Author: Rod Dreher File Type: epub A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.David Brooks In this controversial bestseller, Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life. From the inside, American churches have been hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudoChristianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. Keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House may have bought a brief reprieve from the states assault, but it will not stop the Wests slide into decadence and dissolution. Rod Dreher argues that the way forward is actually the way backall the way to St. Benedict of Nursia. This sixth-century monk, horrified by the moral chaos following Romes fall, retreated to the forest and created a new way of life for Christians. He built enduring communities based on principles of order, hospitality, stability, and prayer. His spiritual centers of hope were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization. Today, a new form of barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church. The goal to embrace exile from mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture. The Benedict Optionis both manifesto and rallying cry for Christians who, if they are not to be conquered, must learn how to fight on culture war battlefields like none the West has seen for fifteen hundred years. Its for all mere ChristiansProtestant, Catholic, Orthodoxwho can read the signs of the times. Neither false optimism nor fatalistic despair will do. Only faith, hope, and love, embodied in a renewed church, can sustain believers in the dark age that has overtaken us. These are the days for building strong arks for the long journey across a sea of night. **

Author: Werner Hamacher File Type: pdf Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end.br The violent transformations which Hegels philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamachers topic. Starting from Hegels commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegels thought into his mature worksthe Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Historyfocusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements.br Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thingthe point where it peaksbecause it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegels system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end.br Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegels philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamachers argument is directed toward what in Hegels philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea (Ekel) everything that resists appropriation.br Emphasizing Hegels claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitudethe pleromaof philosophy and history. What remainsthe indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursivedemands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture toward a pleroma other than Hegels.From the Inside FlapSince Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end.br The violent transformations which Hegels philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamachers topic. Starting from Hegels commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegels thought into his mature worksthe Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Historyfocusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements.br Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thingthe point where it peaksbecause it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegels system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end.br Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegels philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamachers argument is directed toward what in Hegels philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea (Ekel) everything that resists appropriation.br Emphasizing Hegels claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitudethe pleromaof philosophy and history. What remainsthe indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursivedemands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture toward a pleroma other than Hegels.From the Back Cover