Quotes from Rod Dreher

A nation's gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

Defender la ortodoxia bíblica del cristianismo en materia sexual se consideraba ahora de una intolerancia inadmisible. Los conservadores cristianos estaban sentenciados. Este ya no era el país de siempre.

Memory of the past conditions how they experience the present—that is, how they grasp its meaning, how they are to understand it, and what they are supposed to do in it. No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture's memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

Si queremos sobrevivir, tenemos que regresar a las raíces de nuestra fe, tanto en pensamiento como en obra. Vamos a tener que educar nuestro corazón en hábitos ya olvidados en la Iglesia de Occidente. Vamos a tener que cambiar nuestras vidas y nuestra perspectiva de forma radical. En definitiva, vamos a tener que ser Iglesia, sin concesiones, cueste lo que cueste.

When it comes to survival, maybe what's most important is simple fidelity: not by evangelizing people directly but by developing honest relations with one another—not looking for whether one is good or bad, or judging them by their ideology," says K?ska. "He was constantly observed by the secret police, parked right in front of his home. During the severely cold winters, he would bring them hot tea to warm them up. Because they were people, just like that.

El papa emérito Benedicto XVI augura un mundo en el que la Iglesia vivirá en pequeños círculos de fieles comprometidos que viven su fe intensamente y que tendrán que desgajarse de la sociedad de algún modo para aferrarse a la verdad. Lee este libro, aprende de la gente que te presento en él y déjate inspirar por el testimonio de los monjes. Deja que te hablen al corazón y a la mente e involúcrate

In another all-too-common example, the populist Vox party in Spain had its Twitter access temporarily suspended when, in January 2020, a politician in the Socialist Party accused the Vox party of "hate speech," for opposing the Socialist-led government's plan to force schoolchildren to study gender ideology, even if parents did not consent.

Las decisiones que tomamos hoy tendrán consecuencias en las vidas de nuestros descendientes, nación y civilización. Jesucristo prometió que el poder del infierno no derrotaría a su Iglesia, pero no dijo que no vencería a la Iglesia en Occidente. Depende de nosotros y de las decisiones que tomemos aquí y ahora.

The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct.

A person cut off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as

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 SOLZHENITSYN1

In China, the tools of surveillance capitalism are employed by the surveillance state to administer the so-called social credit system, which determines who is allowed to buy, sell, and travel, based on their social behavior.

it is not by winning an argument but by keeping yourself grounded in reality that you carry on the human heritage.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing goes against it," said G. K. Chesterton.

Tradition-minded Christians who have immersed themselves in the writings of Wendell Berry should understand that agrarianism is no panacea. "You can't make a living as a farmer, but you can make a living as a die-setter," says MacDonald. "Industrialism is the new agrarianism. It's not back to the land, but back to the trades.

Faithful Christians who foresaw a professional career for themselves or their children will need to give the trades a second look. Better to be a plumber with a clean conscience than a corporate lawyer with a compromised one.

In the end, either Christ is at the center of our lives, or the Self and all its idolatries are.

In his writing about communism's insidiousness, Mi?osz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanis?aw Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

Memory, historical and otherwise, is a weapon of cultural self-defense. History is not just what is written in textbooks. 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.

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell said in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."5

We have to tell our stories—in literature, film, theater, and other media—but we must also manifest cultural memory in communal deeds—in mourning and in celebration, in solemn remembrance and festal joy.

Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error.

One of contemporary progressivism's commonly used phrases--the personal is political--captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.