A couple of months ago, in one of my “Weekly Reading” posts, I linked to a piece by Rod Dreher where he describes a First Things (FT) conference “discuss the future of religion in the public square” The three conference papers have now been published. They are as follows:...
It has been nearly two years since Rod Dreher infected American religious discourse with The Benedict Option, an under-theorized mishmash of derivative ideas and conclusions meant to finance its author’s extravagant trips to foreign dinner tables. By spawning a litany of lesser-known “Options” in magazine articles and web-logs, Dreher managed to unwittingly play into...
This week’s edition of The Economist contains a review of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, a work that hasn’t quite (temporarily) captured the public’s imagination in the way Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option did last year. (Perhaps too many people are reading Jordan Peterson.) The Economist, which has never shied away from its roots as...
Recently, over at that great forum of learned and calm disputation known as Facebook, my friend Conor Dugan posted a link to his recent review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option for Catholic World Report. Although I disagree with some of Dugan’s comments on the book, I am not interested in critiquing it. In...
I must admit I was caught off guard a couple of days ago when integralism became a talking point on Catholic social media. The source of this discussion was an article by Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy, “Indexing Political Theologies: Six Christianity and Culture Strategies.” One of the “options” made available was “Catholic Integralism,”...
Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” (BenOp) is not novel, and the somewhat anticipated book-turned-bestseller regurgitating what Dreher has said on the BenOp over at his American Conservative web-log further confirms this truth. Ostensibly drawn from the closing section of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, the BenOp has been castigated as being everything from class-based posturing to...
As most readers know by now, I have appeared on Magnificat Radio’s weekly show, Church and State, several times over the past year. Magnificat Media, which runs the radio feed, is currently in the midst of a November fund drive with the aim of raising $25,000 by the close of this month. Further information on...
The Catholic Church’s Jubilee Year of Mercy begins today. The Holy Doors are open in Rome; a small percentage of Latin Catholics will go to Mass for the Immaculate Conception; and Pope Francis’s legislation implementing “Catholic Divorce” comes into effect. In the United States, American Catholics are up to their usual business of behaving...
No one can be so optimistic as to believe that the ideal of a Christian state is going to spread throughout the world in the near future, apart from the extraordinary intervention of Divine Providence. Yet, that should not prevent Catholics from proclaiming unhesitatingly the absolute necessity of a return to Christ on the...
I assure you: the new theme of Opus Publicum is not Dylan Pahman. However, when one man is wrong about so much and so often, it’s difficult not to say something. Following up on his misguided and ill-reasoned attack on Pope Francis, Pahman now turns his sights to the so-called Benedict Option and those...
