused to have that healing conversation, and to do the hard but necessary work of repairing a relationship that both of us had spent years damaging. It was easier for her to hold that grudge."
(Ruthie's a saint, Dreher writes, but a very significant failing is how she treated him.)
In the very next post -- the posts are, as best as I can tell, undated and locked from comments -- he describes the two siblings' different approaches to life.
"I am intellectual and contemplative. Nothing makes me happier than thinking through a theological problem, turning it over in my mind, and talking it out with others. I have been spiritually restless, leaving the Methodist church of our youth for Catholicism, and then for Eastern Orthodoxy. My faith has been mostly in my head.
"Ruthie was emotional and active. She never questioned what the Bible said, or the settled tradition our parents handed to us. For Ruthie, faith was what you did. Her faith was in her heart.
"To be fair to both of us, there is a place for both approaches to the Christian life. God gave us minds, and intends us to use them to understand Him and the world he created. I doubt Ruthie, who was a teacher, would have disagreed, but she took a dim view of abstract intellectual inquiry, at least on theological matters. To her, what really mattered was not what you thought about God, but what you did for His sake."
(Dreher immediately brings up The Scandal as the event that put his intellectualism to a test that it didn't pass.)
(Length limit: more in a moment.)
(Continued from above)
ReplyDeleteWhen my grandmother was sick with the cancer that would ultimately take her life, she and my mother reconciled from literal decades of butting heads, but it didn't happen from a back-porch conversation. Every other weekend, we drove the two hours to my grandparents' house, and while my grandfather and I did yardwork or went to a football game, my mother cleaned house from stem to stern.
She later told me that her mother carefully supervised her cleaning process the first time and then didn't bother doing so again; she was happy that my mom was doing a good job.
They made amends, in part because my mother worked to demonstrate her care for her mother.
Dreher's sister evidently placed a greater emphasis on deeds than on words, he says as much, but he doesn't apparently consider that to be a factor to why she didn't forgive him for past sins.
They had different approaches to faith, and "there's a place for both approaches;" Ruthie's approach served her well even when she faced terminal cancer, but Rod's approach failed him when facing the clerical sex scandal which he reported on but didn't (best as I can tell) directly affect him.
And yet, he insisted on his already discredited approach in seeking forgiveness from her, "days after her terminal cancer diagnosis."
She didn't, and so she sinned against him.
"My sister was breathtakingly courageous in the face of cancer. Her tragedy – our tragedy, and our family’s tragedy – is that she was not once brave enough to say to me, 'I forgive you, brother; please forgive me too.'"
Yes, that must be it, that's the charitable conclusion, that one's dead sister was brave enough to face cancer but too much of a coward to forgive her older brother. It couldn't possibly be that, in seeking forgiveness, the brother said too much but did too little.
I-yi-yi. Thank you for reading this stuff, Bubba, so I don't have to.
ReplyDeleteWho doesn't come from a dysfunctional family? Even the best families fall short. My kid sister hasn't spoken to me in three years. My dad is hypercritical and insensitive, although he seems to be mellowing recently -- perhaps partly because he's nearly 93 and his mind is going.
I would never ever ever dream of writing a gushing, confessional book about all of this. Or even a series of blog posts. But that's just me.
From Owen White's Facebook thread about Dreher. The hat is apparently from some FB meme called "Scumbag Steve." BTW, an Orthodox guy posted this. Is it priceless, or what?
ReplyDeletehttp://i.imgur.com/Pj09efV.png
What is there to say to Bubba's comments, except:
ReplyDeleteLadies and gentlemen, Rod Dreher.
Yep. Some guys really know how to hold a grudge.
ReplyDeleteBut, of course, Ruthie was the one who couldn't forgive. Riiiighhhhht.
Not much she can say in her defense now, is there?
OK, I am being baaaad. Gotta go home and walk the dog.
As far as it goes, it would seem that Ruthie's grudge against him is hardly admirable but then why the nomination for sainthood?
ReplyDeleteYou know, if my crazy sister wanted to reconcile, I'd reconcile in a heartbeat. And I wouldn't ask her to apologize first. OK, that sounds self-righteous, but I don't mean it as a pat on my own back. Heck, I'm almost 62. Life is too short.
ReplyDeleteMy sister's the one who broke off relations, and she is downright scary (she once brandished a knife against me -- true story). I don't necessarily want to hang out with her on a close and intimate basis -- at least not when there are any knives in the vicinity. But I wouldn't mind being on speaking terms with her. And no, I don't give a hoot whether she apologizes for anything. Maybe it's a Sicilian thing. We're famiglia. Apologies not necessary.
It seems to me dreher has a madonna/whore complex with every person and every concept in his entire life. some person or some idea is either really really great or really really bad. there is no gray. one day they seem really great to him, and the next day the scales fall off his eyes and they seem really bad. he uses the constantly resulting chaos as impetus for his constantly urgent writing. it is radically immature, and something I can't imagine living with.
ReplyDeleteDreher's situation is an object lesson in the dangers of ridding yourself of unflattering criticism. He's reduced his blog commenters now to only those who tell him what he wants to hear, that he's written a warm and weepy family tear-jerker, so he believes the artificial bubble of praise he's cocooned himself within and sees Pulitzers dancing in his dreams. Everyone else sees that the comment count on his relentless Six Degrees of Ruthie Leming posts has dropped consistently into the low single figures and stayed there and thinks he's going to knock 'em dead at a mall somewhere, maybe. I'm afraid he may have a painful awakening coming.
ReplyDeleteKeith
Kathleen, I think you are on to something. That definitely seems to describe what happened at National Review, the Catholic Church and the Templeton Foundation. People at NR made gentle jibes about his trips to some farmer's market and it took it as some kind of cosmic insult. Etc.
ReplyDeleteKeith: yes, I agree with you about his allergy to criticism, but he also invites the same by having such a strong opinion on absolutely everything. I don't see how he can go on indefinitely without the "painful awakening" happening. I think they'll be moving again within a year or so.
One relatively popular Catholic author anonymously agreed with a lot of our early observations about Crunchy Conservatism and related this to me in an email. Then he sent me another email asking me to "please not tell Rod I said that" or some-such, because he knew Rod. It really reduced my opinion of that author, but also made me wonder if other writers feared Rod's vengeful temper.
That reminds me--have there been any Ruther Leming reviews by Amy Welborn, Mark Shea, Erin Manning--any of the old cheerleaders?
He's reduced his blog commenters now to only those who tell him what he wants to hear....
ReplyDeleteAs always. Classic control freakery.
I keep thinking about his insistence that Ruthie agree to his "I'll forgive you if you forgive me" scenario. How arrogantly control-freaky is that? I totally do NOT blame her for waving him away.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of an old boyfriend, waaaaay back in the day, who, when he figured out that I was losing interest, confronted me during a drive to the beach (with a carful of people) and said: "Let's have an encounter group." He was really into encounter groups. Y'all are too young to have any clue what an encounter group is, right? For this guy, it was totally a tool for emotional manipulation. Just like Rod's forgiveness-blackmail scenario.
