"And Everything Anyone Else Means at Any Given Moment, Too"
As we here at EQE have said all along, from its inception Rod Dreher's so-called Benedict Option play has been nothing more than an open-ended, anything-encompassing cypher cannily crafted to land a publishing deal about whatever could be stuffed into that dimensionless container.
Not only does "The Benedict Option Means Precisely What I Choose It to Mean at Any Given Moment" as Pauli first reported here, now it also officially means "Everything Anyone Else Means at Any Given Moment, Too":
So, we are going to see a proliferation of “options,” and that’s okay by me. Just remember that even though I’m going to make in my book a specifically Benedictine case for the Benedict Option, the term itself is a catch-all for responses based on accepting MacIntyre’s judgment on the dead end of modern moral discourse, and on a determination to act radically to build social and other structures capable of sheltering, preserving, and growing the Christian faith as the broader culture grows more hostile to orthodox Christianity. Call it what you want, but that’s what we share.
Incidentally, here's Dreher's IKYABWAI response to Tom Piatak's critique of the big BO, commandeering the Rorshach imagery from John Zmirak's post:
[NFR: Chronicles, huh? Mmmmph. Yeah, it’s psychologically fascinating to watch certain people squirm so vigorously about this stuff. It’s turning into a Rorshach test on the right. Some of these guys, you wonder what they have to lose if people start taking the Benedict Option seriously, and trying to figure out how to live it locally. — RD
Heart of a lion in the determination to act radically to build social and other structures capable of sheltering, preserving, and growing the Christian faith department there, I'd say, wouldn't you?
So, bottom line, as he did with this BO project's parental unit, Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher is going to take anyone's comments containing the word "option" and try to pitch a publisher on letting him write a book about them entitled The Benedict Option.
The only question remaining at this point is who the lucky publisher might be.
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