Rod Dreher has suggested something he calls “The Benedict Option” as a response to the decline in religious faith and practice — and in the face of the increasing hostility toward them — in contemporary culture. The question he believes Christians must ask themselves in our current setting is, “What must the church do in order to live and witness faithfully as a minority in a culture in which we were once the majority?”
“As we try to determine which forms of community, which institutions and which ways of life can answer that question,” writes Dreher, “we should draw on the wisdom of St. Benedict and his Rule. We should innovate ways to adapt it to forms of non-monastic living in the world.” Among the Benedictine principles he believes should help inform this recovery-of-the-old-in-the-new way of life he is suggesting would be things like order, prayer and work, community, stability, balance, and hospitality.
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