Now Diane not all of Dreher's control freakery is bad. Some of comes with a big old slurping wet velvety tongue. For instance Dreher has fallen far from the grace of his lofty NRO days and he wants to climb back up into a higher circle of writer. So these days he's telling all the A-list bloggers like Tanisi Coates and Ross Douthat what great books they could write on this or that. See, Diane, you could write a terrific book on this, and you say, why, Rod, you saying that nice thing now just reminded me you've just written a book yourself. Maybe I'll give it a nice review in exchange for that nice blog tongueing you just laid on me. Stay tuned for more of this gratuitous ingratiation, and keep a towel handy.
ReplyDeleteKeith
Nowadays nobody listens to journalists anyway, so they're free to write about whatever they want, which is themselves.
ReplyDeleteAnd the absolute best way to write about yourself is to have *other* journalists write about you, which you do by writing about them.
But... that's not really a secret either, is it?
This may be make-or-break for Rod but getting a million dollar advance is not falling from the heights. If this book comes close to meeting his publishers expectations then he will have it made. If his angel David Brooks reviews it favorably in his column, he's probably there.
ReplyDeleteRod like everyone in that world is primarily interested in career. Same with politicians. Winning is the most important thing. While I can't imagine writing anything that exposes me and mine to the world like he does, the memoir is probably the most successful form of the moment and this tale of alienation from home and family, tragic death of a young vibrant woman and redemption and reconciliation sounds like a winning formula. Still, promotion is everything and he probably needs something like a high-profile Brooks endorsement, an very favorable NYT review or an Oprah book club selection to hit the big time.
Regarding the actual story, it is pretty simple. Smart, sensitive, high-strung (those 3 things seem to come together) kid is abused in his redneck small town. He moves on to an environment where those qualities are rewarded. Along the way he picks up the tastes and habits of the cosmopolitan world and returns the favor of his rejection by dissing back those who rejected him. In the middle of this relationship stands (in his case) a reasonably caring family with a secure place in the world that he left behind. Consequently, Rod’s whole journey of discovery has been to try to find a place like the St Francisville of his imagination where he would fit in. I think we can call this “the Benedict option.” There are probably lots of frogs turned princes out there who can relate. Silicon valley is full of them. I’m sure other economic and cultural capitals are as well.
As dime-store memoirists go I'm sure Ray will make a very good one. Of course he spent years positioning himself as the antithesis to this sort of thing, but whatever ... he has a family to support. Hypocrisy is nothing new. The fascinating thing here is seeing when and how this enterprise is surely going to explode in his face, if it hasn't already.
ReplyDeleteOh, you mean in the form of resentment from all those graduating West Feliciana High seniors who DON'T most exhibit Ruthie’s kindness, generosity, and devotion to community?
Deletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/want-a-starhill-map-print/
Amber Lynne, you most exhibited Ruthie's kindness, generosity, and devotion to community. You get some proceeds from Grandma's sales, not from Mr. Rod. He's got those foodie expenses to cover.
Trixie Belle, Oneida, Kumquat, I'm afraid you didn't because, well, you're trash.
And Leslie? We're sorry. You got ruled out because we couldn't figure out what you were.
Keith
well, i had given starhilliciana the benefit of the doubt, and assumed it truly was charming and down-home. but maybe you're right ... maybe the town and Dreher deserve each other. cha ching!
Deleteand why the f^&* would i want to buy a map of someone else's hometown?
DeleteKathleen, great point. If we are supposed to follow the man's in his localist sensibilities then we should merely write our memoirs about our own people and places and to neck with everything else. Right?
DeleteSilicon Valley Steve, I think your analysis is spot-on.
ReplyDeleteThe crazy thing is that the book can be incredibly maudlin, crammed full of cheap, obvious "insights," emotionally manipulative, exploitative, trashy, you name it...and it could still be a hit. Look at some of the crap that makes the bestseller lists. The Shack...need I say more?
We lived in Louisiana for three years. (My husband taught at the school Rod attended; we actually chaperoned his prom -- true story!). If the Drehers make a mint, they will be accepted by the locals, believe me. Money talks everywhere, but it talks even louder in Louisiana, where there is very much a two-tier society -- rich and poor -- with a smaller middle class than you'd find elsewhere. Of course, Louisianans prefer OLD Money, but New Money's OK, too, as long as you decorate tastefully...which, of course, Rod will be sure to do.
Well, it'll probably all come down to who insists that their overly sweet real lemonade be made with too much genuine sugar and lemons and those, like those who love him, who don't care that their sickly sweet imitation lemonade is made with too much aspartame, poly-scoobydoo-80, the product he sticks his hair up with, and whatever else he's thrown into that witches brew instead. My money says Brooks will sip politely and pretend to swallow, because that's all he'll have to do. It'll really be interesting to see who says what though.
ReplyDeleteKeith
How long do you think it will be before he sells the movie rights? Sela Ward called it "This Generations Steel Magnolias."
ReplyDeleteJonathan Carpenter
SVS: While I can't imagine writing anything that exposes me and mine to the world like he does, the memoir is probably the most successful form of the moment and this tale of alienation from home and family, tragic death of a young vibrant woman and redemption and reconciliation sounds like a winning formula.
ReplyDeleteSteve, this is perceptive. So long, Benedict option; welcome, Thomas Kinkade.
Hah. LOL.
DeleteOK, gotta process this. It says so much. Seriously.
Bullseye!
DeleteHe's gone full Richard Simmons retard into what Amazon.com calls Hot New Releases in Grief & Bereavement and Hot New Releases in Death & Grief and he ain't ever coming back.
Keith
THE BILLING REALLY IS "HOT NEW RELEASES IN GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT". verbatim. priceless.
DeleteHey, it's an Amazon bestseller under "Grief and Bereavement." It must have sold at least 100 copies. :D
DeleteOh my gpsh. Read that second review. I need an air-sickness bag. Keith is right. This is Oprah Book Club material.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/The-Little-Way-Ruthie-Leming/product-reviews/1455521914/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
As I said before, the fact that not only Amazon but Ray's own website features the fulsome praise of that odious Eat-Pray-Love Gilbert woman shows that he's ditching any pretense of orthodox morality for MTD and Oprah's Book Club.
ReplyDeleteThis may be make-or-break for Rod but getting a million dollar advance is not falling from the heights. If this book comes close to meeting his publishers expectations then he will have it made. If his angel David Brooks reviews it favorably in his column, he's probably there.
Color me skeptical. Although I'm sure it'll never be audited, I will assume out of charity that the $1M is already truly spoken for in terms of funding Ruthie's kids' 529 accounts as Ray promised. But the likelihood that sales will make back that much in royalties is vanishingly small--if memory serves, I recall a statistic that there are something like <250 people in whole United States who make a living solely from writing long-form non-fiction. I doubt even a sell-out at every Upper West Side bookseller after a favorable Brooks review is going add Rod to that number.
-The Man From K Street
The tough part for Dreher, insofar as the Upper West Side crowd is concerned, might be that there's too much God in the book for their enlightened tastes. Dreher is no doubt popular with them so long as he bashes conservatives and Catholics, but I suspect they could take him or leave him when he's not (and can leave him entirely when he's a-preachin').
