Rod Dreher: Sam Brinton & The Choice We Face

[Kamaji]

Sam Brinton & The Choice We Face

By Rod Dreher
February 11, 2022

As a follow-up to my post about the Sam Brinton controversy — and I hope you will go back there and read the important update I just posted — here is the first part of the chapter about Eros in The Benedict Option:

The opportunity to work is a gift from God that, when rightly employed, serves life and draws us back to Him. However, if work—or family, community, school, politics, or any other good thing—becomes an end in itself, it turns into an idol. It will eventually become a prison, a desert, even a graveyard of the spirit. These things only serve the truth and human flourishing if they are icons through which the light of Christ shines forth, making them a means by which the kingdom of God flourishes.

So it is with sex, a divine gift that, cherished properly, becomes a source of joy, abundance, and flourishing—of the couple and their community. When bound to God’s purposes, sex unites a man and a woman physically and spiritually, and from that fertile union new life may come, creating a family.

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If you are convinced that Sam Brinton is wrong, and that all values are not a matter of personal taste, then on what do you base your own values? Even if you can’t easily explain that moral intuition, you need to think about it. The only two answers are either a) your revulsion is based on pure prejudice, and needs either to be abandoned, or at least neutered; or b) there really is something profoundly evil at work here, and you had better return to the Church — not in a halfhearted way — and work to strengthen it as a bulwark and refuge against the suicidal decadence of the post-Christian West.

There is no third way, not that I can see. You can either have Sam Brinton, or you can have Jesus Christ, but not both. You can have either barbarism (defined as the release of passions), or you can have civilization. You can have death, or you can have life. The hour is late. The signs of the times are flashing neon.  You must choose.




Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-sam-brinton-sex-eros-weimar-america/