What is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ like?
Question: What is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ like?
(Answer below. Turn screen upside down to read.)
(A) A monastery
(B) The Walrus
(C) Marriage
(D) A puffin
(E) Mowing the lawn
(F) Tiny, early peas
(G) Christian families
(H) Everything, man
(I) All of the above
∀usʍǝɹ: (I)
A is probably the right answer, but I was kind of hoping for H because... oh, wow, man... YEAH!
ReplyDeleteWith each new dawn, new revelations, Grasshopper.
DeleteToday's new verse, upon the occasion of cementing the association with higher-pundit caste, regular USA Today and Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers*, forced briefly by Christianity Today to rhetorically sit, squirming, in Dreher's lap and address his BO:
The Benedict Option is far more a response to pervasive consumerism, individualism, and atomism than anything to do with gay rights.
I don't know why I didn't realize this sooner, given Dreher's well-known and widespread charitable efforts to pull society together across all segments, particularly with an eye to repudiating technological and other indulgent consumerism.
This must be why, instead of embracing the public square, communally and aggressively, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ reccommends strategically retreating into individual and small group enclaves where, because even during Armageddon there'll always be the Internet or you just wait he'll write another post about AT&T if his goes down, no cultural drift at all among the vast number of separate, disparate, and fragmented BO elements could possibly occur, and they'll come back just as they went in, unified and unchanged. Just like a long Rod Dreher nap, but bigger.
*"See, they talk about me! Even the hot, blond, big-eyed chicks talk about me and my Big Ideas! Me! My Big Ideas! Don't squirm, Kirsten!"
I thought Pope Francis had already covered the "consumerism and materialism are Bad Things" shtick.
DeleteIn fact, hasn't every modern pope covered this? Along with the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and probably most Methodist ministers on an average Sunday morning?
He has a couple posts about doom-and-gloom affiliation and youth stats today, claiming that these prove that the Benedict Option (whatever it ends up being) is the only solution that will work. I noticed that he will go on and on about how Catholicism is supposedly falling apart (supposedly at the same rate as mainline Protestantism, which is lol-worthy) and how everyone else is falling apart and how our kids are all falling away or whatever. He even gets in a dig at people like me today, younger orthodox Catholics currently raising kids, saying we're kidding ourselves if we think our kids will stay Catholic or whatever. But he never seems to have a word to say about...hmmm...the ORTHODOX and what *their* stats may be or portend. Now why could that be? I suppose he'd make the excuse that they just don't get measured as much, being so small. But still, since that is, after all, *his church* shouldn't he try to dredge up some stats for comparison's sake? Surely because the Orthodox are far, far more perfect than Catholics in every way, as he insists, they must be doing better, statistically, right? Right??
ReplyDeleteHah!! The Greeks are losing members by the busload. The various Russian jurisdictions -- well, as you say, they're so small, who'd even know?
DeleteHis own ROCOR bunch, I am increasingly convinced, borders on "creepy cult." Was recently reading about a woman raised in an even smaller, nuttier, non-canonical group, ROCA. Oh my gosh. Crazy as bedbugs.
I'm not slamming Orthodoxy. Most cradles are salt of the earth. But the converts are a whole 'nuther story.
I don't know a ton about the smaller branches, the only Orthodox churches I have visited were OCA and GO and everyone there seemed normal. But I am suspicious from what I have seen online, with the kind of snotty hipsterish attitude some show towards the big, mainstream archdioceses. And periodically I'll see posts on Tumblr and so forth from fringey Orthodox converts where the women wear those hijab-ish veils all the time and I wonder a bit. Of course there are goofy Catholic groups too, on both the right and the left fringes, but as a percentage of the whole they are a much lower ratio, I would guess.
DeleteAs much as I love and respect our Orthodox brothers and sisters (and remember I lean Byzcat myself so I feel a lot of kinship through liturgy and theology, even), I feel like abandoning Catholicism for that ship was a huge mistake for Dreher. I recently finished an excellent book by an actual Benedictine brother on the topic of acedia, and over and over again he emphasizes the importance of "clinging to the railing" when you go through the dark. Hang onto the Church, you know she's got guarantees from God that she will prevail no matter the trials. If you let go, who knows where you'll end up, wandering in the night. Not that I think the Orthodox church is a bad place, just that I am not so sure that Dreher is going to be able to hang onto it, either, since he let go of his rule of life and no longer has a consistent guiding light other than his emotions.
Of course there are goofy Catholic groups too, on both the right and the left fringes, but as a percentage of the whole they are a much lower ratio, I would guess.
DeleteA MUCH lower ratio, I agree. Yep, I've known more than my share of Catholic Kooks, but I get the distinct impression that an astonishingly large percentage of Orthodox Concerts goes off the deep end into hijab-land. E.g., the ones who call themselves Reader Barsaphanios, sport hipster beards and peasant shirts, read Seraphim Rose and Romanides, and spend every waking hour online attacking the Evil West / Latins / Franks.
And yes, I agree, the normal cradle types do not have much use for the nutty konvertzi.
And yep, I agree about Dreher, too. Well said.
That would be Converts, not Concerts. LOL.
DeleteOh, I don't know. Rod's spirituality seems to be based on his take on Western Monasticism, Chartres, Dante, St. Therese, Walker Percy, the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. since the mid-90s, and French cooking. If he does go creepy culty, how Russian Orthodox is that really likely to be?
DeleteWell, there's the rub. But that's the thing about the Konvertsi: They think they're genuinely Eastern when they're really as Western as all get-out. My son wrote a pretty perceptive (IMHO) paper about this for his Cultural Anthropology class, examining American hippie appropriations of (Far) Eastern religions.
DeleteBut Tom, this doesn't obviate my point about konvertsi vs. cradles. It reinforces it. Because I never said that normal Russian Orthodox were creepy cultish. But how normal is ROCOR? It is a konvertsi hotbed.