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More on Culture - 45 |
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The Benedict Option - Brave Old World vs. Brave New World
- Chinese Medicine, Orthodoxy and Eastern Approach to Medicine
- Cooking as Soul Craft: Reflections on Church and Kitchen
These talks are about how to live in a culture that is against the Gospel.
Talk One: The Benedict Option
“Our culture is falling apart because we have no shared view of virtue or truth or values.” For this reason, Rod advocates a community culture where people of like mind and values can support each other and their families. He advocates doing this in the context of the local church. The families in his church in Dallas have shared values and virtues but since they live from 30 to 60 minutes away by auto, it is hard to impossible to live with a community attitude. There are several such communities in this country where the members of the local church live within a few minute of each other. One of the most famous is the community of St John in Eagle River, Alaska, where about 40 families live within walking distance of the church and another 20 families live within a 10 minute drive.
Rod advocates a concerted effort to live in this type of community in all areas of the country. He calls this the Benedict Option, named after the order of Saint Benedict who established monasteries around Italy in the 5th Century. He does not mean we need to live as monastic but means we should take a new look at how we support and encourage each other in our daily lives just as monastic’s do.
The success of the Eagle River community has been the commitment of the community to be involved in the whole liturgical life of the church. The individual members of that community have put aside many personal dreams in favor of physically staying in close proximity to their church and friends.
Growing up in a community of shared faith makes it easier for the ideals one teaches the children to be planted on fertile ground. Their peers with be more compatible in their values.
“To live in Christian community is to stand together against a culture that will destroy us. We have to band together to make it”
Talk Two: Brave Old World vs. Brave New World
Rod compares the setting and actions of the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to the world we live in today. The novel opens in London in the "year of our Ford 632" (AD 2540 in the Gregorian Calendar). In this world, the vast majority of the population is unified under The World State, an eternally peaceful, stable global society, in which goods and resources are plentiful (because the population is permanently limited to no more than two billion people) and everyone is happy. In this society, natural reproduction has been done away with and children are decanted and raised in Hatcheries and Conditioning Centers. Huxley has described an ideal world where women no longer are forced to give birth. Society is divided into five castes, created in these centers. The highest caste is allowed to develop naturally while it matures in its "decanting bottle". The lower castes are treated to chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth.
This book was published in 1932 yet it is uncannily reminiscent of our society in many respects today. And even though we don’t have the controlled births that Huxley wrote about, the moral sway of today’s liberal society advocates many of the same philosopies discussed in Brave New World.
The Christian gospel is all that seems to be holding us back from adopting that terrible fate yet many churches today seem to embracing that lifestyle of state controlled immorality. Rod suggests the only answer is a return to personal quest for godliness and real Christian fellowship for encouragement to do the right and biblical things.
Talk Three: Chinese Medicine, Orthodoxy and Eastern Approach to Medicine
Rod presents a detailed view of Eastern Medicine This talk was given in June 2009 at Cambridge University as a Templeton Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion.
This includes a discussion of Daoism, the philosophy of living in harmony with all living things. He also discusses the forces of ying and yang and chi and how they relate to the body. He says the eastern medicine relates to the whole body whereas the western medicine tends to treat the individual parts of the body and mind separately.
Rod draws a parallel between eastern medicine and the Orthodox view of the total person. He is not advocating a departure from western medicine; he is only making observations as to how each medical approach treats the whole person. There is a lively discussion following his talk.
Talk Four: Cooking as Soul Craft: Reflections on Church and Kitchen
This is a wonderful talk about our love for food. So much of what we eat is not all that tasty and may represent an attitude such as is heard quite often, “It’s just food, why spend so much time on it?”
Rod takes a different approach to food and one that may surprisingly be more “Christian” if food could be such. He says that anything we do should be done well and food done well pleases men and God! The Greeks have their food festivals and sometimes that is the brunt of jokes, but the truth is, Greeks have successful food festivals because they have good food, tasty food and it’s food that is a part of their lives.
Rod says that food should be an art. He sites Julia Childs as an example of someone who was raised on bland American food and discovered the world of French cooking. There is now a movie about her life called Julia and Julie. It is a good movie and is well recommended. It is good because it celebrates the main way we as people spend time together, eating.
Julia Childs life was changed at one meal of delicious food. Rod says good food makes him want to be a better man. The Lord gave us the fruit of the earth and common sense and great taste buds. His thesis is that if one puts his whole heart into cooking as he should with everything he does; the food one prepares will be tasty and will raise us up to new levels of spirituality.
He advocates using food and hospitality to win others into the Kingdom of God and to help us build a better community in our own churches.
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Revised:August 18, 2010.