Decadence

In his article "Decadence," Rod Dreher quotes Ross Douthat - "I think it’s hard to turn a decadent civilization around without a period of crisis and disruption and general misery. This is one of the tensions of being anti-decadence. You may dislike decadence but it’s still immoral to wish for crisis in certain ways. You don’t want to say, 'Oh, what we really need is to bring the 1930s back.'

"That being said, the world is a big and complicated place. And I think you can certainly find places in Western society that offer examples of what a non-decadent future would look like. Within the general decline of religion there are revivals of monasticism, revivals of religious community, of religious life that look to both the past and the future in a constructive way, I think."

Further on in the article, Dreher mentions his book The Benedict Option that, as he says elsewhere, "refers to Christians in the contemporary West who cease to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of American empire, and who therefore are keen to construct local forms of community as loci of Christian resistance against what the empire represents." If you are one of these Christians, then you need to read and heed this article!

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