ReplyDeleteOTOH, there might be enough quaintness in the book to hold their interest, along the lines of Coming of Age in Samoa.
To your point.
DeleteYep. Hence the past couple days', er, log-rolling with Excitable Andrew Sullivan ("who's carrying a burden much like mine!"). Pre-empt the inevitable attacks by showing how much I actually love hanging with them.
DeleteWatching Rod as this book rolls out is going to be like watching an American Communist in the days after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
-The Man From K Street
It's not the upper West Side that will make this a top seller but if he can crack the woman's book clubs, he will have a hit. He's already got Eat, Pray Love and Steel Magnolias on-board. If he can get an endorsement from Annie Lamott, the bay area is his oyster. The MTD Christianity is right up her alley.
ReplyDeleteA selection by the Oprah book club would close the deal nationwide.
Could be a major motion picture. I see Reese Witherspoon as Ruthie and Jake Gyllenhaal as the rodster.
If it falls a little short of this level, it could be a hot property for the O network with some smaller stars. Anyone care to speculate?
OK, I've read the first 5 pages. More than anything, it reminds me of a non-funny version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
ReplyDeleteOn his website, Dreher not only trumpets the praise from the author of Eat Pray Love, he also has a similarly positive blurb from "Wm." Paul Young.
ReplyDeleteThe author of The Shack.
Yeesh. I wouldn't dream of publicizing that.
On the subject of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Wikipedia points to a 2009 article by Collin Hansen, criticizing MTD as useless in sustaining a free society. The Wikipedia entry mentions that Hansen references other critics, including one Rod Dreher.
The citied Crunchy Con blog entry has since evaporated from Beliefnet's public archives, but the entry is cached elsewhere.
What was his point?
"It is simply that if you drive substantive Christianity out of the public square, or cheer over its decay into irrelevance, you may rid yourself of the possibility of Pat Robertson, but you also close the door to Martin Luther King."
Now, we know that squishy, heretical, sentimental pap isn't all bad -- not if bestselling writers of such garbage are willing to give your book a hand.
Oh good grief, I hadn't even noticed The Shack endorsement in addition to E-P-L. Christ, what a log-rolling whore. It's all been a lie, hasn't it? The whole Small is Beautiful schtick--when the stakes are an Oprah nod and royalties, you climb aboard the Big Media/Sixth Avenue Leviathan without a moment's hesitation.
Delete--The Man From K Street
I wouldn't mind the blurbs from big names if it weren't those particular names: I could hardly think of worse contemporary examples of narcissistic spirituality than those two books.
DeleteA friend pressured me into reading The Shack. I read a chapter or two and just couldn't continue. It was so freaking bad. I can't read anything that awful, even to oblige a friend.
DeleteBut...the thing's undoubtedly a hit, and I guess Rod's little opus will be a hit, too. As y'all point out, the irony-meter is buzzing like a son of a gun.
About Dreher's writing about his sister's apparent unwillingness to forgive, I was reminded of another author praised by some on the right, and his ungracious memoir in the wake of a family death (or two).
ReplyDeleteI didn't read the book myself, but James Rosen was unsparing in his Washington Post review of Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup.
"As testimony to what Pat and Bill Buckley were really like, the book bears supreme witness and delivers many laughs; as an account of what it's like to watch one's parents suffer and die, it is moving to the point of tears.
"Still, there is something troubling about this book, a sense that it is unduly unkind to -- and thus unworthy of -- its subjects. 'Christo,' as Buckley called his son (whom I've met once, perfunctorily), clearly anticipated that a large number of his father's legion of fans would regard the publication of this memoir as something 'other than an act of love,' as the author told Vanity Fair. This is owing to the book's primary focus on Pat and Bill's final days, when they were aged, sick, grief-stricken, crotchety, sometimes mean-spirited or even enfeebled by dementia...
"[] Christopher serves no legitimate literary or historical purpose by documenting, with lurid granularity, his father's sad decline, when the diseased and dying widower was suffering from emphysema, diabetes, sleep apnea, skin cancer, heart trouble and prostate problems. Thus we are treated to pathetic scenes of the octogenarian Buckley falling asleep over his dinner plate, projectile vomiting, absently wandering hospital corridors, mistaking his DVD player for a thermostat and demanding to have lunch with people long dead. The recounting of such tales tells us more about the son than the parents...
"Christopher Buckley admits that his own sins 'are manifold and blushful, but callousness [is] not among them.' Readers may beg to differ. The very attributes he lists when articulating, in kinder, gentler moments, what made his father 'great' -- unswerving faith and generosity, 'deep and abiding' love for family -- make it impossible to imagine the elder Buckley ever penning such a book about his son, though one senses William F. Buckley, too, would have regarded the source material as rich and abundant."
A brutal review for an evidently brutal book.
(More shortly -- oh, so much more.)
Christopher Buckley's memoir came out about the same time as the discussion of MTD, and -- no kidding -- I quite accidentally stumbled upon the cached copy of Dreher's public soul-searching that the book prompted.
ReplyDelete"What are a writer's responsibilities? To be more specific, what does a writer do when telling the truth about his loved ones and honoring them (or their memories) conflict?
"...The only thing I ever wrote that I am truly ashamed of is a travel piece back in the mid-1990s, about taking my mom and dad abroad. I adore my mother, but she and I are a lot alike, and I'm short-tempered with her at times. This trip was one of those times. The account I wrote of Travels With Mama was meant to be semi-comic, and I thought that's what it would read like. But many read it as me making fun of my mother. I was shocked by the accusation, and upon re-reading the piece in that light, made to realize that it was a fair characterization of my essay -- and, in turn, that I had likely concealed my own motive from myself.
"I will never do anything like that again. I apologized to my mom, but it grieves me to this day that I held her up for any kind of public ridicule. But as I've observed here before, writers tend to have a poor sense of propriety in these matters. For us, getting the story tends to be the main thing. A friend of mine wrote a memoir of her early life, and deliberately left out material that would reflect poorly on her parents' behavior. She and I talked about this, and I told her it would have made for a more interesting book -- and not in the gossipy sense, but rather in giving a fuller picture of the things she had to deal with as a young person, and how her parents' foibles decisively shaped her character. She understood that, but said had she told the complete truth, it would have been a betrayal of them. Because she loved them, she couldn't see her way clear to doing that. I understand today more clearly where she was coming from. I couldn't do that either...
"My guess is that Christopher is doing what writers, especially journalists, do, and nothing more. I struggle in my own life with the morality of that instinct, and find it impossible to judge whether or not Buckley fils did the right thing. I only know that I couldn't do it -- but I don't know whether that is a strength or a weakness.
[And why couldn't Rod? Why else?]
"I couldn't do it for the same reason that, when standing on the Brooklyn Bridge on 9/11, and having to make a snap decision before the police closed the bridge after the south tower fell, whether to run forward toward the greatest story of my professional life, or to go back home and look after my wife and son, I chose to go home. To this day I cannot tell you whether I did the right thing or not. But I chose what I chose.
"One more thing: Janet Malcolm famously wrote: 'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.' She meant that we take people into our confidence and betray them, even if we never tell a lie."
Interesting.
