Quotes from Rod Dreher

Moreover, for Christians, no social order that denies sin, erecting structures or approving practices that alienate man from his Creator, can ever be just. Contrary to secular social justice activists, protecting the right to abortion is always unjust. So is any proposal—like same-sex marriage—that ratifies sin and undermines the natural family

According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.

Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a "Grand March" toward Progress: "The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.

Bibliotherapy"—using books to treat psychological disorders—may be a new trend, but for me, it came naturally.

Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story"—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—"was our story too. Tolkien's dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.

The days to come are going to force American Christians to confront personal suffering for the faith in ways most never have done before (African American Christians are the obvious exception). Besides, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough: the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people's love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.

if we latter-day believers are not able and willing to be faithful in the relatively small trials we face now, there is no reason to think we will have what it takes to endure serious persecution in the future.

God will eventually win, even though I may not see it in my life. So my suffering is not meaningless, because I am part of a greater battle that will be victorious in the end. That is what our father showed us by his life.

Christians must embrace suffering because that's what Jesus did, and because they have the promise, on faith, that to share in his suffering will bring glory in the next life.

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

faith that's primarily intellectual—that is, a matter of mastering information—is deceptively fragile.

If everyone, including himself, loved as they should love, they would love God more than they loved themselves and their passions.

Church leaders don't know how to deal with this chronic crisis; as with the out-of-touch Orthodox hierarchy and clergy of the late imperial period, many don't seem to realize what's happening, much less how to address the decay.

time arrives if we have not prepared ourselves to accept pain and loss for the sake of God's kingdom. Most of us in the West don't yet have opportunities to suffer for the faith like Christians under communism did, but we have their stories to guide us, as well as the accounts of Christian martyrdom

To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes.

If family is so important to us conservatives, why do so many of us bring into our daily lives so many things that take away from family life?

As a perversion of religion, Progress as an ideology speaks appealingly to hungry human hearts.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

To be a Baptist in Soviet Russia was to know that you were a permanent outsider. They endured it because they knew that truth was embodied in Jesus Christ, and that to live apart from him would mean living a lie. For the Baptists, to compromise with lies for the sake of a peaceful life is to bend at the knee to death.

Father Martin put it, "Stability give us the time and the structure to go deep into who we are as sons of God.

It's amazing to me to see parents who have money, and who think they're conservative, abandon their children to the culture, and then turn around and express shock at what the culture does to their children,

He is concerned by polls showing that Americans' support for the First Amendment—which guarantees the constitutional right to free expression—is waning, especially among younger Americans, who are increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinion. Grygorenko sees this as a sign that society prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty. To grow indifferent, even hostile, to free speech is suicidal for a free people.

Genesis tells us that from the very beginning, masculinity, femininity, and sex are created by God and bound to Creation.