For medieval people, everything was a sign pregnant with meaning. "Dante's universe did not simply exist; it meant, and it meant intensely," writes Louis Markos. "The universe was less a thing to be studied than a poem to be loved and enjoyed." For the medievals, the whole world was an icon of the divine, a manifestation of God. That is, God wasn't a distant, absentee figure but as close as the sun in the sky, the wind in the trees, the cry of a baby, and the sigh of a lover.

Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life, p. 45

The pilgrim Dante's journey teaches him that the source of all the chaos and misery is disorded desire. If everyone, including himself, loved as they should love, they would love God more than they loved themselves and their passions. To harmonize with the will of God requires us to overcome our passions and our ego, to make room for the transforming love of God. Out of the ashes of his destruction, Dante the poet erected a monument to redemption--his own and everyone else's; he could not have done it any other way. To clear the pathway to paradise, Dante had to heave his own considerable ego out of the way. 

The poet's personal story does not have a conventional happy ending. Dante died in exile, never returning to his hometown. But as we will discover on the road ahead, Dante's story ends not with happiness in the ordinary sense but with something much better: joy. 

Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life, pp. 39-40

Dante taught me that all sin comes from disordered love: loving the wrong things, or loving the right things too little or too much. Family is good. Place is good. Tradition is good. But these things are only good insofar as they reveal and guide one to God. To place anything above God is to make it an idol — and our idols inevitably tyrannize us.

Rod Dreher, "A Tale of Two Photos"

I am not a very political guy, but I'm not naive enough to think that either politics or the government is going to solve our problems. I have, however, become a fan of Rod Dreher, a blogger who discusses politics from time to time, but who doesn't fit into any neat political categories. 

One of the main points Dreher makes in his posts and in his books is that a strong local cultures, with their own little histories, with their networks of real, longstanding human relationships, with their respect and affection for real people and real places, usually provide better solutions to our problems than big government OR the free market can. 

A society that is made up of many strong local cultures will be a good society. Such a society would be based on the basic dignity of every human being, affection for the natural world, and respect for long-standing institutions (as opposed to the strip-mall and suburb mentality). Such a society would value beauty and goodness over efficiency and economics.

This doesn't always line up with "economics is king" unlimited free market capitalism. But in the long run, it's the best way a society can run in a fallen world. 

Here are excerpts from Rod Dreher's Manifesto from his book Crunchy Cons:

1. [We have] become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

2. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

3. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

4. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

5. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

6. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

7. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After hearing the buzz about this book for a while, and having enjoyed Rod’s first book (Crunchy Cons), I picked this up last week and got right to it. I’m glad I did.

Rod Dreher and his sister Ruthie grew up on a farm near St. Francisville, Louisiana, a community of about 1,700. As children growing up in a small community, Rod and Ruthie’s lives were not very exciting, but for the most part, they were wholesome. They did a lot of fishing and hunting, and they spent weekends hanging out with friends and family. St. Francisville was a close-knit town.

But when Rod became a teenager, he found himself interested more in ideas than the outdoors, and he began to despise the confinement and the lack of imagination he saw in his hometown. He wanted to leave.

His attitude was difficult for those around him, including Ruthie. Rod’s father wanted him to take over the family farm, but Rod didn’t want to. They started to fight a lot. Eventually, after Rod graduated from LSU, he left St. Francisville to become a journalist in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t planning to return.

As Rod worked as a big-city journalist, his career began to take off. He wrote for, among other places, the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, and National Review. He enjoyed French food and trips to Europe, and was on television frequently. Rod had made it big.

Ruthie, however, stayed in St. Francisville. She married her high school sweetheart, who became a local firefighter. They had three daughters, and Ruthie taught at the local middle school. Her family built a house right across the road from the farm where she and Rod grew up, so the grandparents were right across the way.

Rod was happy with his cosmopolitan life, and Ruthie was happy with hers. Over the years, the tension between them built.

Then, two years ago, Ruthie was diagnosed with a rare and particularly vicious form of lung cancer. It looked like she had only a few months to live.

From this point on through the next few months, Rod saw something happening in St. Francisville that changed his life. Rod saw what it meant for Ruthie to have stayed in a place where she had deep roots. He saw Ruthie’s friends, her family, and her entire community rally around her. Neighbors, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, others who didn’t know Ruthie personally but had known her parents—all these folks showed love and support in many ways not only to Ruthie but to the entire Leming family.

I don’t want to give away more of the story, but it is powerful.

But take caution. Honestly, reading this can be tough. We Americans tend to value success over community. We tend to think little of deep, incarnated relationships. We are taught from countless sources that it’s a good thing to leave your roots and do whatever you can to “make it big.”

Because career success trumps all, our families and communities suffer. We use the term “quality time” to avoid the guilt of not spending quantity time with people. We don’t deeply know our next-door neighbors or even our own families. We tend to find our community on Facebook.

