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| Your Benedict Option sausage: lots of chewy word casing, plus other stuff! |
Following an impressive image-post intended to suggest to your emotionally seducible eyes how hard its author is working on Your Benedict Option book, this jarring, corrective truth in advertising; emphases mine:
[NFR: It is a great job, and I am extremely blessed to have it. I’m not reading A Secular Age all the way through; I don’t really have the time to do it. I’m reading Jamie Smith’s guide to it, though, and when I want to dig more deeply into certain Taylor points, I go to the Taylor text using references from Jamie’s book. It’s extremely helpful. I’m researching for the Ben Op book. — RD]
You remember this process: cribbing that book report a half hour before school starts using Google or, for older readers, Cliff Notes.
Your current Benedict Option facts as revealed by Rod Dreher himself:
1. There is no coherent concept of the Benedict Option, although Rod Dreher has been flog-marketing the buzz word for years. Why? Because the Benedict Option has never been important enough in its own right for its beneficiary - Dreher, not you - to devote his time and energy to conceptualizing.
It's not even worth his reading a possibly relevant work by someone else all the way through. Frankly, your would-be Benedict Option book author would rather eat something tasty instead of thinking about his own signature buzz phrase, and he would rather just footnote-drop a reference to someone more notable than himself than even fully read and understand his own, self-chosen research material.
2. Contrary to the suggestive deceit Dreher has practiced upon his own Christian readership, as of this post there is no contracted publisher yet for a Benedict Option book. What Dreher is working on he is working on on spec only, hoping his agent will finally find a publisher foolish enough or desperate enough to bite. Those not yet biting have warned Dreher not to blog about the actual substance of the Benedict Option in the meantime, which is why so many posts are suggestively tagged with the term instead.
3. You, gullible Benedict Option-attracted Christian, are an agronomic commodity in the process of being husbanded and harvested to serve Rod Dreher's publishing income needs only, as if you were no more than so many hogs or soybeans. Happily for you, you are still free to choose which commodity describes you best.
So, based on Dreher's own accounts of the Benedict Option project to date, what will this sausage recipe actually look like?
Your Benedict Option Sausage Recipe
- Casing: 2 yards of 1/4" delicious, chewy suggestive word casing
- Anecdotes: 1 or more from a potential Benedict Option sausage lover, to taste
- (Other stuff*)
*If the level of litter in your cat box drops mysteriously overnight, don't blame your cat. And if your cat is smirking, see 3, above.
What a perfect approach to "research" -- read enough of someone else's book so that yours looks like it is properly sourced, even at the risk of possibly missing the entire point of that work. But since the universe of people that will have read both the cited book and Dreher's is vanishingly small, so is the risk of being called on it.
ReplyDeleteAnd like the Dante book -- his book can shine by reflecting the glow from others', without providing any itself.
The most surreal Benedict Option comment in the history of the galaxy, from
ReplyDeleteRobert says:
February 4, 2016 at 10:52 am
When the book comes out I hope that you appear on Bill Maher’s show. I think you could have a very productive dialogue with him and his audience.
Groot is painfully memorizing Robert's words, even as I type.
Know what I want, Robert? A pony.
No...a galloping centaur wielding twin HK416s and wearing a baseball cap backwards adorned with a vintage "I Like Ike" button. And a tab of whatever you're having.
I rather liked Alison's suggestion that Dreher read "Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales". Not on her own recommendation of course, but because she heard someone in the know mention it as a fave. That's perfect for Dreher -- there is zero chance that he'll read it, but near certainty that it'll be cited in the BenOp book (and perhaps recommended to others!).
ReplyDeleteDreher is simply the Creflo Dollar of the BenOpt movement. He can write a lot about it, speak about it for hours, but he can't begin living it.
ReplyDelete