Is your faith Benedict Option compliant?

Not all are, you know.

Many people while believing they are faithful Christians may actually be infested by a dreaded wasting heresy, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a pestilence far less objectively real than termites but far more damaging to one's soul.

Fortunately, there's a remedy for that: Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™.

The cure for what ails ya

If you're Russian Orthodox like Rod, you're almost certain to be Benedict Option compliant automatically, but, if not, why take chances?

Schedule a 12-point Benedict Option audit today for your church, faith, meeting group, Sunday School class, or just yourself personally by emailing God's Own self-appointed Vicar of Benedict Option Compliance today at

rod@amconmag.com

and be sure your subject line reads simply

Benedict Option

That's all there is to it!

When your email is received, Benedict Option founder and spokesman Rod Dreher will immediately schedule your Benedict Option audit, meet with you personally to review both your personal errors and sins as well as those of your entire faith, and prescribe a course of action to get you back on the approved Benedict Option path in no time at all.

No matter what your failings, Catholic, Episcopalian or just someone who prays sitting down, Rod is there for you to help you get back on track - today.

Don't wait a moment longer - email Rod today!

A possible explanation for the Benedict Option

"Can you see that I am serious?"



There's your answer, Fishbulb."

The Benedict Option: update on Benny

The Benedict Post: still dead as a doornail, two full months now to the day.

Like General Francisco Franco, Benny is still dead (mostly)

Let's review.

At the peak of Rod Dreher's initial Benedict Option mania this past summer, Benny (a Lenny for Benedict Option-susceptible Catholics) launched as a fully-fledged anonymously published newsletter, supposedly to serve the Catholic community online, but curiously containing within each weekly edition a promotion for Dreher's Benedict Option as a solution for dissatisfied traditional Catholics, written in Dreher's same chatty New York Post-imprinted style in his signature real-payload-within-a-deceptively palatable-outer-wrapper technique of presentation.

Despite its anonymity - abnormally odd, to me at least, for an ostensibly devoutly believing Catholic promoting his singularly beloved religion - and creation out of nowhere and nothing, Benny was immediately picked up and celebrated by Rod Dreher's friends at The Federalist including Ben Domenech among others.

But maybe Ben just normally features whatever anonymously published newsletters happen to splash into the Web and Twittersphere on any given day.

After only a few issues, Benny decided he was working too hard and took a full week's "vacation", just after Rod himself went on vacation. When Rod Dreher's father went into terminal decline and died, requiring his undivided attention, Benny immediately ceased publication and died as well (so far).

I am of the opinion that my calling The Benedict Post out as a sock puppet effort designed and written by Rod Dreher himself to push his Benedict Option among dissatisfied traditional Catholics looking for an escape also contributed to Benny's sudden silence. Readers familiar with the short life of Dreher's Bonnie Blue Review blog launched when he first moved back to St. Francisville will recall a similarly ambitious, similarly styled attempt which Dreher was also quick to pull the plug on when criticized about it.

I will be more than happy to update this reporting as soon as the still anonymous celebrator of his Catholicism decides to breach his shame at being known for this work and attach his name to his efforts.

Meanwhile, on a far, far easier row to hoe with a hectic Benedict Option tour still ongoing, Benny's Twitter feed is active once again - if Tweeting can even be counted as activity - eerily paralleling Dreher's current posting on the Synod and echoing his same sentiments from his TAC blog, while throwing a dependable big wet kiss to frequently-Dreher-quoted Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who surely, someday, will return the favor by recommending Dreher for a column there.

While viewing this feed, Twitter recommends I might also like some related feeds from - who would have guessed? - @BenedictOption, @PatrickDeneen, and other @s orbiting tightly within Dreher's regular commentary.

What a remarkable coincidence.

Again, as I mentioned above, in the same manner established as fully legitimate by Rod Dreher himself, I will be more than happy to update my reporting on the anonymous manipulator of the Catholic blogosphere, Benny, the moment they decide to attach their name to their peculiar efforts.

I'm not holding my breath.

Everything is now The Benedict Option

Finding that not having bothered to think very much about what, if any, substantial meaning underpins his widely-marketed catch phrase "The Benedict Option" has left him a bit short of change at the Q & A counter, Rod Dreher has now turned his attention to filling that bottomless moat he's managed to dig around his castle with whatever immediately comes to hand, particularly through crowdsourcing on his blog.

We can help!

Previously pressed by one of his young devotees, Leah Libresco, to name practical examples of how a Christian might engage and exercise his Benedict Option, Leah tells us "between the two of them, they came up with:"

1) invite a group to dinner;
2) memorize a poem;
3) adopt a prayer rule.

The other brain referred to in this two-brainer Leah credits above was Ken Myers.

Clearly anyone can see all of these are powerful activities, unique to this most unique of concepts, one itself uniquely critical for surviving these most difficult of dark times now and ahead, particularly if one is utterly clueless about the existing Christian resources abounding in the most Christian nation in the world.

With these three above as our guide, I believe we can all now contribute to fleshing out Rod's full Benedict Option program in its entirety. I'll begin.

 4) Stand tall against the encroaching barbarism: capitalize your sentences.
 5) Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
 6) Sing a song.
 7) Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.
 8) Don't swear in church.
 9) Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
10) Take a kid fishing.
11) As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
12) Look both ways before crossing the street.
13) Those friends thou hast, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.
14) Stop! Don't touch. Run away. Tell a grown-up.
15) Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
16) If you borrow your neighbor's weed wacker, return it, with a thank you.
17) Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.
18) Dress warmly in cool weather and coolly in warm.
19) Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
20) Go fly a kite.
21) Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
22) Paint the house, and do it right this time.
23) Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
24) Bake a pie.
25) Keep interested in your own career, however humble.
26) Help a little old lady across the street.
27) Remember, you are a caring nurturer, so nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
28) Build a better mousetrap.
29) Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
30) Start a Pilates group.
31) Do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade.
32) Drop that unneeded comprehensive coverage and save fifteen per cent.
33) Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars.
34) Lean forward.
35) Always remember, you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggonit, people like you.
36) Take a bite out of crime.
37) Explore a new hobby. The world will always need another flugelhorn player.
38) Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery.
39) Lift with the legs, never with the back.
40) Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
41) Master the game of bridge.
42) Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
43) Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
44) Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.
45) Measure twice, cut once.
46) Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
47) Launch a book club. You know whose books to buy.
48) Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too.
49) Keep both feet planted firmly on the ground.
50) Tell your children you love them.

Whew! And that's only the start of inventorying the entire universe of human experience and practice for systematic inclusion as examples of the Benedict Option, particularly without the help of those handy label guns that stick those tiny little number code labels on the bell peppers which you can never get off because - Duh! - they use a hydrocarbon-soluble glue, not a water-based glue, and who in their right mind cleans their bell peppers in gasoline?

So, please, help. Give generously to make this the best and most complete Benedict Option list ever.

Benedict Option Marketing Problems

Let's get a few things out of the way at the outset. Despite Rod Dreher's wish to evoke and insinuate any or all of these, his so-called Benedict Option was never practiced by Benedict of Nursia, nor did Alasdair MacIntyre ever recommend a "Benedict Option" in After Virtue. As Pauli has already said most succinctly of Dreher's calculatingly manufactured phrase, "It's not Benedictine and it's not an option."

What is it I'm addressing here, then?

Although Rod wants to draw on several threads in Christian tradition in compounding a marketing brand about which to then write and sell a book, resonant as Benedict of Nursia, Pope Emeritus Benedict, or MacIntyre's invocation of the name Benedict might be within those traditional Christian circles searching for a silver bullet to save themselves from what troubles them about the age we live in, outside such limited circles the phrase "The Benedict Option" itself immediately becomes as intuitively opaque a name for a brand as Snapple. Unless you already know what it refers to, you haven't a clue what it refers to.

