A couple of days ago, I posted a video of Rod Dreher talking about “the Benedict Option.” It’s been both an interesting and controversial topic, a kind of Rorschach test for Christians and their understandings of the relationship between church and culture. Dreher sees the tension between the two hitting a real crescendo. Some of my own takeaways from the clip:
- Your culture can get things wrong. Too often we don’t think critically about the default settings of the world around us. It’s “This is Water” and the frog in the boiling water. And regardless of whether you think culture is good or bad, thinking well about the world around you is an essential part of living well.
- Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a real thing, even if it doesn’t show up on standardized tests asking for your religious preferences. Just yesterday, Dreher had a post concerning millennials and their approaches to big-picture decisions that he finds quite disturbing. You can read the post here. The tricky thing about MTD is that it tends to “nest” in the shell of orthodoxy and can only be discovered if you push a doctrinal issue (but more on that some other time).
- The historic parallel for the church between the contemporary world and the world of Saint Benedict is interesting. You can read quality thinkers that take opposing sides to the analogy’s viability. Even still, it is good to be reminded of precedent in considering the relationship between church and culture.
- The great weakness of Dreher’s presentation (and in the way he articulates it elsewhere) has been his use of the word retreat, which is easily linked with exile. For those raised on a “Christ and culture” paradigm, exile and retreat are not easy pills to swallow. And when many hear the word retreat, they imagine running away with your tail between your legs. I get the sense of what Dreher is going for, though. It’s a kind of reconnoitering. A way to get a real sense of how things are.
- I think it’s great that Dreher spends some time talking about James K. A. Smith and the idea of cultural liturgies. As we’ll see in a couple of days, Smith doesn’t quite agree with Dreher’s approach to things. Even so, the idea of necessary stories and practices and how they shape our engagement with the Christian story is an essential ingredient in any kind of response to the broader world.
The greater takeaway for me is the role of education in all of this. How do we educate with a view to present a full and fleshed out Christian worldview? How does something like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism get root in an evangelical setting? And how do we educate Christians who have spent so much time pushing back on things like rituals and traditions so they understand what we are losing and have already lost in terms of our own Christian culture?
Tomorrow we’ll take a quick look at the First Things article that Dreher mentions. It’s an interesting primer is the role of the church in culture. Then we’ll look at the reactions of other writers and thinkers (good and bad) to the Benedict Option.
The story of Kung Fu Panda 3 begins with adversaries on parallel paths. Po, the hero of the series, is set to take on the duties of teacher. At the same time, the villain Kai has returned from the spirit realm in order to steal all of the chi of the remaining masters. Po, of course, knows nothing of chi. Fortunately, Po’s long-lost father returns and takes him to the hidden village where the secrets of chi were said to have been kept. What starts as a sweet family reunion quickly sours when Po’s father confesses that the pandas of the hidden village have long forgotten the art of chi. The pandas are cute, cuddly, but ultimately clueless when they are called on to train Po in the only way that can bring him victory over Kai.
Douglas Coupland has been writing and drawing us into the future for some time. He has a particular knack for “getting things right” years before they happen. While I don’t always enjoy his short essays for the Financial Times, I did particularly enjoy his most recent entry, “Escaping the Superfuture.” His experience:
Lewis continued his discussion of The Lord of the Rings as myth in “The Dethronement of Power,” his review of The Two Towers and The Return of the King that appeared in the October 1955 issue of Time and Tide.
In his review of The Fellowship of the Ring, Lewis tackles the charges of “fiction as escapism or nostalgia” head-on. We saw hints of it in yesterday’s excerpt. We get an even better sense of it in the selection below. As with so many other things, Lewis does a great job of adding a “twist” to our understanding of what’s going on.
One of the things you hear most when reading Tolkien (or reading about Tolkien) is whether or not The Lord of the Rings is an allegory. Tolkien, of course, flatly denied the charge, but that hasn’t kept decades of readers from speculating about the atomic bomb and world wars and the effects of the industrial age. Lewis picks up on the possibility, too, but quickly dismisses it in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring. Consider:
Space Enough, and Time 