The Phlogistetheron Option

When your J-school degree turns out to be worth about as much as the 8-track player your daddy still keeps in the garage for sentimental reasons, you boldly turn to new reasons to live, namely, to become famous for nothing more than making up word couplings and then trying to get paid for writing as many more words about them as possible.

This, in a nutshell, is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (™), or, as I like to think of it, the Phlogistetheron Option, a mystical, ever-evolving something-experience that will ignite the ether of our imaginations the more it is referred to and discussed by thoughtfully serious consumers of ignited ether.

Today, we learn a new, never before revealed aspect of Phlogistetheron:

The Benedict Option will be in part about fighting for reality against the Matrix.

Really? That should keep us busy for awhile, yes indeedy. Except, um, what can that possibly even mean? Everything. Nothing. Whatever Neo Dreher wants it to mean as he bends the bullets of examination and criticism around him and his Phlogistetheron cloud in slo-mo.

The Matrix was at best a bad Wachowski Brothers-waddling into mystical secular eschatology that only got worse with each reload. Is this how we are to approach living Christian lives? Through the eyes of insecure adolescents yearning for mystical super powers to use against an over-weening adult establishment?

This Phlogistetheron Option does remind me of a different movie, though, John Carpenter's The Thing: a shape-shifting mutant that, as soon as you think you grasp what it is, melts and flows and mutates into something entirely new and unrecognizable.

There, on that plate there. Is that really a ham sandwich? Or could it be Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (™), in a new disguise, preparing to spring and ignite the very ether of our imaginations?