Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age Book

Well, it was a fine read and one that tickled the part of my brain that is so fond of Stanley Hauerwas and front porches. The book is, in part, a reflection on the ways in which the Second Vatican Council laid the groundwork for the Roman church to be a truly global community. Being largely ignorant of the council, I found this very helpful. More importantly, though, the book is an extended reflection on the importance of stability, patience, and empathy within and between traditions (including secular ones.) The chapter on loyal dissenters made me surprised to realize just how little the concept of a such a person holds sway in popular culture. That absence points right back at stability: it seems we have all become such little monads that there is little to keep us from treating ideas, communities, people, and places as consumer choices. I wrestle with this myself: having been given the boot from a religious community after persisting with it through thick and thin with something like a vow of stability, I am unsure of how to start building up a patient loyalty again. But one of the great things about Christian faith is the confidence that it is not, ultimately, our loyalty to traditions, or even to God, that makes us whole, but God's loyalty to us. The danger is, of course, for mistaking that loyalty as a confirmation one's prejudices, which is why the reflective tools of this book, that do such a great job of bringing Catholics and Protestants into dialogue about their traditions, are so useful.

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So far, this book is far more sassy than I had supposed. At one point, the author asks for a letter from anyone halfway on their way to a [insert -ism:] utopia that articulates how they will get to the finish line without something like Saint Benedict's vow of stability.

"...we should begin to develop a critical distance from the paradoxically authoritarian hold that modern antiauthoritarianism has on us. Whether or not the kind of counsel taking, fear of God, and vulnerability to "the least" of those in Benedictine monsteries convinces us that Benedict's abbot is adequately accountable, we should at least gain enough charity toward premodern texts, and enough humility about the limits of our own hypermodern sensibilities, to appropriate the wisdom in vows of stability in order to negotiate our way through a hypermodern world." p.101