Post by Fair Observer

This Week: A Book That Irritated and Interested me in Equal Measure Rod Dreher is an American journalist who spent much of his adult life in search of spiritual seriousness. He converted to Catholicism with great conviction, then watched the clerical abuse crisis unfold from the inside — he covered it as a journalist — and what he saw broke something in him. He left for Eastern Orthodoxy. He now lives in Hungary, where Orbán's government until recently openly organized public life around Christian civilizational identity  The state maintains the fortress so he doesn't have to do it alone. Now, we’ll see what will change with Peter Magiar. The Benedict Option is the book he wrote in between — between the deception and the relocation. It is the intellectual architecture a serious man builds around a serious query. Which is why it deserves a serious response rather than a dismissal. His argument: Western Christianity is losing, the secular world is hostile, and Christians should withdraw into intentional communities — ordered, disciplined, rooted in the Rule of Saint Benedict — to preserve what matters through the coming darkness. He is not entirely wrong about the diagnosis. But I’m afraid is substantially wrong about the prescription. And the reasons why matter beyond Christianity, beyond conservatism, beyond whatever you think about God. This week I offer a unorthodox kind of book review that takes Dreher seriously enough to disagree with him carefully — with some help from Peter Brown, Baruch Spinoza, Umberto Eco, and Benedict of Nursia himself, who turns out to be considerably more interesting than Dreher's version of him. — Roberta Artemisia Campani