Replace "politically incorrect" with "woke" and this could have been written yesterday. Esolen is always spot-on.Replace "politically incorrect" with "woke" and this could have been written yesterday. Esolen is always spot-on....more
Read for school. Excellent and informative if you're reading this to understand the development English/American law.Read for school. Excellent and informative if you're reading this to understand the development English/American law....more
I'm a simple woman, I see a new Anthony Esolen book, I hit Want-to-Read.I'm a simple woman, I see a new Anthony Esolen book, I hit Want-to-Read....more
Let me start this review by saying that I am not the biggest fan of Dreher. He like to claim the conservative label, but at bottom his allegiance is tLet me start this review by saying that I am not the biggest fan of Dreher. He like to claim the conservative label, but at bottom his allegiance is to the liberal order. He rightly sees the threat radical leftism poses, and yet somehow doesn't understand that leftism is the natural outflow of the liberal ideal of complete autonomy for the individual. Worse, he looks down on those who might actually listen to his ideas because they're not sophisticated enough or they like Trump a little too much. (This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about: https://twitter.com/TheIllegit/status...). A case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.
That said, he really does see the threat of radical leftism and its similarities to last century's Communist regimes clearly, and that's the main subject of this book. The first half is spent building the argument that we live in a "soft totalitarian," anti-Christian society that is hell-bent on destroying any semblance traditional culture and religion in favor of the alternative religions of race and/or sexuality, enforced by good old-fashioned Mammon in the guise of woke capital. It wants you isolated from your ancestors, family and church in order to sell you whatever Wall Street wants you to buy and keep you dependent on their drugs of porn and the adrenaline you get from talking down your racist uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. Unlike in Communist countries in the last century, this is no government-enforced slavery; people have learned to love the chains that make their lives so convenient and pleasurable. (Oddly, Dreher never mentions how COVID has played a major role in speeding up soft totalitarianism; then again given his track record that's not completely surprising).
The second half of the book details how Christians can combat this threat. In short: live not by lies. Or to put it in the words of Václav Havel, talking about his famous greengrocer who decides to not put up a Communist poster in his shop:
By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
Essentially, the answer is to be a real Christian who lives in the truth. Preserve cultural and religious memory. Be involved in your family and church. Do not love anything in this world so much that you are not willing to let it go for the sake of Christ. Be willing to suffer. Quite the tall order, but that is nothing new: take up your cross and die to yourself. There is no other way if you want to truly live.
And above all, cling to hope. Christ is Truth itself, the King of kings, the author and Lord of history. He will break the teeth of the wicked and redeem His people. Nothing is in vain if done for Him, and not even the most alluring lie can ever compare with that truth....more
My son, just ask of Me And I will give the nations of the earth For You to rule them with a mighty iron rod For you to dash them all to pieces And then
My son, just ask of Me And I will give the nations of the earth For You to rule them with a mighty iron rod For you to dash them all to pieces And then pound them into dirt Until You spread Your fame and power and Love abroad 'Til all the nations bow before the Son of God
This is more of a compass pointing in the right direction than a detailed map of everywhere we need to go, but for most of us that's what we need - a vision. We need to remember what we (as Christians) have built in the past, with all the glories and failures that come along with that, and be emboldened to build anew. Yes, if Christ is resurrected - if He is the Lord of history and of the Church - is He is drawing all men to Himself - then it is possible to build a new Christendom. The only question is, are we willing to pay the cost? Will we die to ourselves and our own comforts that our children or great-great-great grandchildren might live? God grant that we will as our fathers in the faith did....more
Perhaps the most distinctive marker of modern life is its fractured nature: public from private, sacred from secular, truth from experience, body fromPerhaps the most distinctive marker of modern life is its fractured nature: public from private, sacred from secular, truth from experience, body from soul, beauty from art, science from the humanities, work from home, men from women, nature from grace. Or to quote from G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy,
"There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips... They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout."
In this book Pearcey sheds light on the nature of this divide, diagnosing it in detail and then recounting how we got here, first by looking at the ebb and flow of dualism in Western thought with an especially intense focus on the rise of Darwinism and then by tracing the history of evangelicals in America and why they have gradually become content to rescind their role in the public square as long as they can go to heaven when they die. Suffice to say these issues are complex and have been stewing for many centuries, but are only now beginning to become fully apparent as even the appearance of Christian belief fades.
So what is the solution here? It may seem a daunting task for Christians when they consider that virtually all the public institutions are essentially hostile to orthodox belief, which is why it's temping to go hole up somewhere quiet and not worry about the outside world. But that approach is to be fundamentally unfaithful to God, to bury our talent. We must remember that the inheritance of the West (and ultimately, the whole world) is ours through Christ. He died for it, and He will have it in the end. The only question is will we work with His plan or against it in the time and place that we are given? Will we have the courage to be whole Christians, working out our faith in the realms of home, work, politics, economics, art, culture, science, and so on? Do we truly want to hear "well done good and faithful servant," or do we just want to be comfortable? We have done the latter long enough. It is time to believe God's promises and work towards the reformation of Western civilization, even if we do not live to see its full restoration in our lifetimes. God can take the few loaves and fishes we have and multiply them greatly, but we must die to ourselves first and take up our crosses....more
I am on a quest to understand the "social justice" (or cultural Marxist, or Critical Theory, or whatever you want to call it) phenomenon, if for no otI am on a quest to understand the "social justice" (or cultural Marxist, or Critical Theory, or whatever you want to call it) phenomenon, if for no other reason than that it's everywhere, and I'm not always sure how to think about it. I think, "that doesn't sound right but I'm not sure exactly why, or what the background philosophy is that's driving this." This book has helped me understand it better (though, I still have a long way to go) - and best of all, it's free and available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O-ng....
This book can be divided into two parts, one that recounts Wiley's own experiences in the social justice realm, and one that distills what he's learned from those experiences (and which is the best part of the book imo). What I found so helpful about it is how Wiley gets to the root philosophical assumptions that Marxists make, which helped me understand why they say what they do and to recognize the reasoning when it comes up, even in evangelical settings.
But he also gives a solution, albeit one that is extremely unpopular in modern culture and even, to some extent, in the church: going back to a biblical, patriarchal hierarchy where men lead their families well, who don't shrink from the role God has entrusted to them. To ears accustomed to feminism this sounds like nails on a chalkboard, but it's only by coming to terms with this that our churches (and thus our communities, because the health of the community is directly linked to the health of the church) will once again be a city on a hill. Because seriously: what social issue isn't affected by the lack of a father in the home, and what person hasn't been greatly influence by their father's presence (or absence) in his life?
I'll end this review by listing five ideas that social justice warriors have borrowed from Marxism, according to Wiley, just because it's too good to pass up:
1) Inequality is now prima facie evidence of injustice. "Jesus told us that it rains on the unjust and the just. But He never said that an uneven distribution of rain is unjust. We shouldn't expect human conditions, or human achievement, to be uniform either. But this sort of realism is not something that we associate with advocates of social justice. That's because they're not so much concerned with reality as they are with altering it."
2) Personal moral agency is eclipsed. "Because social conditions are the real basis of personal achievement, inequities in performance reflect inequities in those conditions. Moral virtue, personal discipline, natural talent, even personal taste - all these things can be explained by injustice."
3) The language of social justice reflects a materialistic understanding of reality. "It doesn't reflect the given natures of things, or their purposes. Language is a tool for getting what you want; either that or a weapon. The ancient notion that reality is ordered by the Logos (the divine word in which reason and expression co-inhere) is lost on these people. We've descended into a babble of manipulation, mendacity, and self-assertion. This is what C.S. Lewis warned us about in "The Abolition of Man."
4) A class of social engineers now has a vested interest in the perception of injustice. "When it comes to job security for this class [of those in the government and the non-profit sector], what incentive do these people have to promote social peace, or examine grievances objectively? Their livelihoods, and the growth of their budgets, are directly enhanced by the opposite."
5) The most damning thing about social justice is the way seemingly sincere Christians have come to share a dismissive attitude towards pre-political institutions. "For Marxists nothing is given; social life is conflict, even family life. This is why feminists are fond of saying, 'The personal is political.' A household in this view doesn't reflect a divine order, or a common interest, it's a cage-match. Men and women aren't endowed with different gifts and mutually dependent, they're antagonists. A traditional household in this view is a retrograde thing, the residue of bourgeois oppression and false consciousness. People, especially women and children, should be liberated from it, whether they want to be or not. And who is the liberator? The State." ...more
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