Wednesday, November 25, 2015

The premise of the Benedict Option

Today Dreher asks (via an alleged Muslim commenter):

... when you ask Muslim immigrants to integrate, what do you mean? Integrate into what?

Dreher has no answer -- other than this:

... I'm not sure how I would answer it. I've never thought about it before, and am embarrassed to realize that. 

... I think when Europe asks them to integrate, it's asking them pretty much to quit being Muslim. When America does, I think it's more or less asking them, "Will you please not act in ways that make us feel afraid?"

I guess the only way one can think like this is because one thinks like this:

.... Post-Obergefell, to what extent should Christians remain engaged with and willing to defined the America we have? .... 

.... I no longer hold the view that America is a nearly unambiguous force for good in the world. In fact, I think American culture is in many ways poisonous, and a force for evil....

.... I believe that there is a meaningful difference between being a good Christian and a good American ....
 
This is the premise of the Benedict Option. When one believes that the "Enlightenment project" has failed, then one cannot answer that simple question of "what does it mean to integrate" with the obvious answer that "to integrate" means to accept the founding ideas of the Nation:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

Despotism awaits those who follow the path of the Benedict Option.

27 comments:

  1. Rod is telling other people to do something: Check.

    He doesn't know what he's telling them to actually, you know, do: Check

    But it involves making Rod not feel afraid: Check

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    1. One of the more to bizarrely ironic things about Rod/s Benedict option is that it represents precisely what he consistently decries, the ethos and praxis of social justice warriors. What brought is proposing with the Benedict option is for Christians to form separate communities where they can be safe from cultural contamination. Interestingly, Rod decries the calls by social justice warriors for "safe spaces" in which minority college students can feel safe and insulated from what they perceived to be a hostile domineering culture. Rod consistently speaks in almost paranoid and delusional terms about the way Christians are being persecuted by neo-fascist elements in the dominant culture. Interestingly, social justice warriors and campus activists use precisely the same language to describe their perception of persecution by a dominant Caucasian patriarchal list culture. In both Rod and the social justice warriors cases, there's a certain level of whining childishness in which exposure to diverse ideas, persons from different backgrounds, and alternative points of view are regarded as poisonous and dangerous. One would think that conservative Christians are in need of protection from the dominant culture in precisely the same way that social justice warriors believe that college students of color need to be protected from the larger society. Rod exhibits the same fear, paranoia, delusional thinking, in a rational narcissistic and petulant whining we are currently seeing on college campuses. The only difference is that Rod claims to be doing so at the great protector of Christianity. Astonishingly, Rod has recently published a post praising a conservative college president for telling the social justice warrior class that his school is a university not a daycare. Rod feels that this level of backbone the exhibited by a college president is noteworthy. I fully agree. However it can be pointed out that precisely the same criticisms which Rod has leveled against social justice warriors can be leveled against him. Those looking at the Benedict option with a skeptical eye can easily look at Rod and tell him that living in a civilized society means dealing with people with whom one disagrees and that the real world is not a daycare. Sadly, the irony of this position would appear to be lost on our working boy.

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    2. Dreher isn't intelligent enough - or at least not intellectually disciplined enough - to understand how full of ironic contradictions his muddled, emotive thinking is. He vacillates manically from attacking liberal pluralism to defending it within the same post. He's a flibbertigibbet with no integrity of thought or intellectual consistency.

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  2. That said, I'm not sure what the problem with, "I believe that there is a meaningful difference between being a good Christian and a good American," is.

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    1. Out of context, nothing. In the context in which he uses it (to be a good American, one must buy into the culture and thus America does not deserve defending), I have a large problem.

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  3. Only DreRod could make his father's death about himself. And his Church may close?

    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/thanksgiving-2015-gratitude-fathers/

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    1. I don't get how they thought they could stay "in business" being so remote and so specific (not even one of the mainstream Orthodox communions in the USA) and in an area already saturated with people who are firmly part of another religion.

