Quotes from Rod Dreher

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.

Still, as I have said, accepting that God loved me was something I did only on the level of theory.

Pastor Wurmbrand once wrote that there were two kinds of Christians: "those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments."15

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. THE PARTY SLOGAN, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

golden age of community

Their deep unhappiness comes from the isolation they feel, despite being connected, thanks to smartphone-enabled social networking, to more people than any generation ever has. Smartphone culture has radically increased the social anxiety they experience, as information coming through their phones convinces sensitive teenagers—especially girls—that they are being left out of the more exciting lives others are having.

Fasting is a spiritual exercise whose purpose is to subject the body to the liberating yoke of Jesus. As Wendell Berry puts it, denying bodily desire for the sake of spiritual growth is "a refusal to allow the body to serve what is unworthy of it."10

I saw—no, I think the word is beheld—the most wondrous thing in the world. This church was indescribably complex and harmonious; it was like stepping into the mind of God. I was overcome by the desire to worship—a feeling I would not see as adequately articulated until many years later, when I would read Dante Alighieri's description, in his first book, Vita nuova, of the first time he, as a child, saw Beatrice:

They think they love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.

She worries that her friends don't grasp that suffering is a normal part of life—even of part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving. She doesn't want them to give her advice about how to escape her problems; she just wants them to help her live through them.

Solzhenitsyn emerged from the grinding misery of the gulag as a fearless man of God whose prophetic witness to the world helped bring down an evil empire.

Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life's purpose was to find one's own way experimentally.

the goal is not to get rid of technology, but to limit its use "to restore a more integrated life, where you have the physical, the social, the mental, and the aesthetic aspects of life blending as seamlessly as possible.

Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal.

The undeniable fact is that free-market, technology-driven capitalism, for all its benefits, tends to pull families and communities apart by empowering individuals and encouraging—even mandating—individualism.

If there is no sacred order, then the original promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden—"[Y]e shall be as gods"—is the foundational principle of the new culture.

An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways.

Rather, they must keep their balance and stay focused on, in Havel's words, "the everyday, thankless, and never-ending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, and in quiet dignity.

A wise traveler reaches his goal and rests," he continues. "The wanderer never reaches it, but with great lethargy of mind forever directs his hungry eyes before him.

History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity.

Tamás glances down at the floor of his Budapest living room. "We have so many problems today because fathers never talked to their sons as my father did to me in 1963.

Love is not a contractual exchange. Love is given with no expectation of return. Love does not keep a ledger.

A virtuous society, by contrast, is one that shares belief in objective moral goods and the practices necessary for human beings to embody those goods in community. To

The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime based on lies and propaganda. Most conservatives, Christian and not, recognize that to some degree, but too few see the deeper ramifications of accepting these lies. "Political correctness" is an annoyance; these lies corrupt one's ability to think clearly about reality.