A measured case for appreciating one's roots, returning to them, and developing virtues through everyday actions

Small-Town Saints for Our Placeless Age

by Michael W. Hannon

In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher eulogizes his little sister with a hagiography worthy of St. Therese herself, while also evaluating his own relationships--to people and to place--according to the virtue of stability proposed by St. Benedict.
In the final line of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously remarked that in our peculiar historical moment, "We are waiting not for Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict." By this, he meant to encourage the establishment of subcultural societies, set up to safeguard virtue and to protect tradition from the destructive winds of change already gathering in our post-virtuous world.
"What matters at this stage," he wrote, "is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us."
MacIntyre's Notre Dame colleague Patrick Deneen gestured toward a similar hope in a recent essay here on Public Discourse. Despite the peril of our current trajectory, "We can change direction and even effect a kind of 'regime-change,'" Deneen proposed, "though not by force of arms nor dictate from Washington, DC. Rather, we can live as a kind of 'contrast society' to liberal America--in our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities, and among our friends--even as we seek a change in America's fundamental worldview."
It would be hyperbolic to declare that journalist Rod Dreher has brought MacIntyre's wait to an end and fulfilled his decades-old Benedictine prophecy. It would be similarly overdramatic to suggest that Dreher has realized the perfected form of Deneen's "contrast society" in his rural Louisianan hometown of St. Francisville.
Nevertheless, as regards a more humane and virtuous way forward, Rod Dreher's new masterwork The Little Way of Ruthie Leming serves as a significant step in the right direction. Subtitled A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, the book presents an edifying narrative of localist virtue, encouraging communal ties while avoiding the temptation to paint an overly romanticized picture of communitarian living.

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