Welcome to our visitors from St. Francisville, LA!

First, welcome to those who are stopping by here from the St. Francisville forum over at Topix.  We're glad you're stopping by.

I thought it might be a good idea to explain to our visitors why we have this strange fixation on the fine work of Rod Dreher, so you don't think that we are a bunch of stalkers.  Plus, that sort of rehash is always good fun for those of us who have that common interest. I'll explain things from my viewpoint, and perhaps the elders can elaborate in the comment box.

A few years ago, Dreher was operating a blog at Beliefnet, in the time following the publishing of his seminal work Crunchy Cons.  I was originally attracted to that topic because I thought that there were too many good things that we conservatives had ceded to fringe liberals, and that it was time to take some of them back.   And Dreher was also an op-ed columnist in our local rag here in Dallas, so I had some familiarity with the topic from that.  Not to mention that he was a fellow Catholic -- seemed to fit.

I was soon disappointed. And how.  My view is that Dreher confuses matters of taste with matters of truth.  In his world, the things he likes, and the things he dislikes, become criteria for judging authenticity, and for discerning good from evil.  So we got pieces trashing Wal-Mart, the humor of Roberto Begnini, global imports, and on and on, and we got pieces trumpeting the "finer" local things.  Rules became rules, except for the exceptions (the Beaujolais Nouveau, his Mercedes, etc.), and when Dreher changes his mind (suburbs, Kindle).  But nevertheless, readers were admonished to toe the line.  (Wish I could link to some of these, but they've mostly been taken down by Beliefnet and lost to the ether or at best the Wayback Machine.)

And then came the Great Conversion from Catholicism to Orthodoxy.  We should have seen this coming, because we got Dreherian diatribes on ugly churches, bad music, and homilies that would cause him to leave Mass.  But then (because he was outed, IIRC), Dreher owned up to his Orthodox conversion in  a piece of interminable length entitled "Orthodoxy and Me" (which has been preserved here in its entirety), in which he trashes the Catholic Church, and touts the wisdom of his conversion to Orthodoxy.

God bless anyone along their spiritual journey -- we each have to find our way.  But the manner in which he did this was so uncharitable that many of us (including those of us here) followed the call to defend the Church.  As I said at the time, that post was like a guest throwing a stinkbomb on leaving a party, for the enjoyment of those outside watching the resulting mayhem through the windows.  Defense of the Church was necessary, but certainly appeared amusingly unattractive to outsiders ("Haha -- look at the silly Christians fighting among themselves -- glad I'm a pagan").  We defenders were even called "Assholes for Christ", which I am happy to wear as a badge of honor from that time.

There was a blog among some of the elders here ("The Contra-Crunchy Conservative") where we had been venting against the Dreher posts and got to know each other.   Pauli then soon started this one, which is where we live now.

Again, welcome.  Stay awhile -- we talk about other cool things like guns and politics and religion, too.  But nothing brings up the tempo like a good piece about Rod Dreher.