Quotes from Rod Dreher

Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.

Accept the limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there may open themselves.

To live is to suffer. To become fully human is to overcome suffering by allowing it to give us wings. Stop thinking about how your struggles are weighing you down, and start thinking, with humility, about how they can lift you up, and make you more compassionate and merciful. Changing your attitude can turn a burden into a blessing.

Christians often talk about "reaching the culture" without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.

They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.

It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America's cultural decline, but a symptom of it. The

It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie. Resolve to look for and to accept the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Nothing built on lies lasts.

Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.

If there is going to be authentic renewal, it will have to happen in families and local church communities.

Not all of us are called to die a martyr's death," he wrote, "but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had."9

If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have.

The overweight person diets not to punish him- or herself for being heavy but to become healthier. The athlete works out not because he feels guilty for sitting around watching TV but to train his body for competition. So it is with monks and their asceticism—and so it must be with us lay Christians.

Because we are finite creatures who live in time, we cannot see things clearly. Be careful in judging others because the truth of their character and their situation may be hidden from your eyes. Only God knows the whole truth and only God knows the future. Don't expect all the answers now, but be patient and trusting and seek to grow in love. Each act of love is one more step in the long journey to our true and only home, unity with God in eternity.

If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.

Our food is a sign of what we've lost in general. I think if we could start slowing down for food, and rebuilding the quality of our plates, we could start rebuilding what we've lost in our culture. As my boss says, culture starts in the kitchen, not in the opera house.

It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.

we are spiritual beings first and foremost, and it is impossible to thrive in a culture that does not honor and nurture things of the human spirit over and above material concerns.

In the Commedia, recall, sin consists not only in loving and desiring bad things but also in loving and desiring good things in the wrong way.

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is.

Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

The first part of saving your life is coming to understand how you endangered it by loving wrongly, and living under the rule of your passions.

Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.

If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of "stability"—meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.