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Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher Books

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“We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West. We work, we pray, we confess our sins, we show mercy, we welcome the stranger, and we keep the commandments. When we suffer, especially for Christ's sake, we give thanks, because that is what Christians do. Who knows what God, in turn, will do with our faithfulness? It is not for us to say. Our command is, in the words of the Christian poet W.H. Auden, to "stagger onward rejoicing”

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Book:The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
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“In Chapter 77, you had people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together,” says Patrik. “You had, for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side. It was totally normal for me that as a small child, I was being raised in a community of people with very different opinions. So it shattered the bubble around me.” The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace. “When we look at what’s happening in America today, we see that you are building walls and creating gaps between people,” he says. “For us, we are always willing to speak, to talk with the other side to avoid building walls between people. You know, it is much easier to indoctrinate someone who is enclosed within a set of walls.”

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Book:Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
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“This, it occurred to me, was the deeper meaning in the mournful merriment I had been part of that day. I stood at Mam's sink before bedtime, filling an iced tea glass with water, thinking that I had underestimated this place where I was born. I knew it was a good place to be from. I had no idea how great a place it was to be.”

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Book:The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life
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“Because we are finite creatures who live in time, we cannot see things clearly. Be careful in judging others because the truth of their character and their situation may be hidden from your eyes. Only God knows the whole truth and only God knows the future. Don't expect all the answers now, but be patient and trusting and seek to grow in love. Each act of love is one more step in the long journey to our true and only home, unity with God in eternity.”

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Book:How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem
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“Inferno was for learning about the nature of our sins. Purgatorio is for learning how to overcome our tendencies to fall victim to them. Understanding our dilemma is important, but it's not enough. What we do with that understanding makes the difference between life and death. Humility is the foundation of all spiritual progress. Humility builds resilience. Stop thinking of yourself as the center of your world you will find it becomes easier to endure life's setbacks. Plus, you will in time become more grateful, more merciful, and more loving.”

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Book:How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem
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“I am responsible for myself. Every time I do the things I shouldn't do or fail to do the things I should do, I sin. The weight of our sins can seem overwhelming, so much so that we feel trapped by them in a dark wood of our own making. What makes it worse is the sense in contemporary culture that sin is either not real or no big deal.”

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Book:How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem
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“Once, during my Catholic days, I was complaining with a Catholic friend about how terrible the teaching was in parish life. A priest listening to us said that everything we griped about was true, but we didn't have to resign ourselves and our children to this fate. 'You could go online to Amazon.com tonight and have sent to you within a week a theological library that Aquinas would have envied,' he said. 'My parents raised me in the seventies, which was the beginning of the catechesis nightmare. They knew that if they were going to raise Catholic kids, they would have to do a lot of it themselves, and they did. So do you.”

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Book:The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
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“Sex and commerce are fine things, but man cannot live by Viagra and the Dow Jones alone. A life led collecting things and experiences in pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad life, but it's not a good life either. Too often, the Democrats act like the Party of Lust, and the Republicans the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins that eat at the soul.”

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Book:Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots
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“As both a conservative and a Republican, I confess that we deserve to lose this year. We have governed badly and have earned the wrath of voters, who will learn in due course how inadequate the nostrums of liberal Democrats are to the crisis of our times. If I cannot in good faith cast a vote against the Bush years by voting for Obama, I can at least do so by withholding my vote from McCain.”

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Author:Rod Dreher
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“What happened to that man I was seven autumns ago? What happened to that country? Time heals, yes - and thank God the pain and terror of that time has abated, at least for most of us. In that sense time is a mercy. But time also obscures the life-giving truths we perceive in the light of the shadow of death. In that way, time is a curse.”

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Author:Rod Dreher
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“...whatever the self-righteous excesses of the environmentalist left, it is impossible to be true to traditional conservative values (to say nothing of the Christian faith conservatives like me profess) and hold laissez faire attitudes about the use and abuse of the natural world.”

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Author:Rod Dreher
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“As it turns out, the ecological catastrophe Kirk feared that would be the consequence of our impiety appears not to be one of radically diminished resources, but of potentially catastrophic climate change. It comes from an arrogant refusal by a modern consumerist society to accept limits on its desires. Kirk's idea of the "eternal society" evaporates before the insatiable demands of the Everlasting Now.”

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Author:Rod Dreher
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“If you believe that man is inherently flawed-what religious people call 'original sin'-it follows that man, if left to his own devices, will tend towards ego-driven disharmony. Traditionalist conservatives know that absent the restraining hand of religion, tradition, or the state, there is nothing to prevent human beings from acting in ways contrary to their own best interests, or those of the community.”

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Author:Rod Dreher
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