Let's not forget, as its creator himself has explained on more than one occasion "The Benedict Option" is not a collection of examples Dreher is struggling to give a name to but just the opposite, a phrase he continues to struggle to explain and provide uniquely meaningful representative examples of.

As a matter of fact, enter "Benedict" into Google, and the first thing that pops up is the face of this guy:

Wrong Benedict

Rod Dreher chose the phrase "The Benedict Option" for his book-to-be marketing project for several reasons, first, as mentioned, for the evocative value of "Benedict" among traditional Christians, his hoped for core readership. His now moribund sock puppet side project "The Benedict Post" pursued the same strategy.

Second, branding it as a capitalized "Option" gives it powerful dynamism, particularly with respect to any group currently feeling helpless. Benedict + Option, opaque as that compound still is, now becomes a murky clarion call to action, somewhere between a pre-planned "Take the children and go to your sister's!" and the hopelessly unpredictable results of firing off a six shooter in the night in the midst of a herd of cattle.

Hopefully, though, with this dynamic "Option" now an equal ingredient in the marketing phrase someone, somewhere will now want to do something Rod can write about.

But the problem of the opacity of the phrase stubbornly remains, dynamism or not. Here is "The Benedict Option", now placed within a field of phrases which similarly do not contain their meaning within themselves:

The Network Effect
Beneful
The Benedict Option
The Spearmint Rhino
The China Syndrome
Heaven's Gate
The Holcroft Covenant
The Apocalypse Watch

I really have no doubt that Dreher chose "The Benedict Option" to evoke the same dynamic thrill intended to be invoked by this list. Perhaps he had visions of Shawnee Smith or someone else headlining a made-for-TV anti-cultural Christian thriller, but in his zeal to unilaterally attempt to generate publicity buzz for a not-yet-existent Christian movement in order to then someday write a book about it, he unfortunately managed to couple an intuitively opaque branding vehicle with a concept he could never hope to trademark or otherwise protect.

Why is this a problem? We'll see in further detail below.

First, Dreher could have formed an organization incorporating "The Benedict Option" as part of its legally protected identity and then pushed franchises. Unfortunately that option would be obviously even more self-serving than his current efforts and, needless to say, far harder to sell by appeals to "the disaster of the Enlightenment and modernity itself."

But even if he had given his inchoate phrase-concept such a definitive rooting, legally protected brands can still find themselves either unexpectedly on the wrong side of history like this once happy and promising product

"Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?"

or else somehow hopelessly ill-conceived from the start.

So. Even though Rod is burning his candle at both ends trying to recruit other Christians under an umbrella label they, but most often he and he alone, regardless of their interest or consent, refer to as "The Benedict Option", he can't legally protect his only-a-concept - now containing and implicating their lives as well - in any way whatsoever. Such as, for example, from ending up in the Urban Dictionary alongside "truffle butter" (not safe for decent people to look up; you have been warned). Just take my word for it, it's not a French delicacy.

Or from having someone else subsequently appropriate Dreher's coolly hip "Benedict Option" phrase for their own ends and actually trademark it as their exclusive legal property after the fact of his having unilaterally subsumed every other Christian he can manage to rub up against under it, like this hypothetical future entrepreneur of a chain of decidedly non-Benedictine establishments decided to do.

His focus at least seems to be heterosexual:

The next one's need not be.

Yes, there's Wikipedia disambiguation, but do you really want your non-immediate friends and relatives even wondering why on Earth you and your family are somehow mixed up with that chain of gay bathhouses you heard about on the news named "The Benedict Option"?

So let me summarize the problems surrounding Dreher's attempt to create a marketing brand called "The Benedict Option" in order that he can further his career as a writer by writing a book about it:

• Outside of those already practicing what they need to be doing and who already know what the words refer to, "The Benedict Option" is an inscrutably opaque phrase, meaning nothing - or anything - to the broader population at large.

