Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to a community in the middle of a culture war

From Christian Century-

Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, now lost, in the fall of 50 CE. The Corinthians pushed back quite hard. They wrote a reply to Paul with a number of questions. In the spring of 51 CE he wrote a long letter back, our 1 Corinthians. This is where we start to build up a more detailed picture of the community, and it is not a pretty sight.

The church at Corinth was a mess. I count 15 distinguishable problems that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians: partisanship, with the Corinthians factionalizing behind rival leaders (1:10–4:21; 16:10–18); incest (5:1–13); prostitution (6:12–21); celibacy within marriage (7:1–7); Christians married to one another asking about divorce (7:8–11, 39); Christians married to pagans asking about divorce (7:12–16); questions surrounding marriage and remarriage (7:25–40); lawsuits (6:1–11); idolatry (8:1–11:1); concerns about women praying and prophesying in immodest ways (11:2–16); chaos in worship, with speaking in tongues and competing voices (chapter 14); inequality in the communal meal (11:17–34); denials of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and of Christians (15:1–58); the collection of a large sum of money to be sent to Jerusalem (16:1–4); and a change in Paul’s travel plans (16:5–9).

More here-

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/paul-wrote-1-corinthians-community-middle-culture-war

Christians are more than twice as likely to blame a person’s poverty on lack of effort

From The Washington Post-

Which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor: lack of effort on their own part, or difficult circumstances beyond their control?

The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation asked 1,686 American adults to answer that question — and found that religion is a significant predictor of how Americans perceive poverty.

Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, are much more likely than non-Christians to view poverty as the result of individual failings.

“There’s a strong Christian impulse to understand poverty as deeply rooted in morality — often, as the Bible makes clear, in unwillingness to work, in bad financial decisions or in broken family structures,” said Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “The Christian worldview is saying that all poverty is due to sin, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the sin of the person in poverty. In the Garden of Eden, there would have been no poverty. In a fallen world, there is poverty.”

More here-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/03/christians-are-more-than-twice-as-likely-to-blame-a-persons-poverty-on-lack-of-effort/?utm_term=.5f7878f567d1

We faithful few?

From Episcopal Cafe-

The second voice is that of noted humorist and poetry fan, Garrison Keillor, who writes in his unique wistful style of  a world that is passing away.  Titled “From Giraffes to Episcopalians, World Going Extinct,”Keillor laments its passing.

“Giraffes are dying out because they are a joke, an ungainly mythological-looking amalgamation of a horse and a stepladder. God is not proud of the giraffe. In Scripture, He refers to horses, sheep, cattle, swine, snakes, camels, but nothing about this oddity. Isaiah did not write, “All we like giraffes have gone astray” – their problem isn’t a willful nature, it’s bad design.

As for lions, they used to roam Europe, but do you want to get off your tour bus in Rome and walk into the Colosseum and suddenly hear low raspy sounds and turn and there is the MGM lion 15 feet away with a napkin around his neck? You, a good Episcopalian, about to be martyred by a circus act?

Episcopalians are also facing extinction, along with the rest of the orthodox wing of Christianity that takes the Bible at its word. The Church of the Beautiful Hair is taking over the habitat, humunga-churches where magenta spotlights sway and peroxided men in spangly jumpsuits play Metallica with spiritual lyrics and ponytailed preachers tell the multitude that we are the Chosen and the Lord is going to maximize and monetize us.

More here-

https://www.episcopalcafe.com/we-faithful-few/

The book Christians should read instead of 'The Benedict Option'

From America Magazine-

American Christianity today is beset by political gloom. This gloominess is certainly evident in this year’s best seller on faith and politics: Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, which David Brooks hails as the “most important religious book of the decade.”

Inspired by the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, Dreher argues that “the modern West” is “living under [the] barbarism” of moral permissiveness, secularism and individualism. In this new “Dark Age,” public morality is all about individualistic relativism and “moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the choosing individual feels is right.” Gone are the traditional virtue communities of yesteryear. Faith is in decline. In its place “barbarians” with “designer suits and smart phones” dominate democracies in the name of a “hostile secular nihilism.”

Dreher believes that Christians have been slow to recognize this fait accompli. What it demands of them is forming local communities of committed believers who preserve virtue for a future flowering of civilization. Failure to do so will “doom our children and our children’s children to assimilation.”

More here-

https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/06/14/book-christians-should-read-instead-benedict-option

The Awful Pleasures of Spiritual Pornography

From LA Review of Books-

Being compared to Nazis is a wonderful goad to research, and I immediately read Dreher’s recent best seller The Benedict Option and a similar book by Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes. Both see secularism as an existential threat that has already begun to decimate the West. While Esolen thinks there’s a chance of “rebuilding American culture,” Dreher is less optimistic, instead recommending the formation of tightly knit communities where, as Benedictine monks once did, true spiritual seekers may keep the candle of Christian culture burning through the new Dark Ages, interacting with mainstream culture but protected from it by the strength of their faith.

I struggled to feel spiritual regret, and on occasion succeeded. Dreher’s descriptions of monastic practices are moving, and I am happy there are people like him who believe “everything is a gift from God and is meant to be treated as sacred.” Esolen writes eloquently of the beautiful and — to me — alien promise of Christian faith: “Everything that we have loved in the flesh will be restored to us, cleansed, perfect, never to be lost.” I was grateful for these echoes of a Christian wisdom that has always challenged my own agnostic convictions: a wisdom that I regret not being able to experience fully.

More here-

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-awful-pleasures-of-spiritual-pornography/#!

Where Dreher lost me on the “Benedict Option”

From Aletia-

Like many Catholics who spend too much time reading, arguing and thinking online, I’ve recently gotten caught up in discussions of Rod Dreher’s best-selling book, The Benedict Option.

I have wanted to like Dreher’s arguments — I really have. I’ve lurked on his blog and read his interviews, hoping to see him flesh out his thoughts in directions that make sense to me. But, somehow, he always seems to miss the mark.

When I picked up Archbishop Chaput’s book, Strangers in a Strange Land, a few weeks ago, I started to understand where Dreher loses me. Chaput quotes heavily from the Letter to Diognetus, an early Christian work describing how Christians in the Roman Empire went about living as the leaven in the loaf. While both writers explore the post-Christian landscape, Chaput’s overall vision and hope seems to be very different from Dreher’s exclusivism, and a closer reflection of where our society is, and where the Church fits into the world.

More here-

https://aleteia.org/2017/05/14/where-dreher-lost-me-on-the-benedict-option/

EVANGELISM OF THE WEIRD

From The Living Church-

This past Epiphany, I blessed chalk during the Mass. It was the first time our parish had engaged in this particular practice. Each person who attended was given a piece of chalk to take home with them, along with a set of instructions for scrawling the formula for a blessing over the doors of their homes: “20+C+M+B+17.” It was a strange thing to do. People in the neighborhood would later stare at our doors and wonder. It made no sense to the world. Many people thought it was weird.

To that I say, good. It is good that Christians are weird. The weirder we can be, the better.

We in the West live in a culture in which Christianity is increasingly alien. Despite the fact that much of our cultural understanding of things like human rights and social responsibility is still loosely based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, our societies in America and Europe have become increasingly secular and hostile to Christian faith. Our culture’s priests today are celebrities and scientists (and the celebrity scientist is the most prized figure of all — witness the recent controversy over Bill Nye’s new show). Our houses of worship are football stadiums. Our creeds are sound-bite versions of political platforms delivered over social media and cable news.

More here-

http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/05/03/evangelism-of-the-weird/?platform=hootsuite

ROD DREHER’S MONASTIC VISION

From The New Yorker-

Rod Dreher was forty-four when his little sister died. At the time, he was living in Philadelphia with his wife and children. His sister, Ruthie, lived in their Louisiana home town, outside St. Francisville (pop. 1,712). Dreher’s family had been there for generations, but he had never fit in. As a teen-ager, when his father and sister went hunting he stayed in his room and listened to the Talking Heads; he read “A Moveable Feast” and dreamed of Paris. He left as soon as he could, becoming a television critic for the Washington Times and then a film critic for the New York Post. 

He was living in Cobble Hill on 9/11, and watched the South Tower fall. He walked with his wife in Central Park. He wrote a book, “Crunchy Cons,” about how conservatives like him—“Birkenstocked Burkeans” and “hip homeschooling mamas”—might change America. Ruthie never left. She was a middle-school teacher, and her husband was a firefighter. She could give a damn about Edmund Burke and the New York Post. She was not a crunchy con, and she found her brother annoying.


More here-


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/rod-drehers-monastic-vision

Thoughts on the “Benedict Option” – A Lament

From Scriptorium Daily-

For years Rod Dreher (senior editor at The American Conservative) has been writing about his “Benedict Option.” Now his book of the same title has finally appeared. To be honest, I have not been convinced by his articles addressing the Benedict Option and his book fails to convince me too. James K. A. Smith published a trenchant critique almost immediately and so did Alan Jacobs (there are, of course, a host of other critical reactions to Dreher) and I mostly agree with both of them from a theological point of view. Dreher paints with brush strokes that are too broad (too metaphysical and absolutist, says Jacobs), too alarmist (“fundamentalism without the rapture,” writes Smith) and in a spirit that seems to ignore or deny the catholicity of the Christian Church by a “repackaging of the historic disciplines and formative practices of the church retroactively [that] makes newcomers and outsiders mistake the Great Tradition with the narrowness of the Benedict Option” (Smith). Everything about Dreher’s proposal sounds too doomsday-ish, too idiosyncratic, too parachurch-y and, well, too cynical. But what I really lament is that another Christian author has managed to misrepresent monasticism, again.

More here-

http://scriptoriumdaily.com/thoughts-on-the-benedict-option-a-lament/?utm_content=buffer9d0b7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer