Life together as an empire collapses

In a course that I’m teaching on Christian spirituality, my students and I have felt ourselves directly addressed by everything we’ve read, from medieval commentaries and sermons to visionary literature, from prison letters to autobiographies. The power of these texts to speak to readers is nothing new. What feels new is the sound of their voices in this particular moment.

My students and I notice that bits and pieces of our reading have been turning up in newspaper articles and editorials. In February, New York Times columnist David Brooks explored models of resistance to the Trump administration, some drawn from the literature of Christian spirituality. If the primary threat is authoritarian, Brooks argued, then we are in a Bonhoeffer moment, and the best course is direct action in the streets. If the threat is corruption, then we are in a St. Benedict moment and must keep our heads down and our hands busy creating new forms of community until this wave of barbarism has passed. If the threat is chaos born of incompetence, as Brooks believes, then we’re in a Gerald Ford moment, one that calls for public servants who are committed to restoring the norms of governance that the Trump administration has been aggressively shredding.

Gerald Ford is not on my syllabus, but Bonhoeffer and Benedict are. Benedict, in fact, is the man of the hour. Several of my students have read about him in publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic. What has he captured so our imagination in this moment?