Keith to launch Catholic newsletter to sell The Keith Project™

Readers of this blog have known from the beginning, possibly to the secret dismay of my co-bloggers, that I'm not Catholic, only a bad, frequently lapsed cradle Methodist. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of that fact, it just is what it is.

But I'm understandably excited to discover that, in this Internet age of quick cyber-linking, there's no reason at all I can't use a Catholic newsletter as a vehicle wrapper to sell my beloved Keith Project.

The model for my inspiration is the new The Benedict Post launched just this month by a secret blogger I'll call Muzhik from now on for want of a better name. Most of the time I'll also refer to that blog as Benny instead, for two reasons.

The main reason is obvious: when I or any of my co-bloggers or anyone else for that matter refers to a post by St. Benedict, none of us wants to be cannily roped into the trap of inadvertently shilling for Muzhik's blog (this is the same reason the people at Roget's Thesaurus gave me when I suggested the growing popularity of "keith" as a synonym for "good").

The other reason is that the effusive, profane peppy tone of Benny reminds me of nothing so much as Lena Dunham's very similar new newsletter, Lenny.

Our latest edition includes a fantastic @CrisisMag piece by Anthony Esolen on living the #BenedictOption http://t.co/w3uOTpECYZ @roddreher

— The Benedict Post (@thebenedictpost) July 28, 2015

But Keith, you ask, how can you, a non-Catholic, possibly launch a Catholic newsletter? And what is The Keith Project?

First things first: nothing to it.

Like, well, sort of like a cowbird laying its eggs in another bird's nest to be raised as its own, in the age of the Internet it will be nothing for me to scrounge together enough Catholic-related links to create the sort of Big Lots of Catholicism Muzhik has just launched.

And even better, as the one controlling that artificial compendium, I get to choose what gets emphatically placed as some kind of regular feature, in this case my beloved Keith Project which everyone is talking about, in a way that it draws prestige and gravitas from the Catholicism surrounding it.

But, Keith, you persist, what about those who would accuse you of not being Catholic?

Who says I'm not Catholic? Oh, right; I did. Okay, then, maybe I'll need to get a secret Muzhik of my own, Catholic, Jehovah's Witness, vegetarian, whatever. Wait a minute. No, I won't. I'll just do this and this instead:

The Benedict Post is only 2 weeks old and we've already got conspiracy theorists thinking we're not Catholic! http://t.co/VjvliLFTb6

— The Benedict Post (@thebenedictpost) July 22, 2015

"cursory reading by a non-Catholic like myself is enough to determine [it's] neither primarily about nor...primarily promote[s] Catholicism"

— The Benedict Post (@thebenedictpost) July 22, 2015

Just look at The Keith Post and what will you see? Wall to wall Catholicism, as far as the eye can see, and at deep, deep discounted prices! So much for "conspiracy theorists" saying "we", The Keith Post, isn't Catholic!

But I'm not there yet. I'm still going to have to master hurling breathless, exclamatory tweets like an M2 spitting rounds down range. Like these:

"The latest edition of The Benedict Post is out!"

"For the evening crowd, here's the new edition of The Benedict Post"

"If you missed this week's edition yesterday, here it is"

"If you enjoy our newsletter, you can subscribe via email"

Christ and the saints would be jazzed, don't you think? Especially because, unlike the money changers in the temple, it's free!

But once I master that ShamWow tweeting style, I can then seamlessly blend in my own promotions and explainers (see cowbird eggs, above) whenever I want. Here's how Muzhik does it:

People think #BenedictOption is about retreat, especially from political life. No. Ensuring orthodoxy in politics is part and parcel of it.

— The Benedict Post (@thebenedictpost) July 21, 2015

My version: sure, #KeithProject calls for talking your wife into letting you install a Sony XBR-85X950B 4K TV in your garage man cave. But a TV carries many channels. Think about it.

Okay, Keith, you continue to whine, irritatingly, but why a Catholic newsletter? Why not a Hollywood gossip newsletter or a model airplane newsletter?

What do you have against Catholics? Are you anti-Catholic? (Again, see cowbird, above.) How dare you question The Keith Post, effusively overflowing with Catholicism and only regular, periodic promotions and explainers about my beloved Keith Project! How dare you!

See how that works? Can't do that with a Hollywood gossip or a model airplane newsletter, nopers.Well, maybe a cowbird could.