Like I said, reading this book can be tough. Rod hits close to home.

But he also shows the value of a quieter, more wholesome, more meaningful life waiting for us if we commit ourselves to giving back to the communities that have given to us. Whether this means moving back or simply settling down, it’s a wonderful thing when we have the opportunity to build deep roots. Not everyone has that opportunity, but more of us probably do than we realize.

Another aspect of the book that I appreciate is that Dreher shows that it’s not necessarily easy. As Dreher decides to reconnect with his own family and hometown, there’s a lot of baggage he has to deal with. Dreher is painfully, painfully honest. I won’t say more.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is a very good book--one that shows the value of family, of community, and of relationships. I’m glad I read it, and I hope many other readers take it to heart too.


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From Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

On the way to Paris from London, the coach stopped in a town around sixty miles southwest of the French capital. Our group was going to see a famous Gothic church, they told us. Fine by me. By then I had shed the small-town faith in which I had been raised. Being a seventeen-year-old man of the world, I was fairly confident that God did not exist, but I was pleased, of course, to look at beautiful churches. 

This is the untutored boy from the sticks who ambled unaware into Chartres Cathedral, one of the great architectural treasures of Western civilization. The complexity, the beauty, the sheer genius of the thing staggered me. I moved past the huge statues of biblical patriarchs, carved into the jamb of the west portal door, and into the narthex, staring gape-mouthed at the soaring arches in the church vault. Who had built this? How had they done it? And in the thirteenth century! It looked like those thin ribs held aloft tons of limestone, and, miraculously, those vast stained-glass windows, great sheets of reds, greens, blues, and golds, glowing in the sunlight like rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in the firmament, forming portraits of Jesus, His mother, the prophets, and the saints. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the glory of this building, and the overwhelming scale and intensity of its beauty. 

I walked out of that cathedral a different man, though I wouldn't understand what Chartres had done for me until years later . . . The bus drove on to Paris, but I recall not one thing about the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower, ate a real French baguette, or much else about my maiden voyage to this city that figured so prominently in my boyhood imagination. I only remember Chartres. It was, to me, a message from another time and place, and a mystery. I did not know what it said, not yet, but I wanted to find out. What kind of religious vision can inspire men to build a temple like that to their God? What is God saying about Himself through the stone and the glass of that cathedral? What is he saying to me?

To be sure I did not become more religiously observant on that trip, or back home for my senior year of high school. What happened was that Chartres put me onto something. I was still a teenage boy full of himself and longing to drink beer and chase girls, but in Chartres I had encountered something that for all its stony mass and solidity, seemed to me a thin veil over a higher reality. It sounds strange but I felt . . . judged by Chartres. I had seen it; I couldn't unsee it. Chartres haunted me, principally because having been there, I could no longer say with any conviction that Christianity was nothing more than middle-class social conformity or a con game for nitwit followers of TV evangelists.

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, ... America by Rod Dreher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I shouldn’t be doing this—too many papers to grade. But I have to get this review out of my system. So here goes.

Now that I have three children who will have to make their way in this world, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the direction our culture is headed. So in the last couple years, I’ve started to read writers like Wendell Berry (What Are People For?) and others who critique American values and offer a better vision for the future. As a result, I became interested in reading Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. I don’t think I would have been interested in this book before age 30, but a man has to grow up at some point.

Specifically, what got me interested in this book was the eighteenth-century thinker Edmund Burke. I touch on Burke’s thought in one of the classes I teach, and I’ve come to see Burkean conservatism as far superior to the crassly individualist/libertarian values of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where economics tends to be king. That kind of conservatism has little regard for culture, aesthetics, our local communities, or creation itself. But Dreher is a Burkean.

So anyway, I picked up his book. Although the title of this book makes it sound political, Dreher isn’t really discussing politics here. He’s talking about a way of life—one that he calls “sacramental.” (As a Protestant, I would have preferred a term like “pervasively sacred,” but that’s not the issue here.)

According to Dreher, sacramental living isn’t about politics, but about recognizing the sacredness and inherent spiritual value of all people, all aspects of life, and all of creation. This includes things that we often don’t think of as sacred: our work, our families, our homes, our daily meals, our communities, and the natural world. Sacramental living simply involves recognizing and valuing the inherent dignity of these things. As we do, our daily activities take on meaning—activities like choosing where to shop (big impersonal chains vs. local merchants), deciding what to eat (food from massive factory farms vs. food provided by small, local farms where the people have an affection for the land and for God’s creatures), and educating our children. Each of these activities actually has great spiritual significance.

