85 Quotes by Rod Dreher

Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.

Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.

People long for God, and more of them than we might think are willing to accept the idea that getting close to him might be painful. The church needs to worry less about coddling our superficial tastes and impulses and more about giving us the whole truth.

The first part of saving your life is coming to understand how you endangered it by loving wrongly, and living under the rule of your passions.

If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of “stability” – meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be “salt and light” to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in the hopes that she’ll save another drowning child.

The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution.

For us, the Soviet constitution had no meaning. Everybody knew these were just words that had no relation to real life. In this country, the Constitution is meaningful. We have an independent judiciary. We have to protect it. We don’t need to invent anything new – we just need to have the courage to protect what we have.

Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” in order to bring about “social justice.