But, finally, I'm going to have to line up some cronies to help me shill this thing

Thanks to @bdomenech & @TheTransom for featuring this week's edition! For more on @TheTransom, check it out here: http://t.co/Q2RuqCfE5F

— The Benedict Post (@thebenedictpost) July 22, 2015

Another edifying installment of The Benedict Post (@thebenedictpost): https://t.co/yyBZTPsBkX

— C. H. McCants (@Ponticianus) July 27, 2015

Anyone? Beuller?

Remember, in The Keith Project there are many channels.

And, you know, if you're moved to donate, too, I can set up a tax-deductible thingy like, snap!

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™: Christianity's Don Draper in action

Because, as Pauli and Pikkumatti have each just amply demonstrated above, the one thing Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ simply cannot be about logically is the defense and preservation of traditional Christianity in turbulent times, at the end of the day what is it?

Pure, unadulterated Madison Avenue, baby, where the Mad Man and his product are one and the same

Let's understand a reality at the outset. Like the very best whores, who don't present themselves as whores at all but as that woman you've been waiting for all your life (maybe a little bit of Mom, maybe a little of the Girl Next Door, and just enough of that one you really should have asked out but didn't but next time if there is one you betcha), the real Don Drapers of the world don't look or act like Don Drapers. They don't look like this:

That's what a TV show about a Don Draper Don Draper looks like.

Instead, a real Don Draper looks like this:

Awwww?!?! Like he just found a puppy! To the insecure, elderly lady who would easily drop kick the phone when the Jamaican scammer calls, this looks like what the aging, underutilized bosom has been waiting its whole life to embrace with a big old hug. What a sugar lump! Book ordered!

Similarly with other unfortunates of all stripes, from the revengeless nerd to the tenureless adjunct professor, this is the Online Friend, more important than they are, to be sure, but Not Too Good to like them. And to want to tell their story. And show them how to be saved.

Puppy Lump above is popularly known as a writer, occasionally mistakenly referred to as a journalist, but what he has in fact been for most of his career is a Don Draper, a packager and marketer of hopes, fears, anxieties and ideas, scavenged from others usually, but always in the service of his biggest client, himself.

His first book, Crunchy Cons, was just such a granola of disparate lifestyles and ideologies arbitrarily pulled together, slickly packaged, with a VW minibus and a Republican elephant (although Dreher has nothing but contempt for Republicans) on the cereal box cover instead of a toucan. And, of course, his breakthrough trademark brand: Crunchy Cons™.

Failing in the political counter-culture genre, he turned to the more dependable arena of bereavement: not everyone wears Birkenstocks, but everyone has family who die.

The rather foreseeable family backlash from turning his deceased sister into the next big breakfast cereal proved not to be a crisis for Don Puppy Lump, tilter at markets for himself, but another breakthrough opportunity: Ecce Puppy Lump, behold the victim, unjustly scourged by his own family, betrayed by his own body, ultimately to be saved by Dante - because Dante is quite trendy right now if you didn't know, but, more importantly, because a Medieval Italian poet provides a gateway back into the marketplace for Big Ideas.

Don Puppy Lump's first charge at the Big Idea market as editor of The John Templeton Foundation's new at the time Big Ideas Online blog (since reinvented at the liberal Slate) didn't fare that well. It seems someone named "Muzhik" couldn't keep his eye on the windmill and tried to run a squirrel up a tree instead.

But now he's back, making another run at the Big Ideas market with a brand pre-registered in the public consciousness as The Benedict Option™.

No one is quite sure what The Benedict Option™ product or service actually is or will be, but we are all already well-aware of its primary quality: it is as adhesive as The Booger from Hell. If you have an idea, or if a word is so reckless as to escape your mouth, The Benedict Option™ immediately sticks to it and incorporates it into itself like an amoeba absorbing its prey.

Unfortunately for Christians, somewhere along its travels this amoeba absorbed Christianity as its driving RNA. Conglomerated with everything else this amoeboid BO has accumulated along its eating tour - including not a small amount of its marketer's paranoid apocalyptic secular millenarianism - the Christianity of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is now expressing itself genetically like this from the apocalyptically entitled Christianity in Collapse:

Again and again: these are not normal times. We can’t be about business as usual. The future of Christianity in America will be Benedictine — as in Benedict Option — or it won’t be at all.

Well, there you have it, folks. From Christ's lips through Don Puppy Lump's white board to - who knows? - Guyana and beyond.

This is how a Don Draper repackages and markets ancient Christianity in an anxiety-ridden 21st CyberCentury. Call today! Operators are standing by.

Of course, you know, you could just go to church or Mass instead.

This one goes out to Muzhik

"Johnny? All yours!"



"Careful what you say, don't give yourself away."

LOL

The Man in the Cellophane Mask

As I had pointed out earlier, Rod Dreher's writing over the last year or so has been greatly curtailed by his employer, the John Templeton Foundation. In the meantime, speculations and questions from various sources about when he might be back have abounded. A hostile gay site asks "What's going on with Rod Dreher?" Another mean spirited blog entry hopes aloud that he was fired. Then there are Bluegrass Up and Alexandria voicing a more friendly curiosity, and from the online birthday party at Red Cardigan we learned that although Rod is not allowed to blog, he is allowed to comment on blogs. That was on February 14.

About two weeks later on March 3, Rod began blogging at the OCATruth site under the pseudonym "Muzhik", which means peasant in Russian. This was revealed by the OCA News site on April 30 based on "leaked" emails sent to Mark Stokoe, the OCA News site administrator. Since then, Rod has not added to his fifty blog posts as Muzhik. News items include the termination of a priest, Father Joseph Fester, who was in on the creation of OCA Truth and an FBI investigation about leaked emails. There is evidence that several OCA Truth posts hastily written since the outing have been since removed, a pretty good indication that they are shaken and confused, although to my mind they seemed to be the wronged party here.

Pikkumatti requested that I write up the cliff notes to this pile of spaghetti, but I admit that I need to buy a vowel as well. I don't know all the characters in this soap opera, and I admit that readily. The comments to the OCA news revelation may serve as a beginning, and there are some criticisms and condemnations of Dreher written there which make mine look mild and moderate by comparison. Some are strong enough to make me resemble the guy's drinking buddy. That suggestion is probably more likely than the narrative behind Mark Shea's accusation that I really, really hate Rod Dreher which he made a year ago in National Catholic Register. But no, I'd rather drink with happy, non-anonymous people who don't hug the bottle, and I doubt our Working Peasant would want to kick a six of MHL with such an admitted cultural Philistine.

Another piece penned around the same time a year ago was Dreher's blast at the OCA's former administration, suggesting that Metropolitan Herman has a gay lover and extolling the newly elected Metropolitan Jonah for condemning the previous administrations for corruption. Maybe he got that idea from shots at George Bush in Barack Obama speeches? I was thinking that Rod's line—"Seeing him lead us at the March for Life made me so proud to be OCA, and that’s not a feeling I’m accustomed to"—on that first post as Muzhik reminded me of Michelle Obama's comment during the 2008 campaign. An interesting admission, I think, that he's rarely proud of his new denomination. But this is a digression, sorry. My main point in bringing up the "Primate Rape" post is that in the comment section, he predictably returned to his old standby topic, the Roman Catholic clergy abuse scandal, and wrote 3 or 4 times the copy as the original post about the OCA. I won't excerpt any of that here, you can go read it yourself. He hit all the old memes: the Pope's moral failings, the lack of action on the part of Catholic lay people because they shrugged and said "It's no big deal" instead of starting blogs, bishops didn't attack other bishops enough in public, the absolute need for righteous journalists to uncover corruption, etc.

It appears that Muzhik is not much different than Rod Dreher. In his post titled This is not a game. This is real life, peasant Muzhik informs his Orthodox readers about what is going on in the Catholic church in a warning tone.

Any OCA bishop not affected by what the Roman Catholic Church has suffered because its bishops did not take sexual integrity and immorality seriously, is a fool. In Philadelphia, a grand jury recently indicted a monsignor of the Roman church over his alleged complicity in the rape of children by two priests. This monsignor did not participate in any sexual assault. The grand jury indicted him because he knew these priests were pedophiles, and he assigned them to ministry anyway.

If the state is willing to go that far there, in Philly, will it not do the same elsewhere? Personally, I rejoice in this. The bishops of the Roman church are incapable of policing themselves, and in taking their responsibilities to the faithful seriously. Let some of them start going to jail for the damage they do. That will get their attention. If our hierarchs don’t get right on this issue, they too may face jail. And that is not a bad thing.

To my knowledge, we don’t have any issues in the OCA like what the Catholics are dealing with, but I am in no position to know for sure....

Here's a cute one from March 14 where Muzhik publishes a note from a reader. Read the letter. Of whom does the reader remind you?

Over the weekend, I received an e-mail from a man who said he had been thinking for a long time that “the OCA promised by Metropolitan Jonah” is the place he and his family belonged. They are feeling defeated by the chronic problems in the Roman Catholic Church, and want a solid, orthodox place to grow in Christ. The recent trouble between the Synod and His Beatitude had discouraged the man, but he said that seeing my name on the list of Jonah supporters gave him confidence. I’m honored by his confidence in my judgment, and I’m glad to be part of an effort to spread the good news about Met. Jonah, and to remind the wider world that there’s another side to the story. His letter reminds me, though, that there are huge implications to this crisis beyond the immediate result of whether or not His Beatitude survives it. People are watching us, and not just fellow Orthodox. We are a very small church, and we cannot afford to lose potential converts. More importantly, we cannot afford to lose ordinary families who are desperate for what Orthodoxy offers. That’s how my family found its way into the OCA. We didn’t come because we believed in the bishops. We came because we believed in Orthodoxy. But the bishops, if they don’t get their act together and act like men of God instead of CEOs, will make it ever more difficult for people on the outside to hear the call of the Gospel in Orthodoxy over the noise of the petty game-playing and agenda-pushing.

The emphases are mine. Sounds like the Working Boy, doesn't it? It sort of reminded me of the episode where Bruce Wayne calls Batman on the Bat-phone. Alfred has to use some special kind of computer keyboard connected to the phone and programmed with words spoken in Batman's voice. The internet sure has simplified things.

Here's another post, The Long Game (didn't he say "This is not a game" earlier?) which takes some more shots at the Catholic church. For the record, I'm not really concerned with the posts that don't contain the word "catholic" in them. That's how I've chosen the ones to highlight, by the way.

Fr. Ted Bobosh, who is the ethics chair of the MC, has publicly stated that he doesn’t believe homosexuality to be a sin, and Mark Stokoe, Bobosh’s parishioner, is living with a same-sex partner, though we don’t know whether or not they are living chastely. Again and again, I don’t make it my business to pry into the sex lives of other people, but as an Orthodox layperson, I have a right to expect that the private lives of the men and women who serve in leadership capacities in our church — especially top leaders like MC members — are lived in conformity with Orthodox teaching, especially on a subject as contentious within all Christian churches as homosexuality. +Tikhon can’t brush this aside (nor can the other bishops), especially not in light of the destructive experiences of the Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches with this subject. Not only is this a matter of theological divisiveness, but a hidden culture of sexual sinfulness among the clergy (homo and hetero) has wreaked total havoc within other churches, especially the Catholic Church. We cannot let tolerance for that kind of thing take hold in the OCA, because it will tear us apart. The OCA is not going to change its teaching on homosexuality, but neither have the Catholics, and they have been devastated by the secrets kept and lies told to keep a facade of holiness for the laity’s consumption while the reality of life among some of the clergy is very different.

Got to love that ol' Catholic facade of holiness!

I had already blogged on this post by anonymous blogger Tovarishch which features a letter from non-anonymous Rod Dreher. Here's an excerpt from it which I find darkly humorous:

The OCA, like the Roman Catholic Church in our country, is too often an absolutely passive church, one that just stands back from the culture in self-satisfaction and with a false sense of invulnerability, while opportunities to open the door for Christ to save souls slips through our complacent fingers. True, none of us need the permission of priests or bishops to evangelize for Orthodox Christianity, but when you have a visionary pastor like His Beatitude, who is all-in for a visible, counter-cultural Orthodox mission, it does wonders for one’s sense of hope and confidence.

I agree that everyone, Catholics included, should be doing more to spread the Gospel message. But I'm sorry, when you add in the current context, what I'm forced take away from this is that if Catholics were more active in spreading the Gospel, we'd be starting more anonymous blogs, then we'd be writing letters to the anonymous authors and signing our real names to be published in said anonymous blogs. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.

I could go into a long list of books written by Bishops like Chaput and Wuerl and Popes like Benedict and John Paul along with those by hundreds of Catholic priests and lay people. But what a waste of time that would be, tilting at the cardboard windmill of Dreher's official narrative.

Well you can read the rest of the entire Rod Dreher Muzhik catalog on your own. I wish I had read more of it a couple weeks back. I think I might have outed Dreher as Muzhik without doing anything potentially illegal or unethical. He's wearing a mask, but it is made of cellophane. Who could have written this stuff other than him?

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