With A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis published the private journal he kept in mourning his wife's death, but he did so to encouraging others by confessing his own shortcomings -- not his wife's.
Is it a reflection on me that I could not even wade through those few paragraphs detailing the only piece of writing Rod's ashamed of? (BTW, he has a stunted sense of shame, if you ask me. What about all his vicious Catholic-bashing? He's seriously not ashamed of any of that?)
DeleteBut...getting back to my inability to read all that schlock: Why oh why do people think this guy's a good writer? Since when is narcissistic navel-gazing great writing? Good grief, I honestly do not want to know how Rod-Man feels about the story he wrote lampooning his mother. I do not give a flip about his ever-evolving "feelings." Yeesh is right.
Florence King really nailed Dreher's sing-song emoting in her review of Crunchy Cons, but on the other hand, plenty of his fellow writers do praise his way with words.
DeleteAs eager as he is to tackle good-faith criticism, I can't imagine that his friends are pulling their punches. :-)
...plenty of his fellow writers do praise his way with words.
DeleteHave they ever read real stylists? Dreher is not remotely in the same league.
how about Pee Wee Herman as rod?
ReplyDeleteDAVID CROSS.
ReplyDeleteDoug Hutchinson.
ReplyDelete"I only know that I couldn't do it." Nice find Bubba. This one sentence exposes what initially appears to be mere hypocrisy as total delusion.
ReplyDeleteOn the original news that started this thread, Piku, it's not entirely clear that the Beliefnet page is actually a blog: it appears to be just a clearing house of a few short essays.
ReplyDeletePauli, can you tell if those essays are excerpts?
--
Where Dreher spends most of his time blogging isn't there or his own site, but at the paleocon American Conservative, where Daniel Larison also blogs.
Dreher's been mentioning his recent get-together with Andrew Sullivan.
First: "I think Andrew and I were both rather surprised by how much our own life journeys have paralleled."
All of us are shocked, no doubt.
Then, on the occasion of David Kuo's funeral, Dreher writes that he recognizes Sullivan's difficult side but yet can live with the theological disagreements "because Andrew is a decent and kind and very much alive person."
Sarah Palin might disagree with that assessment, but then I don't think Dreher much cares about what she or her fans think, if he still holds to his ironic opinion of Palin from a 2011 blog entry.
("Her greatest limitations are not things you overcome by gaining experience. They are intrinsic. The Greeks were right: character really is destiny.")
(Indeed!)
But I bring up that essay on Kuo's funeral because Dreher continues to show some self-awareness, but not nearly enough to change his writing habits.
"The older I get, and the more I become aware of my own frailty, my own vanity, my own hard-to-govern passions, my own weaknesses, and the more I come to grasp how freaking hard life is, the more inclined I am toward mercy. It’s not out of big-heartedness, necessarily, because unlike my sister Ruthie, I am not big-hearted. I am petty and jealous and quick to anger. My worst fault is my unbridled tongue. Rather, I think any inclination towards mercy on my part comes from a recognition of how much I need it myself.
"This is a lesson my sister’s life and death taught me — including, I must say, the mercy she denied me, of being able to finally and genuinely resolve our differences, to forgive and be forgiven. As I’ve told people along the way of this book tour, please don’t deny the people in your life who want to be reconciled with you the chance to do so, to know they have your forgiveness. In The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, I write about being surprised, months after Ruthie’s death, to learn that she still harbored some serious contempt for me, even though I had tried — and thought I succeeded — in resolving our differences. The greater part of my own grief, as her brother, is knowing that she is gone now, and beyond my ability to reach, and to make real and lasting peace with. I mean, I believe she can hear me when I speak to her, but I can’t hear her when she speaks to me, and if she wants to say I forgive you, and to ask me to forgive her for the at times cruel ways she treated me in our adulthood … well, that time passed on the morning she died. And I mourn that, and will every day of my life." [emphasis mine]
He will mourn that, but not in private and not with the charity of spirit to concede that maybe her intransigence wasn't entirely unjustified.
His inclination toward mercy only goes so far.
I probably mentioned this already, but all of this burbling unctuousness is transparently the spittle of Judas, the most slinking, poisonous form of revenge.
DeleteHe's not only kissing her corpse wetly over and over and over again, he's grinding her into unrecognizeability, or rather into what he hopes he would have been had he had the redemptive fortune to have been born as her and not as his self-loathing, life-loathing self.
Keith
Burbling unctuousness. What a great phrase.
DeleteConfessional writing is really, really hard to do well. But I guess today's reading public doesn't give a crap whether you do it well or poorly. Still, Bad Confessional Writing is pretty hard to wade through.
Oh well. Don't mind me. Just babbling.
The greater part of my own grief, as her brother, is knowing that she is gone now, and beyond my ability to reach, and to make real and lasting peace with.
DeleteBecause it's all about you, Rod. It's always All About You.
Yeah, there's a coy but flamingly immodest usurping narcissistic subtext underwriting this whole project, namely "look how many people Ruthie is touching! Have you been touched by Ruthie yet? So and so in Peoria was just touched by Ruthie yesterday. Be the first in your town to be touched by Ruthie."
DeleteWell, Ruthie's dead, dirt napping, six feet under. How the heck, then, is she touching people? Is she a zombie?
Darn (head slap), even I'm bright enough to figure this out: it's only because Rod is bringing Ruthie to the people that she's touching them!
Without Rod, Ruthie would just be another anonymous dead country girl, her life of value to only a vanishing minority around her. Why, it's only because of the powers of Rod that she gets to escape that fate and become the world-historical figure that that ungrateful little sister of his is becoming now.
You think about that, Ruthie, while you're regretting not forgiving Rod like you should have! Without him, you'd be nothing, nothing I tell you. You'd be touching nobody!
Okay, even I need a shower now.
Keith
Dreher's book is "the most powerful book I’ve read in years. It overflows with that inexplicable mix of joy and pain that a writer can only achieve when he is telling the truth."
ReplyDeleteAnd this is from Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, which I would consider the most serious magazine out there right now.
Assuming I'm not completely wrong about Dreher's weaknesses as a writer, and assuming that professional courtesy would go only so far, I'm left to conclude that Yuval Levin thinks that this book could have a cultural impact on the subject of family, community, and other "mediating institutions" which have been his recent focus.
"If I had to define what conservatism ultimately means for me, it would be the preservation and reinforcement of the preconditions for the emergence of that goodness in a society of highly imperfect human beings. But politics is of course only one very crude way to strengthen and protect those preconditions. A powerful story that brings us face to face with that mysterious something [that makes life worth living] can do far more. And this book tells a mighty powerful story. Well worth your while."
Of course, another one of the delicious ironies is, as we contemplate his whole-hearted embrace of MTD-treacle sentimentality, the gyno-mafia of the NY publishing houses, and the suburban women's book club readership demographic, remembering how much he loved telling us about EOdoxy because it was so geared towards REAL MANLY MEN.
ReplyDelete-The Man From K Street
remembering how much he loved telling us about EOdoxy because it was so geared towards REAL MANLY MEN.
DeleteOh my gosh. I forgot all about that.
Strong men also cry.
DeleteStrong men also cry.
