Welcome to Litsy!

Ehn..

A very similar message to Out of the Ashes (Anthony Esolen), and reminiscent of The Abolition of Man (C S Lewis), but this one is more meandering in a “let‘s consider these ideas and mull over community prospects” way instead of directly confronting and proposing specifics. I think it‘s a good companion to those, but if I had to pick only one, it wouldn‘t be this one.

Lots of good thoughts. A little too monastic for my liking. Downplays the work of the Holy Spirit.

I am a fan of the Rule of St Benedict and have studied under monks. So, I purchased this book w/o research and by title alone. I am a liberal, affirming pastor who has had to listen to stories of LGBTQ people and what the church has done to them. I try to clean messes and rebuild lives. This is calling for conservative Christians to fight harder against people like me who are affirming and loving. I was not aware this was a code word. Garbage.

The Benedict Option is a call to [undertake] the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity's big lie: that human beings are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like.

"one effect of which is to culture Christians to believe that God blesses whatever makes them happy.... It is a protein theology, because there god to whom it bears witness is the ever-changing Self..."

??

The technocrat decides what he or she wants and, once it is available via technology, rationalizes accepting it. Concealing what technology takes away from us is a feature of the technocratic worldview. We come to think of technological advances as inevitable because they are irresistible. Just as "truth" for the technocrat is what is useful and effective, what is "good" for him is what is possible and desirable.

What gave birth to technology as a comprehensive worldview was the sense, beginning with nominalists and emerging in the early modern era, that nature has no intrinsic meaning. It's just stuff. To Technological Man, "truth" is what works to extend his dominion over nature and make that stuff into things he finds useful or pleasurable, thereby fulfilling his sense of what it means to exist.

In "Paul Among the People," author Sarah Ruden contends that it is profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending on happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.... Christanity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and the human body, and infusing marriage -- and marital sexuality -- with love.

????

"The classical education of the pagans that was transformed by the church attempted to inculcate in each new generation an idea of what a human being should be, through constantly having examples of ideal humanity set in front of it, and by studying the great deeds of great men.... This was a culture with a definite and distinctive goal: to pass on the wisdom of the past and produce another generation with the same ideals and values."

YES.

"Liturgy restores the stability we've lost by cementing the story of the gospel in our bodies.... If we want to know what to do, we must first determine the story to which we belong."

"Again, the new Trump administer may be able to block or at least slow these moves with its judicial appointments, but this is small consolation. Will the law as written by a conservative legislature and interpreted by conservative judges overwrite the law of the human heart? No, it will not. Politics is no substitute for personal holiness."

YES. ?

"'God has distributed his graces in such a way that we really need each other,' said the priest. 'Certainly there's the old man within me that craves individualism, but the more I live in community, the more I see that you can't have it and be faithful, or fully human.'"

[Stability] anchors you and gives you the freedom that comes from not being subject to the wind, the waves, and the currents of daily life.

Suffering doesn't make sense to us...

"The Judeo-Christian culture of the West was dying because it no longer deeply believed in Christian sacred order...& it had no way of agreeing on the 'thou shall nots' that every culture must have to restrain individual passions & direct them to socially beneficial ends. What made our condition so revolutionary... was that for the first time in history, the West was attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief in a higher order..."

"Psychology did not necessarily intend to change a man's character, as in the old Christian therapies of repentance as a step toward conforming to God's will, but rather to help that man become comfortable with who he is."

Wow.

"Sigmund Freud... found his true genius not as a scientist but as a quasi-religious figure who discerned & proclaimed the Self as a deity to replace the Christian religion. Yet Freud's immense cultural authority depended on his role as an icon of science.... In his therapeutic vision, we should stop the fruitless searching for a nonexistent source of meaning & instead seek self-fulfillment."

"Medieval Christianity focused on the fall of man, but the more humanistic Christianity of the Renaissance centered on man's potential.... Scholasticism emphasized reason and intellect as the way to relate to God; Christian humanism focused on the will. The danger was that Christian humanists would become too enamored of human potential and man's capacity for self-creation and lose sight of his chronic inclination toward sin."

"The problem with [Moralistic Therapeutic Deism]... is that it's mostly about improving one's self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to go with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering -- the Way of the Cross -- as the pathway to God."

Wow.

We had to read an article about the book for school and I knew I had to read this book. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says but I agree with a lot. I'm sure this book will stir up lots of conversations between Christians.