• The only-a-concept "Benedict Option" and the phrase referring to it as Dreher wishes to employ it cannot be patented or trademarked or otherwise legally protected from any sort of abuse; but

• Anyone else can, after Dreher has already published that your wife is a "Benedict Option Mama" and your kids are "Ben Op" kids, subsequently appropriate the phrases  "The Benedict Option" and "Ben Op" to his own, including conceivably quite nasty, ends while legally protecting his exclusive use of them - for example, suing you for illegaly using them - to whatever those ends happen to be.

Here's the bottom line as I see it. Do you feel a need to replenish, recharge, reassert your Christianity? If so, why would you want to consign yourself and your family to this sort of "Benedict Option" branding trap? What could you possibly hope to gain by assuming Dreher's manufactured mantle of faux-authenticity?

Instead, here are a number of already proven and well-established hallmarks under the aegis of which to assemble your efforts:

Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour
The Catholic Church
The Presbyterian Church
The Methodist Church
The Episcopal Church
The Baptist Church
The Orthodox Church

You get the idea. And there are many, many others, all intuitively transparent, completely unambiguous, and every one immune to reappropriation to commercial ends you may not have considered, the worst of which I have already effortlessly imagined for you above.

We are called to be salt and light to the world. One of the assumptions underpinning that divine commission is having a grasp above that of a six-year-old of how that doggone real world works in the age in which one is commissioned. I have serious doubts that Rod Dreher has a clue, but that at worst need only be a problem for him and his family, not you and yours.

Please, fellow Christians, just think before you allow someone else to label you and your family to suit his own commercial ends above all others. Your children may end up thanking you most of all.

Open Comment Thread (2015-10)

A little late on posting this. Have at it.



Wow, I said "have at it" last time. What an old, predictable coot I'm becoming.

("Becoming!?" said his kids....)

The Real Sexual Revolution

The real "sexual revolution" took place in the early Church, and the one people talk about in the sixties was just an attempt to undo it. Many people who have rediscovered the restoration of the beauty and integrity of the human person are converts to the Catholic Faith, and a number of them (130 to be precise) have delivered what I think is by far the most gracious, balanced and respectful letter voicing the concerns of the Catholic faithful with regard to the Synod on the Family. Excerpt:

With respect to the bewildering diversity of contemporary opinions about the human good, especially where questions about the human body are concerned, we understood that the radical nature of the Christian claim − that God, the Son, had taken up all flesh into Himself − was at stake. Christ “revealed man to himself” (Gaudium et Spes 22). He thereby “made clear” the meaning of our humanity – and with it the meaning of the body, of sexual difference, of sexuality, marriage and the family. He did this, for example, when the Pharisees asked him about divorce, and he turned them (and his own disciples) back to “the beginning,” to human nature as it was created. What is more, he brought something new to that same humanity, bestowing on it, mercifully, a share in His own fidelity to the Church. It was not by accident, then, that early Christians were drawn to the Church through the radiant humanity of His followers, manifest, for example, in their unique attitudes toward women, children, human sexuality, and marriage. And it was not by accident that, for the same reasons, we too were drawn to the Church many centuries later.

We are keenly aware of the difficult pastoral situations that you will be confronting at the Synod, especially those concerning divorced Catholics. We also share something of the burden you carry in confronting them. Some of us have experienced the pain of divorce in our own lives; and virtually all of us have friends or close relatives who have been so afflicted. We are therefore grateful that attention is being paid to a problem that causes such grievous harm to husbands and wives, their children, and indeed the culture at large.

We are writing you, however, because of our concerns about certain proposals to change the church’s discipline regarding communion for Catholics who are divorced and civilly re-married. We are frankly surprised by the opinion of some who are proposing a “way of penance” that would tolerate what the Church has never allowed. In our judgment such proposals fail to do justice to the irrevocability of the marriage bond, either by writing off the “first” marriage as if it were somehow “dead,” or, worse, by recognizing its continued existence but then doing violence to it. We do not see how these proposals can do anything other than contradict the Christian doctrine of marriage itself. But we also fail to see how such innovations can be, as they claim, either pastoral or merciful. However well meaning, pastoral responses that do not respect the truth of things can only aggravate the very suffering that they seek to alleviate. We cannot help but think of the abandoned spouses and their children. Thinking of the next generation, how can such changes possibly foster in young people an appreciation of the beauty of the insolubility of marriage?