Never mind that -- spoiler alert! -- the man who spoke those moving words was conning a good-natured hippie and abandoning a family member for the sake of filthy lucre.
Well, Bubba, maybe it all depends on what you are comparing Dreher's book against. Compared against what else is out there, Dreher's book might in fact seem relatively powerful and worth one's while.
ReplyDeleteEspecially for those readers who haven't been scarred by the Crunchy & Conversion Experience as we have.
Well, hey, at least recipes are practical and useful. ;)
DeletePikku, Dreher isn't the first writer I've encountered who thinks it's a horrible personal attack to recall what he wrote elsewhere: maybe he does look better as a writer when considered out of context.
DeleteYeeaaahhh...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTtpWgrhS78
Keith
All of us who are required to make a living in the world know that we need to go-along-to-get-along. We make friendships based on professional needs and honor these as required. This is useful in understanding Rod's newly reinvigorated friendship with Andrew Sullivan.
ReplyDeleteThe "little way ..." will have little appeal to conservatives. Consequently, there is little or no need to mend fences in that regard even though he has been extremely vicious with conservatives he has disagreed with.
He is however trying to appeal to an audience for whom any hint of "homophobia" is reason enough to refuse to read him. In this context, his new understanding and friendship with Sullivan makes perfect sense as his best potential defense against the charges of "homophobia" that are already being leveled.
He has recently thrown in the towel on gay marriage and could easily come around and endorse it soon.
Precisely, SVS. Innoculation. He actually threw in the towel on SSM some time ago, and arguably even earlier when he started threatening to shut down comboxes if people said mean things.
DeleteSay folks, that Tysons Corner B&N he'll be signing at tonight is a stone's throw from TMFKS's suburban manor. If I succumb to the wicked temptation to crash it, can anyone think of anything witheringly inappropriate I can bring up in the Q&A?
-The Man From K Street
Well, TMFKS, the most glaringly obvious thing to me is why didn't he recognize the value in Ruthie long before, while she was still alive, before she developed her million dollar tear-jerking ripeness? Say, 1997 2r 2002?
DeleteIt's not as if Ruthie had spent her whole life tearing the heads off of kittens and sucking their necks and then, just when she developed cancer, turned into Saint Ruthie. If she was what he says she was she had spent her lifetime being that person. Only after Dreher got fired from that science place and he needed a new direction did she and her hometown suddenly develop their golden radiance.
So, Rod, how are we supposed to evaluate epiphanies about people who we suddenly discover are worth big bucks to us, like snakelings coiling and flicking our tongues in wonder as we listen to the reading of a fat will?
Keith
Here's the thing. Unlike crunchy conservatism which at least had the theoretical potential to be an enduring philosophy of living, anything similar regarding Ruthie Leming ends up being Ruthieism, namely fetishistic cult worship.
ReplyDeleteUnless someone launches a nationally recognized Ruthie snake farm or something to keep the Ruthie ball rolling, sooner or later the book tour is coming to an end. Sure, Dreher can try to keep fanning the flames down the road by continuing to talk about Ruthie this and Ruthie that, but the more he does so the more addle-pated he's going to sound, like some old guy who keeps looking to his left where no one is and asking, "so what do you make of that, Mother?" People will treat that behavior in the same way, of course, with quiet politeness. But the "tragic view of life" that Dreher keeps patting himself on the back about tells us that even Ruthie has an ultimate and final sell-by date.
Then what?
Keith
"Then what?"
DeleteHe'll come up with a new formula with equal appeal to the Oprah Book Club crowd.
I have to give him credit, in a certain sense: He has discovered Marketing. He seems to have mastered it, in fact. No, that's not very crunchy. But heck, it's the American Way.
Keith, even Ray knows Ruthieism to have a shelf-life. This book, the tour, the whole enchilada, has to be seen as a early-late career Hail Mary pass.
DeleteHe's 46. He's probably got 1/10th the the daily website hit count that, say, Yglesias has, and even Yglesias at 31 can't eat out on the novelty of being the precocious child-blogger anymore. At this point in the pundit's life you needs to be a regular contributor to The Atlantic or the NYT Magazine to not be seen as "yesterday's man". But you don't find Rod's name in those forums. Instead, you have the dreary downward mobility of NR (which itself peaked around the time of Rod's birth) to the newsroom of a truly second-rate broadsheet, to a crank vanity 'think-tank' in the least intellectually consequential big city on the East Coast, to an even more crankish paleo rag, to a rented flophouse in the Land of the One-legged Prostitutes.
Ruthie is the all-or-nothing roll of the dice. Snake eyes, and he'll be ghosting corporate blogs to his grave. Double boxcars, and he'll ride the fame to those publications that to date have kept him out.
-The Man From K Street
What an overview, K Street: remind me not to ask you for help the next time I'm reviewing my resume.
DeleteAbout NR's peaking decades ago, I will say that what riled me most about the Crunchy Con thing was NR's willingness to promote such crap.
But what once seemed like a rare misstep has become an all-too-common occurrence, as NR becomes a mockery of WFB's mission statement.
LOL, I second Bubba. What an overview. Scathing, brilliant, funny.
DeleteTMFKS,
ReplyDeletePlease do attend and report back. I can't wait for your report back. Isn't his mentor into orthodoxy Frederica Mathewes-Green from the area. If so, I'm sure she will be there.
I don't have the question quite defined enough but here is where I would question him:
So Ray, you have come to celebrate the ways and means of the tight-knit little town where you grew up but... you reject the very institutions (for your own family) that hold the town together such as the local church and the public schools. You hold yourself separate from these mediating institutions and seek to introduce "foreign" influences such as home schooling and the Orthodox church. Aren't you creating the kind of wedge influences that lead to a lower level of trust in the community and foster a kind of outsider "superiority that will threaten the cohesion that you celebrate. After all, didn't Ruthie find her peace in embracing these local institutions and strengthening them instead of rejecting them as you did and still do.
At least before now, you did it from a distance, now you threaten to provide divides within Starhill.
Almost too cerebral. I was considering getting tanked at the Gordon Biersch brewpub across the mall corridor beforehand and then calling him *Mr.* Heat Miser while asking him if the ladies of Starhill usually wear Daisy Dukes.
Delete-TMFKS
PS. Her full name is My Dear Friend Frederica Matthewes-Green, as you should know from Rod's blog.
K Street, SVS isn't the only one interested in what you encounter if you go.
ReplyDeleteA really wicked question would involve asking, wide-eyed and sincerely, just how proud Ruthie would be to know that her older brother has a book blurbed by the authors of The Shack and Eat Pray Love.
"Was she a fan of those books in particular, or did she prefer Joel Osteen?"
My Dear Friend the Man from K Street,
ReplyDelete"a rented flophouse in the Land of the One-legged Prostitutes.
"
You do have a way with words. Do the one-legged prostitutes make an appearance in "little way"?
Anyway, perhaps you could invite rodney over to GB for a pint. They are serving the MaiBock this time of year. I'm sure he will appreciate it.
I spoke too soon and harshly. La Belle Dame Sans Jambe is a pole-dancer, not necessarily a woman of negotiable affection.
Deletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bon-temps-rouler/
-TMFKS
"Rodney"? That would be just like Your Working Boy Ray O. Dreher (ROD, get it?) to legally change his name to something more literary-like.
DeleteJust like another guy who likes to sneer at the hometown hicks and their simple homespun wisdom changed his birth name from the prole-ish "Gary" to the more bespoke, tweed jacket-like "Garrison"...
-TMFKS
La Belle Dame Sans Jamb. ROTFL.
DeleteAbout his opposition to "same-sex marriage," construed as homophobia in more left-leaning circles, Dreher just wrote about how the issue is the result of a "cosmological revolution," or so he says in a piece published TODAY at that "crankish paleo rag." (Thanks K Street!)
ReplyDeleteThe article is reporting, not editorializing -- and probably for that reason, it's actually worth reading on the merits, even with there was a sentence or two where the meaning wasn't immediately clear.
The central subject:
"It seems that when people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.
"This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?"
His reporting suggests an answer of yes.
And guess what comes up as one of the unique problems of our post-modern culture?
"It [] remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist Christian Smith’s research on what he has termed 'moralistic therapeutic deism' —- the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the normative version of the faith in contemporary America -— suggests that the task will be extremely difficult." [emphasis mine]
Well guess who just wrote a book embraced by some of the leading lights of that "feelgood pseudo-Christianity"?
Yeah... Dude! Man from K Street, you HAVE to go. Make an iPhone video while you're there. Maybe... wear a beret so you you can be incognito. At least record yourself talking in a faggy voice to some hipsters. Then will youtube it; I'll post. You will remain anonymous behind the camera wall.
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, ^that's me^. Ha ha ha.
ReplyDeleteOh,
ReplyDeleteAnd pick me up a t-shirt or maybe even a tour jacket. Or, a tour beret if there are any left.
wave a lighter in the air
ReplyDeleteCivilization is depending on you, TMFKS. If Dreher wins, it's grifters and fluffers all the way down.
ReplyDeleteKeith
I can't wait to see Rod's next book after this one.
ReplyDeleteFor now, I think I'll just bypass this one.
There's that great quote from Patton about Roman generals returning from battle who when they drove their chariot among the cheering crowds always had a slave riding behind them whispering in their ear that all glory is fleeting.
ReplyDeleteA commenter named Thursday inadvertently lets Steve Sailer whisper it best. Here I'm substituting
I rather like [Rod], in part for his brave advocacy of The Bell Curve, in part because he has elevated hypocrisy to an art form. The disjunction between what he preaches and what he practices is so stark that it somehow feels wrong to judge him according to the normal standards of truth, logic, honesty, and morality that apply to drab analysts like me.
Too bad Our Working Boy insists on riding alone. You'd think his wife at least would say something.
Keith
Tell you what. I'll write something up by tomorrow morning and send it with pics to our host. The story of how I played Rod Bingo.
ReplyDelete--TMFKS
You da man, Kayst!
ReplyDeleteThe orgy of licking himself there because he can continues unabated.
ReplyDeleteThe peasants, however, are tiring of the possum puree:
David Owen says:
April 12, 2013 at 12:34 am
Sorry, but the level of self-promotion has now reached a truly ludicrous point — one where TAC has to intervene. A sabbatical is perhaps called for, allowing you to find, once again, some topics that extend beyond the reach of your book. A journey that sought to honor a much-loved sister has blundered close to a point where exploitation will have supplanted homage.
The Prince of Petulance responds:
Rod Dreher says:
April 12, 2013 at 12:48 am
Well, whatever. As I keep saying, I’m not blogging all day, but only for a short time daily. I’m on the tour, out all day in bookstores and doing media. I’m away from my normal blogging, because I’m not able to be in front of the computer, and will be for the next week. A lot of what has gone up this week was posts I did in advance that could go up while I was out all day. I’m going to keep track of the best reviews and note the people I meet and conversations I have while I’m on the road. This is a weblog, which is to say, a daily diary. Maybe you’ve read them. If you don’t want to read about Little Way, that’s fine, I understand. You can read other things. Really, you can.
Keith
Keith, the title of that blog post is worth noting:
ReplyDeleteA Great Day For ‘Ruthie Leming’ In DC
A little creepy, even with the quote-marks.
In the very next post, he's taking shots at the narcissism of Elizabeth Wurtzel.
"I, I, I, I, I.
"The reader who sent me the link points out that the personal pronoun constitutes a full eight percent of the Wurtzel piece’s content. But hey, when a gal is writing about her favorite subject... the I’s have it."
...says the guy who, in writing an article just to explain the title of his book, describes the book as his memoir of his sister but presents its themes as a little more self-centered.
"[Other approaches] didn't work for my narrative, the twin themes of which— Ruthie's pilgrimage through cancer and my return home in its aftermath—proved too complex to be summed up punchily or pithily. I thought briefly about 'South Toward Home,' a reverse-play on 'North Toward Home,' the Mississippi journalist Willie Morris's famous account of his Yankee hegira. But that not only lacked originality, it also put too much emphasis on my own experience, versus my sister's.
"Still, I liked the journey concept; it linked the twin odysseys of siblings who were often at odds. The nexus was this: Ruthie's passage into death revealed a way of life that showed me the way home."
Since, by definition, a communitarian cannot be self-centered -- just as support for the free market makes you inherently selfish -- Dreher's in the clear.
the natives are getting pretty restless over there (I mean the commenters at the amcon blog). not really buyin it
DeleteOooooh, can you post a few examples? (I don't want to give that narcissist any clicks if I can help it.)
DeleteThanks!
"A great day for Ruthie Leming" ... "Ruthie Leming has so much to teach yet" ... the dead sister ventriloquism is really twisted. And I'm sure it has f*&^ all to do with the real Ruthie Leming. Is there anything more hostile than speaking for a dead person with whom you competed in life? What better way to utterly erase their identity than to confuse it with your own? He was angry with her, he envied her and he wanted to be her. now that she is silent, he gets to resolve that festering psychic wound (so he believes) and get paid for doing it. Individualism and the American dream are his big bugaboos now, but what could possibly be more individualistic and American dream fulfilling than getting paid for this sort thing?
ReplyDeleteBut, Kathleen, he's writing about community, and so, tautologically, he can't be indulging in individualism.
DeleteHe was angry with her, he envied her and he wanted to be her.
DeleteHelp me out here, please, y'all. I have been sedulously avoiding actually reading Rod's blog, so I have no clue about all this. Why did he envy her and why did he want to be her? (Please spare my having to google this and actually read his schlock, LOL.)
daddy liked her, but not ray
DeleteThanks, Kathleen. Actually, that does sound pretty awful. Parents should never play favorites, IMHO.
DeleteFrom what little I've read from excerpts, it sounds like his sister gravitated to their father and the outdoors while he spent time at his aunts' house.
DeleteI wouldn't hazard a guess as to how much was the father's favoritism and how much was the son's idiosyncrasies.
Should have read: Please spare me from having to google this....
ReplyDeleteGaaaa. I hate when I mangle syntax.
Dreher linked to a gushing review at Christianity Today, about how evangelicals "need" to read his book.
