Author Topic: The Benedict Option  (Read 2678 times)

hoping2retire35

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The Benedict Option
« on: May 05, 2017, 08:42:21 PM »
Ivefollowed Rod Dreher for a while so the book is not a lot of new material. Halfway thrubefore I had to turn it in ( slow reader,house full of kids, short check out in new books) but seems pretty relevant. I was fascinated by how MMM urban tribe and the Ben Op community had a lot of intuitive similarities.

Anyone else reading?

Cowardly Toaster

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Re: The Benedict Option
« Reply #1 on: May 09, 2017, 04:07:43 PM »
I am also interested in this

kite

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Re: The Benedict Option
« Reply #2 on: May 15, 2017, 09:51:49 AM »
Halfway through.  I expected to like it more. 
The deliberate structure around life & influences is appealing, but I'm not as pessimistic as he is about our culture.  Where he characterizes the world (America in particular) as post-Christian, I think we've become more Christian over my half century lifetime. 
What was the civil rights movement if not the very embodiment of Christ's teaching?  Just in the past decade, my state got rid of the death penalty and enacted genuine bail reform.  We've got the ADA & the ACA; we view addiction as a disease. Young people are far less racist today.  I'm not glossing over issues we still face, but it was so much worse in every era before the one we are in right now.  The past only feels intuitively better because we ourselves were ignorant of the wolves. 

hoping2retire35

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Re: The Benedict Option
« Reply #3 on: May 16, 2017, 06:55:50 AM »
Kite-
I don't think Rod Dreher would disagree that those things are good and it would appear as though lots of progress has been made, but...
What he has observed, is that if anything that comes in the way of "religious liberty" then religious liberty is the loser. He cites the big reason for this is kids each generation are less religiously observant. In many ways, we should have practiced something akin to the BenOP all along. Our culture does not sustain a religious life. I think a lot of the readers would have thought our culture did do this or at least should do it, and have a hard time with a lot of more recent changes.

EDIT:Just to be clear, I don't think he wants to return to some fantasized past, at all(even if he did it would probably be somewhere between the end of the dark ages and beginning middle ages; not 1950s america). Dont' get too hung up on that point.
« Last Edit: May 16, 2017, 07:01:17 AM by hoping2retire35 »

 

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