A professor of mine at Notre Dame was wont to preface some of his most barbed questions, usually to visiting philosophers and theologians when he thought they had flown a little too high off the ground, with: “Well, I am just a humble historian, but ….” It was a modesty topos worthy of a medieval monastic. You can imagine the smothered snorts from his graduate students in the back row.
Well, I am just a humble historian, and in my case the humility topos is quite, quite genuine. But I have a special interest in early medieval monasticism — the heyday of Benedictine monasticism, historically speaking — and I have been following with interest the debate surrounding Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Aside from my academic interests, I teach at a residential seminary: models of Christian community separate, to some extent, from and in tension with their wider parent culture are of interest to me.
Read Full Article »