Is US Christianity in a state of emergency?
Christian bloggers are currently debating a new book from the Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.
In The Week, Damon Linker summarises the book’s argument as follows: “Christian conservatives need to practise ‘a new kind of Christian politics’ – or an ‘antipolitical politics’ – that follows the example of the religious order that St Benedict of Nursia founded in the 6th century to preserve and foster Christian civilisation as the Roman Empire decayed and crumbled around it.”
But Linker wonders if Dreher paints too rosy a picture of the past. “American Christianity has always been imperfect, morally flawed, doctrinally heretical,” says Linker. “Is it really different in kind and significantly debased in comparison to the quality of faith one would have found among a random sample of Americans during the 1850s?”
There is one vital difference, Linker concedes: contemporary society’s attitude towards sex. “Christianity in all of its manifold forms and expressions isn’t about to disappear, but comprehensive Christianity – a holistic vision of God and humanity, sexuality and sin, marriage and procreation – has been dethroned,” Linker writes.
The alternative to the Benedict Option
Patrick Deneen in First Things also had some reservations. The idea of Christians focussing on building their own communities at arm’s length from secular society, he wrote, is not the solution to avoiding extinction.
“If Christians are to eschew Washington DC as a lost cause, they should not imagine they can just build familial monasteries,” Deneen writes. “Instead, we need to focus on our town and city halls, our neighbourhood associations, seeking to foster the kinds of communities where our children can – and will – roam the fields again. At some scale, however small, the moral minority must become a majority again.”
‘The rise of squishy, feelgood Christianity’
John Waters of realclearbooks.com spoke with Rod Dreher directly. Waters argued: “Most of the country continues to live out its traditional values. Millions of people live their faith by volunteering at homeless shelters, food banks and prisons. Am I being overly optimistic about the state of society?” Dreher replied: “You are being overly optimistic about the state of the Church, which is more important than the state of the nation.”
During the interview Dreher said that the “millennial generation is secularising at a rate never seen before” and younger Christians’ beliefs had drifted far way from the Bible’s teachings into a “squishy, feelgood parody of Christianity.”
He added: “What I hope the Benedict Option does is to wake up the Church and tell those who have eyes to see and ears to hear that we had better start preparing now, and change the way we teach and live out our faith.”
✣ A Yale neuroscientist has left academia to become a Catholic priest. Jaime Maldonado-Aviles was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale, studying the neurological causes of addiction and depression, when he began to wonder if God was calling him to a different vocation. “[I had] this constant intuition – I almost want to say nagging – that maybe I was called to serve in a different way,” Maldonado-Aviles told the Washington Post.
“It was always frequent.” So eventually in 2014, he left his career as a high-flying scientist and entered the seminary at the Catholic University of America, where he has been studying ever since.
✣ The Franciscan monastery of Cochabamba, Bolivia has recently welcomed a furry friend into its fold. Before he was adopted, Carmelo (right) lived as a stray but now he is truly part of the Franciscan family and even wears the order’s signature habit.
“His life is all about playing and running,” friar Jorge Fernandez told The Dodo. “Here, all of the brothers love him very much. He is a creature of God.”
Carmelo’s adoption was arranged through a local animal rescue group, Proyecto Narices Frías (Cold Nose Project), which hopes that other religious orders will be inspired to adopt other stray animals.
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213
Korean martyrs being proposed for beatification by the bishops’ conference
Source: CNA/EWTN News
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