The Value of PhDs has dropped even more.

"But he got his PhD not too long ago!" A graduate education in philosophy is crap, if one doesn't expect any real learning to take place until after the degree is conferred.

Catholic philosophers also need to stop masquerading as theologians.

Desanitizing Christianity After St. Benedict and After Virtue by Gregory P. Floyd

CWR: St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican II, and the “Benedict Option” by John Paul Meenan
We should all adopt some sort of interior ‘Benedict Option’, to ensure our souls are not conformed to this age, to keep our thoughts and motives as pure as we can.

Benedictine Options

CWR: Benedictine Options by James Kalb

When worldly life is brutal and disordered, and the Church is persecuted, she needs a place where she can remember her ultimate goal. And when it’s easy and prosperous, she needs to have examples of heroic dedication to her fundamental vision.

An Examination of Conscience Based on Chapter 4 of the Rule of St. Benedict

A New Examination of Conscience for Lent

St. Benedict and St. Thérèse

Post by Sophia Institute Press.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker on St. Benedict

Post by The Imaginative Conservative.

I missed this when it was published in August - New Liturgical Movement: Carillon Blessing at Holy Transfiguration Skete BY Jennifer Donnelson. I can understand why some might think that the adoption of the Rule of St. Benedict is a Latinization, since it developed under the Roman rite, but could it not be adopted for use with the Byzantine rite, as an sort of spiritual heir to the Rule of St. Basil?

Rod Dreher Asks

Is It Benedict Option Time?

Related:
A new Benedict for a new Dark Ages by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Dr. Hittinger for the Lumen Christi Institute

VIDEO NOW AVAILABLE: "Benedict's Teaching for Dark Ages, His and Ours," by Russell Hittinger

Feast of St. Benedict

Reposting this video featuring Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey.



See also Quaerere Deum - Documentary for Norcia. (ver 1)

Dom Mark Daniel Kirby: Evening of Saint Benedict's Day

Misc:
Te Deum

An intro to St. Josemaría Escrivá's teachings on lay spirituality

Holiness for Everyone
A recent book by Eric Sammons looks at the inheritance St. Josemaría left to the Church. As Scott Hahn says in the foreword: "I could not have written a book as useful as Eric’s, for he sees my family inheritance from a different perspective."

Opus Dei - Holiness for Everyone
The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaría Escrivá
by Eric Sammons

Scott Hahn has his own book about his experiences with Opus Dei.

Worthy of a review; who wants to obtain a copy for me? Does it mention love of parents and family while neglecting how the ordo caritatis is an ordering principle for one's life? Does it give the theological foundation for Catholic "relocalization"? I wonder if the local Catholic bookstore might carry it, or the bookstore at the shrine.

Mr. Sammons was on The Catholics Next Door several days ago, but the show isn't archived, as far as I can tell.

Related:
author's website
The Thin Veil review (weekly giveaway)
Jennifer Fitz's review (Amazon)

Josemaria Escriva. Founder of Opus Dei -News


Peter Hitchens on Philip Larkin: They Tuck you Up, Your Mum and Dad
Saint Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480 - ca. 547)

Items of Interest, 21 March 2012

Almost got run over tonight! That ------- is lucky that I didn't trust his driving or visual skills.

For the feast of St. Benedict (on the old calendar of the Roman rite): Pax Inter Spinas by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Suscipe Me, Domine







Paul Gottfried, German Sabotage and America’s Entry Into World War I

Kevin Gutzman on Jack Riccardi: "James Madison and the Making of America" (mp3)

The funeral of Pope Shenouda III - in pictures


(via Byzantine, Texas)

Juliet Schor on Consumption and the Environment

The great, invisible brain wave in the sky by Gene Logsdon (EB)

From January: Happy 130th Birthday, A. A. Milne: “Happiness” and the Origin of Winnie-the-Pooh

Relocalization:
Building Businesses That Stand For Something

Preparing for the unimaginable by Dave Pollard (EB)


Peak Oil and Energy:
Behind Oil Price Rise: Peak Oil or Wall Street Speculation?
Peak oil, keeping reality in mind

Education:
Laziness by Any Other Name

Diet and Health:
Mark Nugent, Will Red Meat Really Kill You?
Gary Taubes, Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat

Catholic:
Garbage Generation
Life after RC: Pressing for an investigation
Brennan Pursell, How to Develop a Prayer Life that Transforms
Don Nicola Bux Personally Appeals to the SSPX: "This is the appropriate moment..."

Music:
Pretty Little Girl from Galax video

Movies:
Whit Stillman Q & A: 'Damsels in Distress,' 13-Year Hiatus, Upcoming Ska Rocksteady Project

ARC'TERYX LEAF Urban Wolf from ARC'TERYX LEAF on Vimeo.

Our friend MB recommends the following address given by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury at San Anselmo University: 'Benedict and the Future of Europe.'

Much of what he writes concerning communal life and the need for a more humane economy is good. The biggest objection I would have would be to his discussion of cultural diversity. Culturally diverse Christian polities in Europe? Wonderful. Cultural diversity within a political community? Problematic.

The community envisaged by the Rule is therefore not in any way a unit dominated by individual will, however strongly the injunctions may be phrased about surrendering to authority. That authority attempts to be, not representative in the modern sense, but at least systematically attentive to the diversity of character and experience within the community. Most significantly, perhaps, the community's discipline does not assume that there is a 'natural' order of precedence established by the world outside which dictates the degree to which you are taken seriously in the community. Seniority is a matter determined within the monastery (chapter 63), primarily related to the date of entry, except as the abbot may determine. It is, we could say, the scope of your involvement in the community's life that defines your standing, not any external criterion such as wealth or social status or education, or even chronological age. Put the other way around, no-one's voice in the community is automatically dismissed or minimised because of the lack of wealth, status and so on. The community is one in which the 'currency' of exchange is not restricted by social or historic accident; commitment to the community is the ground upon which the right to be heard is based.

Once again, how does all this relate to the questions we might want to put to our continent and its culture at the present time? The first point is obviously about the valuation of diversity in the Rule. It is not anything remotely resembling the rather passive pluralism, which seems to be the default position of many kinds of post modernity. There is a clear and unambiguous assumption that there is such a thing as a common good and that therefore each distinct diverse perspective is open to challenge; Benedictine obedience is to do with this, not with some generalised submission of one person's will to the power of another. But there is an equally unambiguous refusal of any sort of competitive struggle for the dominance of one individual or group, and a set of checks and balances to offset any risk attaching to the strong emphasis on the abbot's authority. Authority is the negotiating of a variety of gifts in order to sustain a society in which all are at work for the sake of each other's flourishing and (in the monastic context) holiness).

In the macro political scene, this implies a serious valuation of cultural diversity - of local language and custom - and a suspicion of those trends that associate authority either with an isolated professional class or with an economically dominant partner in the community of states. The bureaucratic urge to homogenise is one which Christians have every reason to resist; and the characteristic style of international planning and debate needs to allow the less materially advantaged partners a free voice. One of the more positive factors of some of the language of European politics in recent decades has been the emphasis on regional autonomy - a recognition that the solid and inflexible concepts of national sovereignty that have prevailed in the modern period cannot do full justice to actual cultural diversity and the need for appropriate local freedoms.

A European community (in the strict sense, and in the looser sense of the general geographical ensemble of European countries) that reflected something of the Benedictine vision would be one in which smaller nations and minorities within nations would be assured of a voice. And, to pick up a point that is especially pertinent in our present situation, it would be one that did not panic about migrants. The migrant group that is prepared to work within the civic framework of a host society, that aspires simply to citizenship, is one whose voice in the community overall is of significance alongside those who have a longer history and a political or economic advantage. Once within the relationships of purposeful common life, the facts of coming from ethnically or religiously different backgrounds should not disenfranchise them. The basic importance of 'obedience', in the full sense give by the Rule to that word, requires governing authorities to listen to diversity and to ask how the overall balance of nation or transnational grouping needs to be adjusted so as to incorporate both the gifts and the needs of the incoming stranger who is seeking not simply hospitality (the Rule's priorities are clear about what to do in such a case) but shared belonging.

How this is achievable when we confront groups whose basic assumptions about civic identity appear to be different from our own historic ideals is of course a major challenge. While it is a facile and dangerous fiction to think of Islamic civic ideals and Christian or Western ones as so different that they cannot be sensibly compared, there is undoubtedly a spectrum of understanding from the ideologically secular liberal through to the most inflexible Muslim primitivist (the kind who elects to ignore most of Islamic history and jurisprudence in favour of a supposed adherence to the bare data of initial revelation). But once we have stopped thinking of this as inevitably a standoff between rational pluralism and simple theocracy - once we have actually begun to think about how to conduct debates over civic identity across some of these frontiers - the way is open to a properly 'Benedictine' questioning as to how we shape a common civic purpose out of these new diversities rather than assuming that this is now a level of diversity with which we can't cope.

I think he is rather optimistic about a community formed in a Christian Western civilization being able to maintain some semblance of harmony when cultural diversity is extended to include (a sizable population of) Muslims.

Democrats and Jihadists: A Love Affair by R. Cort Kirkwood

Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo