Tag: Dorothy Sayers

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The Vanishing American Adult

“We are going to need America’s children to rise to their best in the years to come, because a nation of adult-children cannot be a nation of self-governing people.
“A plea for self-discipline and self-control is the one and only dignified alternative to discipline and control from without. For in this broken world of lawless souls, there will be control; there will be government. Order-seeking and security-seeking people, as well as those in search of power for their own purposes, will invariably seek to hold back the chaos of the world. The question is whether people will control themselves or submit to the control of others.” Ben Sasse
When I was a college student in my thirties, I found a couple simple ways for dealing with stress. And not to brag, but my stress was significant.
I had a part-time job as a bank teller, and yes, that’s a stressful job. I was a single mother dealing with the aftermath of an antagonistic divorce, a leaky roof, and a car that somehow seemed invisible to other drivers who would periodically hit it with their cars.
Stress-relief 101 included a more than once a week walk through the grocery store. These trips were not the weekly restocking of my larder, in which my five children typically participated thereby generally ensuring the opposite of stress relief. My solo store visits were brief times at the end of classes. They included listening to benign music and unwinding while making a few small purchases mostly involving comfort foods.  Continue reading “The Vanishing American Adult”

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A Boatload of Hope

Work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God. Dorothy Sayers

He was not a student I expected to see years later sitting across the desk in my university adjunct office. When I was a brand new teacher, he, like many middle school boys, had not been a highly motivated student.
Back then, I held little hope that he might simply fulfill his potential.
But here he sat.
So he told me his story. Continue reading “A Boatload of Hope”

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Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Review

“[T]he Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust the settings in any way we like.” Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (236).

If you’re a Christian, don’t read this book unless you are truly willing to face the deep realities that Rod Dreher presents within its pages.

But if you are a Christian, you really should read this book.

It will move you to change your life.

And you will find it is not the same book some critics have described.

The Benedict Option is not a call for the faithful to cloister ourselves in a monastery or don white robes and sit on a mountaintop awaiting the Apocalypse.

Dreher calls us to a more focused faith walk, to “be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs” (3, emphasis Dreher’s).

He calls us to a deeper prayer life. A life steeped in community with other faithful Christians. A life that looks very different from the lives many of us lead–pursuit of consumerism and busy-ness with splashes of church sprinkled between. Continue reading “Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Review”

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