ReplyDeleteThe way the critic put it was that, for multiple reasons, "evangelicals need to read Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming," etc.
Dreher's paraphrase in his blog entry's title?
Why Evangelicals Need ‘Ruthie Leming’
Not "Little Way," but "Ruthie Leming," and again the presence of quote-marks only makes it a little less creepy.
--
As Dreher puts it, Jake Meador is "making a life for himself and his family in Lincoln, Nebraska," when "lives in Nebraska" would suffice. It almost sounds like he's tilling the good earth, but his day job is in the traditional fields of marketing and social media.
All you need to know about Meador is found on a single page on his blog, where "Community" is by far the most popular subject:
The first two books he lists as among his favorites are by one Wendell Berry, including a book that "captures more of my vision for life in the world than any other novel I know of."
Do mags like CT seek out Barry worshippers to review books like this, on the assumption that they're among the few who would like it? I suspect the reverse, that the venues are sought out by people who volunteer to review such books so that they can advance their pseudo-gospel.
I'm not exaggerating when I think that their ideas on community amount to a false faith...
Meador writes to remind evangelicals that "small places have a vital role to play in God's kingdom."
ReplyDelete"Jesus himself came from a town in Israel with a reputation not much better than those enjoyed by most small towns in contemporary America. First-century Jews mocked Nazareth. We enlightened moderns now mock places like Potter, Nebraska or Wall, South Dakota. Yet that is the place where God chose to spend the vast majority of his time on earth. Though Christianity did take to the cities quickly, as the Book of Acts documents, our roots are not large and urban, but small and rural. If Jesus himself chose to grow up in a place like Nazareth, then surely there's some honor and even glory in contemporary Christians choosing to love places like St. Francisville and give their lives to the care and sustaining of such places."
Arguably, the supposed ridicule of Nazareth in John 1:46 may have only been the recognition that Jewish Scripture didn't strongly single out Nazareth in prophecies -- unlike Bethlehem, another small town.
To write about how Jesus grew up in Nazareth, you have to fudge the facts a good bit, that He evidently spent the first two years of His life in Bethlehem and spent some significant part of His childhood in Egypt.
He writes how "Christianity did take to the cities quickly," but that almost implies that the faith "went viral" almost organically, rather than from Christ's own commissioning and commands and His miraculous interruption of Saul's life to make him the chief missionary to the Gentiles.
Hail Nazareth, and you have to ignore other salient facts.
Nazareth largely rejected Christ and even tried to kill Him (Mt 13:57-58, Lk 4:28).
Christ claimed not to have a home, and He called His closest followers to leave their homes AND livelihoods to follow Him (Mt 8:20, Mt 4:18-22).
Who is Christ's family? They are those who obey the Father; those who love their own families more than Jesus aren't worthy of Him (Mt 12:46-50, Lk 14:26).
Indeed, there is at least one instance where Jesus healed an apparent Gentile from demon possession and told the grateful man to stay in his hometown to be a witness (Lk 8:38-39), but the rule IS NOT "stay put."
The Christian rule is, "Obey Me."
Going back to that article on our culture's "cosmological revolution," Dreher writes about "the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture -— indeed, by many who call themselves Christians."
ReplyDelete"They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism -— a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as 'simply pathetic' -- but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today."
He's extending what I saw as the chief problem with the Crunchy Cons project: Dreher touches on the truth in his diagnosis of the problem of alienation, but he COMPLETELY misses the boat on its solution.
What he offers isn't essentially small-o orthodox: if the solution were the Gospel and its implications, I doubt that the authors of The Shack and Eat Pray Love would have embraced it.
And I don't think his proposed solution is ultimately compatible with Christianity. There are faithful Christians who live the "rooted" life he espouses, but they don't elevate it above all others.
How could they? The Bible offers to many examples of faithful lives that positively rejected Wendell Berry's way of things in obedience to God.
There's Abraham who Hebrews explicitly praises for his packing up and moving west; there's Moses and Joshua, who left Egypt for the Promised Land; there's David who left little Bethlehem to found the city of God; there are the fishermen disciples who fished no more; and there's Paul who sought to plant churches across the entire Roman world, even as far as Spain.
In many cases -- Jewish AND pagan -- the decision to follow Christ means ostracism from the hometown that would rally around you if only you would stick by the old ways. That's still true today, where Islam teaches that conversion to any other faith is a capital crime.
I don't think Rod Dreher idealizes the small hometown, in that he doesn't pretend that it has no problems, but his writing does suggest that he idolizes it, in that he's devoted to it more than he is to following the clear teachings of Scripture.
His efforts to sanctify localism and agrarianism amount to a gospel far different than what the Bible teaches, and they ought to be opposed completely apart from any personal considerations.
In short:
His story of Ruthie doesn't trump the Book of Ruth.
Bravo.
DeleteRod absolutizes one way of living the Christian Life as the only true way. That is what cultists and heretics do. They do not simply spew outright falsehood. They take some small truth, some small insight, some aspect of Christianity, and they reify and absolutize it.
Just as the Church is much bigger, more varied, and more multifaceted than Rod's little backyard Ortho-Cult, so too is the Gospel.
So.
ReplyDeleteWent by the book signing in Atlanta yesterday. There were 12-15 in attendance, quite a few who knew Dreher from his home parrish.
After the signing, he and I talked briefly, and it does appear that his beliefs aren't nearly as (for lack of a better word) militant as some of his writing suggests.
"We need the discipline of stability in place, and in community, to become who God wants us to be."
Even in its original context, it's clear that that's not precisely what he really thinks.
It doesn't seem like he would disagree with the way I would rephrase the sentence, that we confirm to God's will for lives, not necessarily through geographic stability, but through "stability in relationships," with primacy being given to the most important relationship, one's relationship with God. That would explain how Abraham could leave his home and father to find himself, and how Paul could do the same crossing the Roman Empire planting church after church: they were doing so in obedience to God.
I think I now better understand his approach to communication: the emphasis may be on his subjective experience, and he may convey that experience as the from-on-high truth that it seems to be as it is felt. That's not anything like willful deceit or woefully unprofessional sloppiness, but it does mean that the writing doesn't bear a certain sort of careful, word-by-word scrutiny.
There's not precision in terms of the mapping between Dreher's words and objective reality, but that might not be the goal: the goal might be conveying how those words resonate with the writer.
I understand that approach, especially if it were limited to a private journal or personal correspondence, but I won't go so far as to say that -- as published material -- it's as valid as the careful Christian writing of C.S. Lewis or John Stott, or the political writing of Andrew McCarthy or Thomas Sowell.
Our criticism is, I think, proof of the dangers inherent in Dreher's approach as I now THINK I understand it. Two risks present themselves immediately:
1) If a writer vents about particular groups of people -- like Catholics or Reaganite conservatives -- readers in those groups can reasonably conclude that his writing is unfair.
2) If a writer presents his own beliefs more stridently than they really are, a reader might take him at his word. In this case, that would mean true idolatry of where one lives, concluding (as Caleb Stegall has; and I believe he means it) that it's impossible to find Christ if you live in the suburbs.
I would warn against this approach, but I do think I understand Dreher's writing style better.
