Matthew Loftus, “Fear the lifestyle that will kill body and soul” at Mere Orthodoxy = http://mereorthodoxy.com/fear-the-lifestyle-that-will-kill-body-and-soul/#more-126950. This might be the first time I have linked to an article by Matthew Loftus who is someone I admire and would like to emulate if I had more courage and creativity. Loftus is about to move with his family to serve as a medical missionary in South Sudan. Loftus discusses physical and spiritual dangers that face people (especially traditional Christians) in the modern secular West and from which we are not immune when we live abroad. Pay special attention to his discussion of risk and suffering – especially in relation to the spiritual formation of our own children. Note also a few important ways he challenges current discussions of the Benedict Option. Loftus points to something I have been talking and thinking about lately in conversation with a close friend. The conclusions frighten me. But do not see how to avoid them.
While the needs abroad are great, there are some particularly acute opportunities here in America within our marginalized communities. Urban, suburban, or rural, you can find examples of each in need of neighbors and neighborliness. As Rod Dreher points out about once a month, there are too many places where discipleship isn’t happening, with ugly cultural consequences. These places usually have a few faithful saints who have chosen to love their community despite the cultural urge to “get out”, but need the sort of people who would seriously consider the Benedict Option to join them. Does intentionally moving to these communities in concert with other believers to love fragmented families carry some real risks to ourselves and our children? Yes. Is there any other way to bring the Gospel power of cultural renewal to these towns and neighborhoods besides moving in and sharing in the joys and struggles of life together in our churches? I don’t think so.
Taking one’s family into sacrificial mission and involving our children in giving to others is by no means a guarantee that they won’t stray. (I can practically guarantee that idolizing the mission over its Master or loving the sacrifice over your kids will do very bad things to your relationship with both.) However, if we want to disciple our children we must involve them in loving outreach and model what it means to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. This is hard, perhaps even more so because we have imbibed our culture’s idolatrous approach to safety, security, and status. Even more, we’ve allowed this cultural value system to characterize a great many of our practical decisions about where and how we live for the past several decades. Yet the Kingdom of God is being proclaimed throughout the world and by joyfully pouring ourselves out in sacrifice we have the opportunity to witness to God’s love. After all, we worship a risen Savior who really did take one for the team, more than you or I ever could. By walking in His footsteps, our sufferings themselves are transformed and outweighed.
Ross Douthat, “There is no pro-life case for Planned Parenthood” at New York Times = http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/there-is-no-pro-life-case-for-planned-parenthood/?smid=tw-share&_r=0. Let me once again emphasize… I am not trying to offer an argument against (1) legal elective abortion or (2) federal funding for Planned Parenthood. The point is yet again examples of bad arguments and sloppy thinking that seem so ubiquitous in this generation.
So let’s be clear about what’s really going on here. It is not the pro-life movement that’s forced Planned Parenthood to unite actual family planning and mass feticide under one institutional umbrella. It is not the Catholic Church or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or the Southern Baptist Convention or the Republican Party that have bundled pap smears and pregnancy tests and HPV vaccines with the kind of grisly business being conducted on those videos. This is Planned Parenthood’s choice; it is liberalism’s choice; it is the respectable center-left of Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus and Will Saletan that’s telling pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike that contraceptive access and fetal dismemberment are just a package deal, that if you want to fund an institution that makes contraception widely available then you just have to live with those“it’s another boy!” fetal corpses in said institution’s freezer, that’s just the price of women’s health care and contraceptive access, and who are you to complain about paying it, since after all the abortion arm of Planned Parenthood is actually pretty profitable and doesn’t need your tax dollars?
This is a frankly terrible argument, rooted in a form of self-deception that would be recognized as such in any other context. Tell me anything but this, liberals: Tell me that you aren’t just pro-choice but pro-abortion, tell me that abortion is morally necessary and praiseworthy, tell me that it’s as morally neutral as snuffing out a rabbit, tell me that a fetus is just a clump of cells and that pro-lifers are all unhinged zealots. Those arguments, as much as I disagree with them, have a real consistency, a moral logic that actually makes sense and actually justifies the continued funding of Planned Parenthood. [emphasis added]
Yes. This is precisely the point I keep making over and over again. That people run around using arguments that they would not be caught dead using if any other issue were at stake.
Addendum 15.16h – Rachel Lu, “Liberals don’t want you to read Ryan Anderson” at The Federalist = http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/05/liberals-dont-want-you-to-read-ryan-anderson/. Yeah the title is a bit in-your-face but interesting piece by Rachel Lu of whom I am a fan and like to link her work. Lu reviews Overruled: The future of marriage and religious freedom by Ryan Anderson. The main thrust of her review is that opponents of traditional marriage (pardon the terminology) and religious freedom (when it allows people to disagree with and choose not to support same-sex marriage) hate Anderson and are terrified of his book precisely because it is that good and Anderson is that persuasive.
Over the course of reading Anderson’s book, the reader is in serious danger of recognizing this terrible truth: knowing what things are is good. It helps a lot in keeping the world sane.
We’ve already seen what happens when people forget what marriage is. We get heartbreak and dysfunction, which first ravages adult lives, then gets obligingly passed on to the next generation. That’s been happening for some time.
Now we’re in a new phase: government-mandated confusion. The people who haven’t yet forgotten what marriage is must be coerced into conceding the point. Naturally, these holdouts tend to be religious people. (Religious traditions have a way of preserving nuggets of sanity when the mainstream culture is going off the rails.) So now we talk a lot about “religious freedom,” although what we really need is just the freedom to remain sane in a culture that increasingly is not. We’re still debating how much leeway to give to religious dissenters, but things clearly aren’t going well when we have to fight this hard for permission to be the crazy ones.
Edited 2015-08-13 11.00h – Removed and changed a couple sentences that might have been distracting.