Quotes from Rod Dreher

we should start thinking seriously about why we have become the richest and most free society ever to exist, yet our wealth and personal liberty have bought us so little happiness.

if you wait around for the church, or someone else, to get something going, it may never happen. What are you waiting for? It's

ama la comunidad, pero no la idolatres».

By their indifference to solidarity, and surrendering to social disintegration as the new normal, Christians make it easier for those in power who hate us to control us.

Here is one of Christ's hardest commands: But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew 5:44, KJV)

Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood, but by shedding tears

In his 2014 book about Father Dmitry, The Last Man in Russia, journalist Oliver Bullough quotes an atheist saying that after hearing the priest preach, "the immorality of Soviet society, its inhumanity and corruption, its lack of a moral code or credible ideals, means that Christ's teaching comes through to those who it reaches as a shining contrast.

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.

With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well but knows deep down that they are not the future.

Nothing was real about life under communism. The state's control was total. What led Popkov to seek fellowship with Christians was reading The Stranger, the celebrated 1942 novel by Albert Camus, the French existentialist. Though Camus was an atheist, the novel compelled the young Russian living in an atheist state to look for Christ.

Nos atrevemos a pensar que Dreher puede tender un puente con esas comunidades europeas al elegir un precioso texto de Maritain para describir la opción benedictina. No la describe como un «castillo fortificado», sino como un «ejército de estrellas» arrojadas al cielo.

La constitución americana, un texto profundamente lockiano, privatiza la religión al separarla del Estado. Todo alumno de una escuela estadounidense aprende a considerar esto como una bendición, y puede que lo sea, pero tal segregación de lo secular y lo sagrado ha repercutido profundamente en la consciencia religiosa del pueblo americano.

La democracia solo puede triunfar si prosperan instituciones intermedias, como las Iglesias.

This, it occurred to me, was the deeper meaning in the mournful merriment I had been part of that day. I stood at Mam's sink before bedtime, filling an iced tea glass with water, thinking that I had underestimated this place where I was born. I knew it was a good place to be from. I had no idea how great a place it was to be.

I am responsible for myself. Every time I do the things I shouldn't do or fail to do the things I should do, I sin. The weight of our sins can seem overwhelming, so much so that we feel trapped by them in a dark wood of our own making. What makes it worse is the sense in contemporary culture that sin is either not real or no big deal.

The genius of Saint Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.

If democratic majorities come to believe that transferring social control to governmental and private institutional elites is necessary to guarantee virtue and safety, then it will happen.

There always is this fallacious belief: "It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible." Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose.

The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.

When their souls are rightly ordered, believers serve not only the good of the church, but are a means of God's blessing to all people.

Like the early Bolsheviks, SJWs are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited. Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness.

Now, in liberty and relative prosperity, the children of the last communist generation have fallen to a more subtle, sophisticated tyranny: one that tells them that anything they find difficult is a form of oppression. For these millennials, unhappiness is slavery and freedom is liberation from the burden of unchosen obligations.

You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie," says the old pastor. "This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.