Dave

“If you isolate yourself, you will become weird,” Father Marc continued. “It is a tricky balance between allowing freedom and openness on the one hand, and maintaining a community identity on the other. The idea of community itself should not be allowed to become an idol. A community is a living organism that must change and grow and adapt.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Medieval man held that reality—what was really real—was outside himself and that dwelling in the darkness of the Fall, he could not fully perceive it. But he could relate to it intellectually through faith and reason, and know it through conversion of the heart. The entire universe was woven into God’s own Being, in ways that are difficult for modern people, even believing Christians, to grasp. Christians of the Middle Ages took Paul’s words recorded in Acts—“in Him we live and move and have our being”—and in his letter to the Colossians—“He is before all things and in Him all things hold together”—in a much more literal sense than we do.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“The moment the Benedict Option becomes about anything other than communion with Christ and dwelling with our neighbors in love, it ceases to be Benedictine,” he said. “It can’t be a strategy for self-improvement or for saving the church or the world.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Said Father Basil: “Saint Benedict takes the image that Scripture uses to speak about Christ himself. ‘A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not quench.’ Humanity is already fragile. We need to treat it with care, with concern, with delicacy.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation