Marginal Christianity

Do you know what a “rule of life” is? It’s a way of life ordered to maximize our experience of God and facilitate our growth toward maturity in faith. Everybody has one, you know. A “rule of life,” that is. We all order our lives to maximize what we believe we wasn’t out of it. Some are more intentional about this than others. Some would even claim they don’t have any such thing. But whether we think through the shape we want our lives to have or simply fall into it by “going with the flow,” our lives inevitably assume some ordered form. It’s easiest to see the shape we give to at least certain parts of our lives by reflecting on the things we do regularly. Eating, getting up and going to bed, setting aside certain times for doing our laundry and doing it in a certain way, and many other things we regularly do we tend to do in regular ways, that is, ordered. The monastic movement in the early church was a way of life the church ordered for those willing to undertak

July 7, 2015 by Thomas Kidd 7 Comments Rod Dreher has been blogging about the need for traditional Christians to embrace the “Benedict Option” of retreat from and engagement with post-Christian society. In a recent post , he commented that It is  retreat  in the sense that it requires a) an honest and sober recognition of the condition of our post-Christian culture, and the relationship of the church to it; b) a realistic understanding of how radically Christianity opposes the mainstream post-Christian culture; c) a clear grasp of how radically Christians have to live, in community, to “push back against the world as hard as it pushes against you” (Flannery O’Connor), and d) implementing these new, and renewed, ways of living, in part to build resilience for the trials to come, and to guard against assimilation. It is about  engagement  in that the church has a mission to serve the world, through evangelism and works of charity. The church can only fulfill its mission if it kn