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After linking to that Rod Dreher article yesterday, I Googled him. I used to correspond with him occasionally when we both wrote for Touchstone (he regularly, me whenever I wrote something they liked, which is the difference between an accomplished writer and a writing hack, though the hack often takes far more trouble with his prose than, say, the journalist who has to crank out script for a living).

I was interested to see this passage at Wikipedia: "Dreher is working on another book. He has said on his blog that it will center on "the Benedict Option", the idea that those who want to live with traditional morality should separate themselves to some degree from mainstream society and try to live in intentional communities or other subcultures."

I've been seeing more of this kind of thing. There's Opus Dei, of course, but then E. Michael Jones seems to be proposing a similar thing. There also appears to be a strain of this kind of thinking in The New Evangelization, which emphasizes the need for "little communities" within the parish, which seem to be a combination of bible study/support group/lay order.

It reminds me of the important work of Robert Nisbet, who pointed out that the demolition of communities under the nation-state behemoth was leaving modern man "metaphysically beleaguered." "Values such as love, honor and loyalty," Nisbet said, "do not, cannot thrive in a sociological vacuum." As Brad Lowell Stone summarized in his excellent little biography about Nisbet: "They must be cultivated in groups small enough to instill learning and meaningful enough to the individual to convey to him the profound significance to those values."

Fortunately, I believe nature abhors a sociological vacuum, so people instinctively seek to fill it with society, no matter how hard the federal government seeks to make the vacuum more powerful by taking away more and more local control (relevance).

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