Why Cloister?

On Shira Telushkin’s “The Improbable Revival of the Cloister”: The waste of God’s resources in building these monasteries is a downright lack of stewardship to the extent of sin. All the waste is for the fulfillment of a few people. (They could pray as much in their modest civilian homes.)

Do you think a personal relationship with the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, would have filled their void and broken the chain of humanness within them so that they could have lived a fulfilling life with their family? The answer is yes. Can we humans not realize that radical seclusion in most ways or forms in the present day (however righteous they appear on the outside) is actually self-oriented, which is nothing other than self-worship! Praying is spiritual relationship with God through faith in Jesus (the way). It is not ritualistic praying at certain times or places. Jesus taught that this is the righteousness of the Pharisees and if our righteousness is not better than theirs we will not see God. Would Plough quit publishing stories or articles that do not influence people to seek the kingdom of God first, then other things would be added.

Firman Miller
Shreve, Ohio

Is the revival of young women seeking the cloister really improbable? Personally, I find the thought of living as my authentic Christian self while being part of a larger society that rejects and denigrates my ideals much more challenging than the idea of a cloistered life. If we call these novitiates’ life-choice “intentional community,” would we view their decision differently? People are drawn to communal living for a variety of reasons; these women seek to prioritize their faith. Modern secular society with its techno-wizardry and fake social media has left many people feeling more isolated and adrift than ever. Meanwhile, studies show that people living a communal lifestyle experience deeper social connections and a stronger sense of purpose. These nuns haven’t chosen to live in isolation. They’ve rejected an impersonal society’s claims to their time, skills, and resources, and traded them for a like-minded, supportive sisterhood where faith is prioritized. There are physical sacrifices, true, but don’t they gain so much more in the liberation of their minds and souls?

DeVonna R. Allison
Ocala, Florida

Not Radical Enough

On Sohrab Ahmari’s “The Workers and the Church” (Autumn 2024): One of Ahmari’s many controversial claims stands out: his condemnation of “privatism and ‘lifestyleism,’” defined as “the dream of a retreat to some boutique redoubt, away from the contaminated world,” in which he alleges “traditional and conservative religious communities are drowning.”

Ahmari samples a variety of newly potent, anti-modern “lifestyle recommendations” on the Christian right, ranging from homeschooling to hobby farming to investing in cryptocurrency. However, he subverts the trad narrative by tracing those interests to neither timeless wisdom nor the ancient heritage of the church but “the Whiggish self-help ideology that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.”

Readers of Rebirth of a Nation and No Place of Grace, the left-leaning historian T. J. Jackson Lears’s cultural chronicles of the post–Civil War United States, will know what Ahmari is referring to. As Lears recounts, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a profusion of anti-modern fads among upper-middle-class American urbanites. Trends such as working out, periodically embarking on wilderness retreats, and buying craftsman-made goods all originated in their familiar forms during this period, essentially as means for the bourgeoisie to counteract or escape the negative impacts of industrialization.

Lears appears to sympathize with these trends insofar as they represent a protest against the “evasive banality” and “weightlessness” of a society in which “all that is solid melts into air.” Ultimately, though, he condemns them for merely resisting the liberal economic system on liberalism’s own terms: those of individualistic consumer choices.

Ahmari’s critique of bourgeois anti-modernism in its current, more religiously tinted manifestations falls on very similar lines to this: “There is nothing wrong with and probably much good about weightlifting or wholesome organic food.… But these things do not a Christian politics make. Moreover, the movement as a whole can only deepen the isolation and solipsism typical of the very modernity its advocates deplore.”

Ahmari’s greatest ire is reserved for the “elite-trad-lifestyle church,” a congregation of largely well-to-do Christians who use their resources to cultivate exclusive spiritualities rather than ameliorate the ills of society writ large. This “gated-community” approach to religion, he argues, “represents a profound betrayal of faith’s public, social component.” For Catholics in particular, he suggests, it represents a betrayal of the church’s “character as a mass religion” with what the Roman Magisterium has termed a “preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.”

Stern stuff, but there is palpable truth in it. The communities Ahmari lambasts are far from always pernicious, and his portrait of them may be a caricature, but the spirit of Christian privatism does seem to encourage those it animates to ignore or outright repudiate outsiders, whether they be present-day pagans, less fervent believers, or the urban poor.

Nonetheless, if the anti-modernism of the elite-trad-lifestyle church is not anti-modern enough, then neither, one might argue, is Ahmari’s proposed alternative to it. The most he appears to put forward in the way of economic reform is advocacy of “a living wage, labor unions, denser social safety nets, and the like,” benefits that are presumably to be secured through federal legislation.

This is not exactly a radical proposal. It is frankly just a restatement of the proposal of twentieth-century liberalism. And while it might mitigate some injustices if taken up, even then, it would hardly disrupt the United States’ economic system as a whole. New Polity’s counsel that Catholics completely cut ties with the stock market is more stridently anti-capitalist than anything Ahmari has proffered.

Pressing for a new New Deal or Great Society regime at the federal level, moreover, is not as much an affirmation of man’s social obligations as Ahmari seems to think it is. This is due to a straightforward, albeit often overlooked, problem of scale. Simply put, the average American has little influence over goings-on in Washington, DC.

Indeed, for vast swaths of the country, national politics is actually a distraction from the arena in which people’s authentic responsibilities more nearly lie: that of local politics. Perhaps the place most in need of Christians’ faithful presence is neither the trad homestead nor the halls of Congress, but the local city hall. Perhaps the venue in which believers should first seek to fulfill their social obligations is neither the boutique parish nor the new-right blogosphere, but the nearest soup kitchen.

Ahmari is correct to point out the pitfalls of privatism, and his pro-worker stance deserves a sound hearing in our national debates over economic policy. But if Catholic social teaching testifies to anything, it is to the fact that nothing should be allowed to obscure that most basic of Christ’s political doctrines: to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Collin Slowey
Washington, DC

The End of Work

I have wanted to attend a Plough reader meetup for a while now, but I felt apprehensive as I stepped off the metro in Washington, DC, with my magazine under my arm because I hadn’t even finished half of the recent issue Why We Work. As I explained to some of the wonderful people I met that evening, though I usually read the magazine cover-to-cover within a week of getting it in the mail, I put this issue aside for a month without opening it.

In late January, my wife was laid off from her job staffing and implementing foreign aid projects. My own job with the federal government remains at risk. For weeks we each woke up after a few hours of sleep thinking of what we would do if we were both out of work.

In these past months every few weeks has brought changes to our work. As it feels the walls are closing in on me, my mind races to use whatever degrees of freedom I have available to make life “normal” again. I realize, as Tish Harrison Warren writes, that this represents the urge “to use whatever means necessary to avoid the cross.”

Drawing on my work, which involves offering protection to those who suffer often brutal violence, I have slowly moved from a place of resistance to, at the best moments, one where I take “solace in the crucifixion,” as Stephanie Saldaña writes. Despite my own difficulties, I can still notice and act on the urge of compassion when I see my tired and beleaguered colleagues who have driven two hours to work, and who I know haven’t seen their children during waking hours in days. I pray for the grace to love my enemies, though I don’t know if I’ve yet received that grace or accepted it. I do see, though, maybe only really for the first time, that the freedom of the cross makes it possible to love in the face of hatred. I also find solace in the faith that even if my job and our work do not continue in the way I would hope, that our works do follow us in the small acts of compassion for one another and in the lives at whom our work was directed.

N. M.
Baltimore, Maryland

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