"Delights in Skewering the Left and the Right Simultaneously"

"It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

"Dreher's answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term 'liquid modernity' to describe a way of life in which 'change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.' The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable. He urges Christians, therefore, to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism."

 

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker profiles writer Rod Dreher.