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Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision (newyorker.com)
45 points by lermontov on April 29, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



Dreher writes for The American Conservative (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/), a center-right publication which is a must-read in my media diet to get coherent, well-reasoned essays from the other side of the political aisle.

I often find myself challenged by the viewpoints they put across, gaining understanding of where people on the right are coming from intellectually, and it's refreshing to get out of the filter bubble. Recommend reading through it, especially if your news sources and environment tend to be more left-leaning.


Great advice and people need to do this more often (or at least recognize if they don't do it).

I agree 100% on everything with Dave Rubin, for example, so I avoid listening to him too much.


Noah Millman is one of the most cogent writers I know of: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/


And what do you recommend as "must-read in my media diet to get coherent, well-reasoned essays from" from the left?


Jacobin https://www.jacobinmag.com/ is good for left-wing thinking.


> It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

> Dreher’s answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe a way of life in which “change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.” The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable.


> “I liken liquid modernity to the Great Flood of the Bible,” Dreher said,[...] “The flood cannot be turned back. The best we can do is construct arks within which we can ride it out, and by God’s grace make it across the dark sea of time to a future when we do find dry land again, and can start the rebuilding, reseeding, and renewal of the earth.”

That reminded me of the convents in Neal Stephensons 'Anathem'.


Except instead of useful math and pure science, it's supernatural religious stuff.


Are there any scientific/tech-oriented intentional communities that are not universities?


They are rarer now than back in the 60s and 70s but PARC, Bell Labs, CERN etc might be good examples.


In a way, a good hackerspace/makerspace can be.


Indeed.


Dreher's problem is he's trying to find a good defense for bigotry, and there are no good arguments for bigotry, so he ties himself up in knots.




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