Fun with the Benedict Option, Part 1
Whatever the Benedict Option ends up being we're going to have as much fun with it as we can. There are obviously some limits to this fun. Or there should be; I have always noticed the absence of wiener jokes in the fable of the Emporer's New Clothes.
But let's not waste time lamenting the limits! Instead, let us continue our exploration of the vast possibilities of what the Benedict Option might be by posing a mind-expanding list of ten questions. Then you may use the comments below to answer these questions or post your own questions.
Just remember that there are no wrong answers and no silly questions. And at the end you get a gold star! Unless you like silver better, of course. But more importantly, we will all have learned because we will have expaaaaaaanded out little mainstream conservative minds!
OK, here we go:
1. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, will I still be able to play My Singing Monsters?
3. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, will churches with modern architecture disintegrate, explode, implode or catch on fire?
4. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, will everyone get a personal, 15-minute Marian apparition?
5. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, will looking in bird's nests show us how many children God wants each of us to have?
6. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, will this blog be unmanned?
7. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, will people still steal sour cream creating obstacles to keeping it local? Will we be allowed to complain about it?
8. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
9. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, can we overstate and dramatize our part in world events to inflate our relevance?
10. When the Benedict Option comes in its glory, can I have your Pokemon Cards? how about your Legos?
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| Benedict Option: Secure your own oxygen mask first. |
This is a riot. Sorry for late response. We have just started Summer Hours (four 10-hour days in front of the blasted computer, with Fridays off to catch up on sleep), and we are rather discombobulated.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, this is a riot. :D
Today's clarification on what the BenOp is not:
ReplyDeleteThe BenOp must be anti-modern to some extent. I hesitate to define (at this point) too strongly what that means, because we all live in modernity, and have been shaped by modernity. It would be unhelpful, to put it mildly, to make of the Benedict Option such an impossible-to-achieve ideal that most people despair of trying something different.
and:
Finally, I am grateful to Andrew Lynn for pushing forward* on how the BenOp cannot be quietist and strictly retreatist and be true either to MacIntyre’s vision or to the spirit of the Benedictine monasteries. I agree with him, and concede that my own weakness on thinking about practicalities has kept me from engaging this aspect of the BenOp as much as I should on this blog.
Oh my, I'd have figured that the 100,000+ words Dreher has spilled on the BenOp so far would be sufficient to "engage" just about every possible aspect of it. But no -- darn that excess thinking on practicalities -- more cowbell.
*Pushing Forward!! Excelsior!!
P.S. Long and short of Dreher's post is that Republicans suck, and that Rick Perry sucks because his saying we need to return freedom to the individual shows how he doesn't get it.
I should have put a link to Excelsior!. (Better yet, the version illustrated by Thurber is here.)
ReplyDeleteThe poem seems to fit Dreher's fixation with the undefined BenOp, assuming of course that he is sincere about it.
The anti-modern shtick made me think of Father Vasiliy from "The Onion Dome": "Was it IPhone 6 in nineteenth-century Russia?"
ReplyDelete