Quotes from Rod Dreher

Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante's verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. Wild animals blocked the man's path at every turn. Suddenly the shade of a great poet of antiquity, Virgil, appears before the man and promises to show him the hard road to a good place—but first the man has to trust him.

Classical liberals are more concerned with individual freedom, while leftists embrace equality of outcome.

And classical liberals favor a more or less limited role for the government, while leftists believe that achieving their vision of justice and virtue requires a heavier state hand.

Romaszewska is fierce on the subject of, well, solidarity. She sees the danger of soft totalitarianism coming fast, and urges young people to get off the internet and get together face-to-face to build resistance

As I see it, this is the core, this is the essence of everything right now: Forming these communities and networks of communities," she says. "Whatever kinds of communities you can imagine. The point is that the members of that community must be very supportive of one another, no matter what comes. You don't have to be prepared to give your life for the other person, but you do have to have something in common, and to do things together.

the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and be increasing worldly comforts - that is a road that leads to hell.

The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan, a practicing Christian, once said that everyone he knew who lost his faith began by ceasing to pray.

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be "salt and light" to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

seeing is only the first step. Think about what you see. Get together with others to talk about what you are all seeing. Analyze the facts and discern how your faith and your moral convictions should be applied concretely to the situation.

That is the basis of ketman—and to surrender to that kind of self-defense will, over time, destroy your soul.

There's never going to be an economy rich enough or a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family and the absence of self-discipline.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, "it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites" working through their "well-developed networks and powerful institutions."24 This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse.

I began to wonder what, exactly, mainstream conservatism was conserving. It dawned on me that some of the causes championed by my fellow conservatives—chiefly an uncritical enthusiasm for the market—can in some circumstances undermine the thing that I, as a traditionalist, considered the most important institution to conserve: the family.

Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence," she writes. "Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative."2

Sex and commerce are fine things, but man cannot live by Viagra and the Dow Jones alone. A life led collecting things and experiences in pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad life, but it's not a good life either. Too often, the Democrats act like the Party of Lust, and the Republicans the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins that eat at the soul.

By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game.

The ideology of progress, which has been with us in various forms since the Enlightenment, explains their confident zealotry. It also explains why so many ordinary people who aren't especially engaged by politics find it hard to say no to SJW demands.

For the traditional Christian, establishing internal order is not mere discipline, nor is it simply an act of will. Rather, it is what theologian Romano Guardini called man's efforts to "regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self, and finally to God."3

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future.

If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, then the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order.

worldwide throughout the ages. Familiarize yourself with their stories, and teach them to your children. These stories are near the core of the lived Christian experience, and form an essential part of Christian cultural memory. Learn them, so you will know when and how to live them.

It also doesn't mean that "progress" divorced from God is progress at all. In fact, progress can become very dark in a secular context, without a biblical understanding of human fallibility and without the God of the Bible as the author of history and the judge of the earth.

Marx and his disciples replaced the Christian hope in a reward in heaven with the belief that perfection could—and inevitably would—be established on this earth, after a savage apocalypse, and through the application of science and science-based politics.

Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not.