If and when the Benedict Option is ever understood...

...what then?

The inchoate and incoherent marketing phrase "Benedict Option", test-marketed at the end of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons, was just that: a phrase, nothing more.

Years of blogging since based on that marketing phrase are just that: years of blogging based on that marketing phrase, nothing more.

A book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase is just that: a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase, nothing more.

Examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally post hoc are just that: examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally, nothing more.

Spirited current talk provoked by examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally post hoc is just that: spirited current talk provoked by examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally, nothing more.

What, if anything, does any of this derivative, discretely and completely independent, free-floating cloud of abstract talkety-talk reality have to do with actual Christianity as practiced for the last 2,000 years? Need it? No, not at all, really, no more than the loquacious quadriplegic football fan need suit up and actually hit the field. All such abstracted fans, ordained and not, can remain blissfully happy their entire lives, perpetually circulating in their respectively flavored cloud realities.

Why has the derivative, Benedict Option cloud reality never before been proposed until Rod Dreher arrived to propose it to us? Is Rod Dreher the singularly visionary Christian prophet of our time?

Or is the problem ultimately simply the perennial one of trying to live as an actual earthly Christian, in the actual human world in which we find ourselves, in the actual historical years into which we have been born - rather than in an abstract cloud map?

Will the new, improved, aftermarket Christian additive - the abstract, derivative talkety-talk cloud reality of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, hovering like a disembodied spirit over the human corpus Christi - really make Christianity and us as Christians perform better than the original?

How could it?

None of this of course means that Rod Dreher's Benedict Option phrase and its book may not sell some copies on Amazon, make Rod the talk of Christian blogging for a time, get him invited onto some high visibility  TV shows, or anything else coveted by the professional writer.

It simply means that, at the end of the day, even the most celebrated abstract aftermarket map remains just that, nothing more.

The territory - and Christianity's role within it - remains the same problematic, grubby, gritty human reality it has always been since that day on Calvary, the wonderful modern development of the Internet combox salon/book marketing portal notwithstanding.

TL;DR version: the "Benedict Option" is a faith unto itself.

"Well, we’re still here; where he?"

A New New Republican

Like all saprophytes, Rod Dreher once again finds opportunity in the demise of others, in this case in the fall of The New Republic.

Yes, Rod, you're still there, and where he? He still there, too.

The New Republicans were there—in the canal—reflected in the water.... The New Republicans stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water....

UPDATE (as they say): I thought this evaluation by Judith deserved its own update, if only so we could savor it:

Robin Abrahams at 6:45 AM on Dec 5th spoke for me.

Rod Dreher, your blog has gone from being a thoughtful, and well written source of inspiration for me, to being a copied pastiche of other people’s nasty and inferior expressions, (basically their failures), thrown together and titled with deformed and sensationalist headlines, followed by superior and snide commentary (as if that in and of itself constitutes a contribution), while you sit back under a canopy of highbrow religiosity as your readers walk into the traps you have set, laughing gleefully at their exaggerated, angry, and one sided statements. This, alternating with an embarrassingly exhibitionistic over sharing of personal information, shows that underneath the trappings of symbol, there is nothing conservative about your agenda, and your style. Since you appear to be immune to any sense of personal hypocrisy, I can understand that you would criticize Sully and Coates for deteriorating into mass appeal, and would refer to everything you don’t agree with using that trite expression “the mainstream media.” My version of Robin’s second sentence is: “I’m a great follower of tabloid reading, my favorites being Salon, HuffingtonPost, Gawker, and Rod Dreher’s blog.”