...and, I understand the pitfalls of writing online. There probably remains a time and a place for cutting satire -- like Iowahawk's brilliant takedown of Andrew Sullivan -- but the intent of, say, Steyn's humorous heavy hitting isn't to persuade someone like Nancy Pelosi, it's to address everyone else about the serious flaws of Pelosi's politics.
Writing online can put the addressee at a remove, because he might not read the comment and it's easier to disdain him from the distance that the web creates, and it brings to the fore an awareness of the audience -- of everyone else who might read and probably will comment.
In hindsight, I believe that -- even when I was explicitly writing "TO" Dreher -- my comments were more "ABOUT" Dreher and not the sort of things I would have communicated face-to-face. I think the substance of my criticisms were understandable, but not the way I conveyed them -- at least, not if I expected a good-faith response from Dreher, which I did.
Bubba, your comment puzzles me, because I think our criticism has always been that he wants it both ways -- he wants to present himself as moderate while simultaneously throwing bombs to get attention. That has always been the crux of the problem, for me anyway. He undermines his own message, which deals with subjective and delicate matters of universal importance -- matters that *shouldn't* be toyed with or exploited -- and then gets bitchy when called out on it. That said, did he know you were "Bubba"?
ReplyDeleteI haven't changed the basic criticism, that Dreher makes outrageous claims that he's unwilling to defend, it's just that, having met him, I'm now no longer so quick to conclude he's doing so "to get attention."
ReplyDeleteIt may simply that he's conveying his subjective impressions instead of what he believes is objective reality, and so he wouldn't understand why people would push back and demand the argument behind the claim: there might not be an argument to present.
Either way, I don't think the approach is as valid as more intellectually rigorous approaches, and the approach is dangerous.
When he writes, as he did in the first book, that typical conservatives act as if "accumulating wealth and power is [] the point of life," conservatives have reason to be rankled -- as Jonah Goldberg was -- and others who agree with Dreher may nevertheless take him at face value.
I just see another possibility for why he might have written the way he has. I'm planning to write him at length later this week in part to reiterate my concerns.
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I did introduce myself as Bubba, one of his more vocal online critics from way back, though I'm not sure he could place the name. It has been more than a couple years.
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ReplyDeletePerhaps he is not totally conscious of how he appears to other people.
ReplyDeleteOengus, I agree that this is probably the case, but I think that a good writer should be conscious of how he comes across.
Bubba, really interesting. I see it this way, no matter what he says: his "discipline of place" stuff is code at least for "living a good life like I live". Then when you say "But I live a good life and go to chain restaurants" he moderates it to "well, you have a stable marriage, that's what really matters. I'm not really saying you need a local diet, but look at how many divorced people live in the suburbs." So much of his writing is this kind of convolution with very little precision.
For what it's worth, I never thought Dreher did it strictly to "get attention", although that's part of the equation. He sure does love his attention. I thought and still think he does it to work out and resolve his own multitudinous issues. In other words he caricatures religious conservatives to further his career, certainly, and get attention he seems to crave but also to elevate his family standing and to resolve God only knows what other psychic torments. What makes it more vomitous is he does this while portraying himself as the opponent of such evils perpetrated on the religious right.
ReplyDeleteBubba's point: I think I now better understand his approach to communication: the emphasis may be on his subjective experience, and he may convey that experience as the from-on-high truth that it seems to be as it is felt. That's not anything like willful deceit or woefully unprofessional sloppiness, but it does mean that the writing doesn't bear a certain sort of careful, word-by-word scrutiny.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. My large problem with Dreher's work is that it seemed to conflate matters of taste with matters of truth. It may have been more tone than the words, but that was the message that I received.
I think back to the old BeliefNet days, when he'd write about leaving mass early because of "On Eagle's Wings" and gauche sanctuary decor -- eventually leaving the Church. Toss in some Walmart and Roberto Benigni bashing, and his joy over the day the Beaujolais Nouveau came to town, and the reader would receive the message loud and clear. So Bubba's point is interesting in that the message received by the reader may not have been the one that Dreher was trying to convey.
But he is a professional writer, and so he should be better than that. As a wise professor taught me, "if the reader does not understand what the writer means to say, it is almost always the fault of the writer, not the reader".
P.S. Our local Sunday rag ran an essay by Dreher about his sister. Honesty requires that I admit the essay was pretty good, and not particularly Dreher-centered as I expected -- he portrays himself simply as one of several observers.
But I'll wait for a review of the book from one of y'all. Life is too short.
My fundamental criticism of Rod's writing (given my own spotty familiarity) is that he fails to distinguish between subjective impression and objective reality. If he's doing this as as stylistic choice -- if he actually distinguishes the two in his own mind, but not in his writing -- then (following pikkumatti's wise professor) I'd add the criticism that he's a lousy writer.
ReplyDeleteBut note that a writer who fails to distinguish in his own mind between subjective impression and objective reality is not a trustworthy interpreter of his own writing. If you ask such a writer, "What, then, do you believe is objectively real?," how are you to understand the answer?
It's not as if he hasn't gotten any criticism on his inability to distinguish between subjective and objective. He has gotten reams of it, and ignored all of it. Worse, he and his acolytes have been really bitchy in the face of it, all the while claiming the mantle of truth. How is this different than a cult? I'm not kidding when I say he's delusional. His furious writing is an effort to both create and sustain his delusions, and ANY subject matter can and will be used to that end.
ReplyDeleteSo Ruthie has a halo now? honestly
ReplyDeleteI'll probably jump from this thread to K Street's report, but first...
ReplyDelete--
Pauli, you write, "I see it this way, no matter what he says: his 'discipline of place' stuff is code at least for 'living a good life like I live'."
You're probably right; at minimum, the language he uses leaves open that possibility, and the main point I would make directly to Dreher is that I think he should be more precise in his language -- and that precision should be used to advanced the Good News of Biblical Christianity, not the "good life" of a particular lifestyle that's merely one of several ways to live in conformity to God's will.
I have no illusions about how likely it is that he would change.
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Kathleen, working out one's issues ought to be a private activity: figure out who you are and where you stand, and then bring it out once you've worked it out. Just as my writing to Dreher was probably coarsened by the "audience" online, his self-examination is probably compromised by fans' expectations, to say nothing about the all-too-human desire for attention.
Evidently, Lewis' A Grief Observed was written as a private journal first, and it's the unvarnished truth because he was seeking truth, not attention. There's a great webcomic that tackles this very subject.
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Pikku, apart from those who willfully seek to misconstrue people for gain (e.g., the Left's reaction to Bill Bennett's ENTIRELY defensible comment on abortion and race), I agree: the writer has the responsibility to communicate clearly.
I guess what I meant by saying Dreher isn't necessarily sloppy is that he might be quite careful in describing his subjective experience: the problem is WHAT he's describing (subjective experience vs. objective reality), not how he's describing it.
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Tom, I agree that all this makes him untrustworthy as a writer, it's just that I think that my earlier conclusions about why were possibly less charitable than they could have been.
The consequences are no less serious, either way, and as much as Dreher criticizes Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, his approach to communication AND the resulting writing are, on balance, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.