Dreher says that sacramental living leads to several things: a rejection of American consumerism; an appreciation for beauty in the home, at work, and in our places of worship; a high priority on our families (which, in Dreher’s view, often means homeschooling and at least one parent at home full-time); love for and support of our local communities; and a healthy respect for the natural world. (It’s no coincidence that Dreher became very popular after a commentary on “Crunchy Conservatism” on National Public Radio a few years ago.)

But as Dreher shows, many conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads”) show little sense of the sacredness of these things by the way that they live. Here are some of Dreher’s critiques of mainstream conservative values:

• “We right-wingers grimace at the lust celebrated by mainstream culture, but we rarely stop to think that greed is no less deadly a sin, no less destructive of human dignity. We look down on the liberal libertine who asserts the moral primacy of sexual free choice, but somehow miss that the free market we so uncritically accept exalts personal fulfillment through individual choice as the summit of human existence.”

• “[Conservatives seem to believe] that individual fulfillment is the point of life. Conservative, perhaps, in their sexual views, they are, however, libertarian in their economic principles, and believe that the free market should be the guiding light of our lives together. Thus they believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to that merchant or manufacturer. They feel no particular responsibility to be good stewards of communal life or the natural world; if something of real value has been lost because of economic decisions, hey, that’s the free market.”

• “We conservatives are big on bashing the public schools, which mostly deserve it, but please don’t ask us to think about what education is for. For many of us, it’s about no more than making sure our kids get into the right college, meet the right people, and go on to have a good (read ‘lucrative’) career.” (As someone who lives in Wisconsin and sees what Scott Walker, the Republicans, and the Democrats in our state want to do to higher education, I have to agree with Dreher’s critique here.)

• “We poke fun at the sanctimony of environmentalists, and try hard to convince ourselves that the sprawling crapulence of big-box stores, strip malls, monotonous housing developments, and other degrading manifestations of our built environment somehow represents progress. We abandon or bulldoze old buildings and human-scaled neighborhoods, then create fake environments … to recreate what we have destroyed.”

• “We have unwittingly allowed a consumerist mentality to shape the way we think about nearly all aspects of our private and public lives.”

Dreher gives an example from 9/11 that sums up typical American conservative values: “As the fires in the collapsed towers still raged, [both New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and President Bush] had this advice for us: ‘Go shopping.’”

Sadly, Americans don’t value their own communities, but things. We want personal affluence, and to be left alone. That’s why we build backward-facing “McMansions” in the suburbs. The front porch has disappeared.

This lifestyle has consequences: “Consumerism . . . sees its expansion as unambiguous progress. A culture guided by consumerist values is one that welcomes technology without question, and prizes efficiency. . . . A consumerist society encourages its members both to find and express their personal identity through the consumption of products.” As a result of these values, local communities, the environment, our families, and our quality of life are being destroyed.

But Dreher is not merely critical. On the contrary, the book is actually very positive, since Dreher lays out a wonderful vision of sacramental living. And he shows that many people are, in fact, living this way today. A sacramental life is about quality, and Dreher demonstrates what a good quality life looks like in his chapters on food, the home (in which he includes a fantastic contrast between good architecture and the McBuildings being built today), education, the environment, and religion.

By changing the ideological reference point from economics to a sense of the sacredness of this world, Dreher draws on an older conservative tradition, one that involves thinkers such as Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, and T. S. Eliot. He also draws frequently from writers like Wendell Berry (whom he interviewed at length for this book), E. F. Schumacher, William Morris, and G. K. Chesterton.

Dreher’s conservatism is one with beauty and imagination. It has an appreciation for good art, good music, good food, and good fellowship. It places a high priority on showing compassion for people, because human beings are sacred. It also recognizes the importance of the family, and it desires to make our local communities strong once again.

To give you an idea of where Dreher is coming from, here is his Manifesto:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship — especially of the natural world — is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

In a few places, I think Dreher is a tad over-opinionated, as well as alarmist. But overall, I really appreciated this book, and I benefited greatly from reading it. Highly recommended.

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Rod Dreher on architecture's role in shaping our sense of beauty, community, connection with the past, and connection with the future:

"We have been trained to think that beauty is a luxury; consequently, most Americans now live in places that they find hard to love, and that make ordinary human community difficult. I'm thinking of a story my friend David, who lives in Washington, D.C., once told me about a conversation he overheard one day at work, between two older African-American women who were surprised to run into each other. The women had been neighbors in a supposedly run-down neighborhood in the District, one that had been marked in the 1960s for expensive 'urban renewal.' The government bought the residents out, bulldozed their houses, and built -- ta-daah!-- housing projects. You can imagine how well that turned out.

"David said that listening to those women talk about what they had known in their old neighborhood,  for all its faults, was to understand what spiritual violence had been done to those people in the name of progress. A complex web of human relations had been spun by generations of neighbors was brushed away by the benevolent hand of the state. Those folks who remained were warehoused in giant concrete boxes that they did not care for because, well, who in their right mind would care for something so dehumanizing? The community collapsed.