Our current Holy Father is quoted in the letter:

"Today, there are those who say that marriage is out of fashion….They say that it is not worth making a life-long commitment, making a definitive decision, ‘forever,’ because we do not know what tomorrow will bring. I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, I ask you to swim against the time; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes you are incapable of responsibility, that believes you are incapable of true love." - World Youth Day, 2013

Here's the concluding statement, but I hope everyone goes and reads the letter in its entirety: "It is our hope that our witness will strengthen yours so that the Church may continue to be the answer to what the human heart most deeply desires." That's why I became a Roman Catholic. I discovered that it is the only religion which answers the longings of the human heart.

To me, the details surrounding the process of annulment-granting is not really interesting at all. Loosening the requirements or tightening them are not even the point. I just feel a deep sadness thinking that people could go through so much pain and then realize that, if indeed their marriage was null, they didn't get one bit of grace from it. What a complete waste of their time and of themselves. Unless maybe they learned something from the experience and can actually make a sacramental marriage the second time around.

I heard a woman casually discussing her annulment with another woman in line for confession one time and I thought that it's no big wonder people think it's Catholic divorce. They treat annulments with more respect than their own marriage.

The list of people who signed the letter contains a great list people whom I deeply respect: J. Budziszewski, Jeff Cavins, David B. Currie, Dawn Eden Goldstein, Scott & Kimberly Hahn, Marcus Grodi, Austin Ruse, Tim Staples, etc. I'm humbled and happy to be a small follower in their larger footsteps.

No, no, no, possibly and it's hard to say

I liked this article on the Synod on the Family from CNN. It's short and to the point. Here's a cliff notes summary:

1. Will the church change its position on same-sex marriage?

No.

2. Will the church change its teaching on birth control or abortion?

No.

3. What about euthanasia?

No.

4. So will this meeting change anything at all?

Possibly.

5. If the synod does recommend any changes, when will they take effect?

It's hard to say.

Number four is the placeholder for the liberals hopey for changey. The strategy for "this meeting" is the same as always for liberals: to take some tossed-off lines from Pope Francis or from others that are written down into documents which can have interpretations read into them. Then they will base their actions on the agenda they inject. This is what they've done for years with Vatican II, so I highly doubt they will do anything different for this synod.

For example, notice this line: "Pope [Francis] has said the communion is 'medicine' and not a 'prize for the perfect.'" This is not a Pope Francis thing, this is basically the traditional Catholic response to the Jansenist heresy and there is nothing new or innovative about the statement at all. The priest who first gave me instruction went even further stating that "Holy Communion is medicine for your soul not a reward for being good". So forget perfect for a minute, you don't have to even be good to receive communion! All you need to be is in a state of grace and not in some persistent state of sin like being in an unlawful marriage.

Normal Catholics and people in general will note how much middle ground exists between perfection and a persistent state of sin. Most of my friends and acquaintances are somewhere in between. But liberals love to spend their time at the poles. So they will treat the whole thing like a binary either/or proposition. For example, many liberals give the impression that if you don't approve of and celebrate every immoral act of an active homosexual then you are no better than people who physically attack and kill homosexuals. And if you make distinctions — like the Church does — between valid and invalid marriages then you really don't think that those people in the latter love each other. Which of course has nothing to do with being either in a state of grace or a persistent state of sin.

I'm not worried that anything horrible is going to take place within the context of the synod. I do think that some people will take it as a green light to push a liberal agenda, and it is amusing to see them pretty much doing this already when this meeting is just getting underway. The worst I fear is that the Church might lose an opportunity to clarify its constant teaching in the interference of all the gay talk. But it wouldn't be the first of the last time that's happened. But I think that TFP and MBD are overly worried.