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    2. Actually my remote small southern town which is filled to the brim with pentacostals and baptists has a small OCA Orthodox mission that is growing and hopefully moving into a new building. But if I lived near St. Francisville, why would I go to a tiny ROCOR nission parish when an OCA church is 34 miles and a 45 minute dive away?? St. Mathew's OCA church is also a mission church in need of support. There is also the established Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Baton Rouge. I have to wonder why Rod would need a mission parish in St. Francisville unless he either ran afoul of the OCA parish or he found them not sufficiently fanatical enough.

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    3. St. Mathew's is in a strip mall between a martial arts studio and a cheese steak place. My guess is that is where he worshiped when he first moved back home, but his delicate aesthetic sensibilities couldn't handle the neighborhood.

      He was, of course, mistaken; nothing says "counter-enlightenment" like a cheese steak, it's a sandwich based on the authority of tradition, not rationalism

      Anonymous Maximus

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    4. I just assumed that the whole Muzhik Thing had so tarnished his brand that he could no longer show his face in an OCA parish without being tarred and feathered by the congregation.

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    5. St. Matthew's had me at cheese steak.

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    6. I'd be the first to say that Rod is a deeply embaressing person to many Orthodox. But he consistently supported Metropolital Jonah and Jonah was quite popular in the OCA overall. It is widely understod in the OCA that Syosset and the Synod of bishops of the OCA are a pit of vipers. So I imagne that Rod would not be tarred and feathered . If Rod inp person is anything like Rod the blogger, I'd imagine that the parish quickly became hrired of him. Every church has "that guy" whom you actively try to avoid at coffee hour.

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  4. or he felt he couldn't control it. .We all know that he needs to be in control or be the "Top Dog"...The Greeks would ignore him: his personal vision of Hell

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    1. Dreher is less a top dog than a bossy bottom.

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    2. I am sure Rod would have never started a ROCOR mission parish 30 miles from an OCA mission parish to undercut or sabotage the OCA mission in any way.

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  5. Y'all, on Twitter Rod has just mocked someone for being jobless AND tried to get him fired from his new job at Patheos. My Facebook friends are reacting, pointing out how utterly vicious Rod's behavior is. Check out Owen White's feed. We are far from the only ones who have noticed Rod's venality. And yes, his fellow Orthodox cannot stand him.

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  6. To be fair, when it comes to utter viciousness and venality, Artur Rosman is even worse than Rod.

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    1. I'm FB friends with the guy, but I know next to nothing about him. He rarely shows up in my feed. Has he ever tried to get someone canned from a desperately needed new job, though? That sounds like a new low.

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  7. Again, to be fair, Rod isn't trying to get Artur fired, just predicting he will be. I think that's correct, since Artur is even more of a jerk than Rod.

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    1. Even more? How is that even possible?

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    2. By your own admission, you know next to nothing about Artur. If you knew more, it would be clear how possible it is to be even worse than Rod.

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  8. Rod ? Is that you?

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    1. Rod is the master of passive aggressive doublespeak in which malice poses as civilzaed discourse What!!??!!! Me advocate someone will be fired??

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    2. Lol, thank you. And yes, I was a tad stunned by the other Anonymous's response. I don't expect rudeness here in Pauli's Safe Space. Lol!

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  9. I wasn't rude, Diane. I just pointed out that if you knew Artur better than you say you do, you'd have no problem understanding how he's even worse than Rod. I'm not a fan of Rod's but I'm even less of a fan of Artur's. Lots of people feel the same way.

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  10. Rod , and his pretentious Benedict Option is just narcissus in self-serving, self-righteous religious drag.
    This reference describes why (as do the other essays featured on the same website)
    www.dabase.org/up-1-6.htm
    Plus this reference too - there is some overlap with the above reference;
    www.dabase.org/aletheon.htm

    Two more truth-telling references

    www.beezone.com/AdiDa/ScientificProof/christ_equals_emsquared.html

    http://spiralledlight.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/4068

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