. . . 

"[Writer] James Howard Kunstler . . . contended that since about 1945, we've been building neighborhoods not to suit authentic needs for beauty and community, but to move product as cheaply and quickly as possible. For reasons of expedience and efficiency, Kunstler argued, Americans cut themselves off from architectural tradition. . . . We began to build houses and neighborhoods and cities that have no connection to the past or the future, and that ultimately are not worth caring about. Our built landscape, Kunstler has written, 'ends up diminishing us spiritually, impoverishing us socially, and degrading the aggregate set of cultural patterns that we call civilization.'"

. . . 

Dreher makes the same point about churches, and I think he is right. We can build church buildings that look like movie theaters, boxes, or gymnasiums, or we can build church structures that reflect, in some small way, the glory of God. Which of these buildings is more likely to shape feelings of reverent awe and wonder at the grandeur of God? "Your typical conservative will scoff at [such questions], but he can only dismiss these questions if he is determined to ignore human nature, and the way built environment both expresses humanity's deepest longings and aspirations, and the way it shapes them."

From Crunchy Cons

Today's architecture is, for the most part, meaningless, shallow, and impersonal. Just look at houses built in the last few decades. In Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher asks, "Why is that?" He says,

"For one, there are no front porches on those houses, and therefore nothing to encourage neighbors to open themselves to street life. Those houses turn their backs to their neighbors. For another, the utilitarian sameness in row after row speaks a pattern language of monotony. There are no parks, no playgrounds, no common areas. These stolid brick houses don't aspire to be more than shelter. There is no ornamentation, none of the human touches that endear us to older, traditional architecture, no matter what the style. To drive down our old street, or almost any residential street built in Dallas after the Second World War, is to encounter a monosyllabic pattern language that says the same word, over and over: efficiency.

"To understand why our modern residential landscape leaves so many of us with a vacant feeling, it's useful to see our houses and neighborhoods in the way I've come to think of as sacramental. What ideals do they convey in their physical reality? How do these habitats make those who live in them feel? What kind of life is possible here? What does living in such places teach its residents? How does it shape their character and outlook?

"These aren't silly questions, or the kinds of things that only the well-off can afford to think about. Your typical conservative will scoff at them defensively, but he can only dismiss these questions if he is determined to ignore human nature, and the way the built environment both expresses humanity's deepest longings and aspirations, and the way it shapes them."

From Jonathan Hale's The Old Way of Seeing:

"Everywhere in the buildings of the past is relationship among parts: contrast, tension, balance. Compare the buildings of today and we see no such patterns. We see fragmentation, mismatched systems, uncertainty. This disintegration tends to produce not ugliness so much as dullness, and an impression of unreality.

"The principles that underlie harmonious design are found everywhere and in every time before our own; they are the historical norm. They are the same in the eighteenth century houses of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the buildings of old Japan, in Italian villages, in the cathedrals of France, in the ruins of the Yucatan. The same kinds of patterns organize Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and Michelangelo's Capitol.

"If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the patterns of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds, or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves."

(Qtd. in Dreher, Crunchy Cons)

"What are food and agricultural and culinary traditions for, anyway? You can't answer that question properly without first asking, what are people for? Answer that one, and the first question answers itself."

Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons

"The world exists not for what it means, but for what it is. . . . It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. . . . We were made in the image of God. We were created to delight, as He does, in the resident goodness of creation. We were not made to sit around mumbling incantations and watching our insides to see what creation will do for us."

Robert Farrar Capon, qtd. in Dreher, Crunchy Cons

"There is a wisdom that comes into a culture when many of its people have a direct connection to the land and to life, to the living cycles. I see many of the political agendas today as being a total failure to understand life, seasons, accountability, and the connections of life and people to our community. There's just no connection, and so there's no reason, there's no common sense. You can blame as many people on the right as on the left."

Joel Salatin, qtd. in Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons

Rod Dreher interviewed writer Joel Salatin in his book Crunchy Cons about problems with mainstream conservatism.

Salatin: "One of the problems with conservatives is that we tend to be very Western in our thinking. Greco-Roman-linear-segmented-compartmentalized thinking. We in the conservative community love the scientific method, double-blind studies, that sort of thing, as opposed to the Eastern mind-set, which thinks more holistically, and more along the lines of 'we' than 'I.'"

Dreher: "You'll recall that that's what British economist E. F. Schumacher found.... He discovered that thinking of economic questions as distinct from human society, with all its variables, could result in greater material output, but at the cost of a greater harmony needed to sustain the happiness and well-being of the community."

Salatin: "Conservatives tend to ask how we can be more efficient, not how we can be more effective. You can be very efficient at the wrong thing."

"The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important."

Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons