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  • The Benedict Option

  • A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
  • Written by: Rod Dreher
  • Narrated by: Adam Verner
  • Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (40 ratings)

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The Benedict Option

Written by: Rod Dreher
Narrated by: Adam Verner
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Publisher's Summary

The light of the Christian faith is flickering out all over the West. American churches are beset by a rapidly secularizing culture, the departure of young people, and watered-down pseudo-spirituality. Political solutions have failed, as the self-destruction of the Republican Party indicates, and the future of religious freedom has never been in greater doubt. The center is not holding. The West, cut off from its Christian roots, is falling into a new Dark Age.

The good news is that there is a blueprint for a time-tested Christian response to this decline. In The Benedict Option, Dreher calls on traditional Christians to learn from the example of St. Benedict of Nursia, a sixth-century monk who turned from the chaos and decadence of the collapsing Roman Empire and found a new way to live out the faith in community. For five difficult centuries, Benedict's monks kept the faith alive through the Dark Ages, and prepared the way for the rebirth of civilization. The Benedict Option shows believers how to build the resilience to face the modern world with the confidence and fervor of the early church. Christians face a time of choosing, with the fate of Christianity in Western civilization hanging in the balance. In this powerful challenge to complacency, Dreher shows why churches who fail to take the Benedict Option aren't going to make it.

©2017 Rod Dreher (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

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Conservative Christian Waffle

It's indicative of American self-obssession that this book came to be written. I found it regressive and isolationist. I actually agree with many of the cultural suggestions Dreher made: moving away from consumerism, professionalisation, consequentialism. The answer to these troubling modern trends is not to secede. It is sort of unfathomable that a Christian response to immorality within its own society is to cloister. To think that the author believes that Christianity is in peril in the most religious developed country on earth is a staggering act of self-absorption. Perhaps if the grotesque modern conservative impulse to play the victim were not central to this book I could have overlooked its short-sightedness and obvious hypocrisy. The author is, to my mind, more concerned with race issues than religious. Too often these causes are conflated in the US, Christian means White to these people. Demographics are Destiny, Dreher.

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One of the best books I have ever heard.

I highly recommend this book, I have recommended this to anyone who will listen to me. I loved so much that I even named my second Son Benedict!

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Helpful framework

Liked: Christian approach and understanding of how current cultural, intellectual, and technological structures are negatively impacting the possibility for Christianity to be sustained in the “West” - with clear theology and sound teaching to go with it.
Disliked: very America centric, with an unhelpful exhortation for the preservation of “Western” culture (if it was classical education that would be one thing, but celebrating Western culture without distinguishing it from the Eurocentric abomination that brought about colonialism and the Nazis is remarkably concerning)
Overall: very thought provoking and inspiring. Worth the read.

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worthwhile!

further I got into it the more I found myself agreeing with many of the principles. Not running away, but to attempt to share these values with our descendents and future generations. living in faithfulness in a culture which opposes and even ridicules our values.

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is now a time to gather seed?

As one raised in a typical NA Pentecostal environment things like liturgy, ausetecism and contemplation are mostly foreign to me. However, I find myself increasingly disillusioned with the current model of Evangelical church and wonder if a return to some of the practices suggested here may lead me and the church at large to live more in Christ's fullness and freedom.

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