shamgar
robophobe
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User ID: 2609
shamgar
robophobe
20d ago
While it is not as formalized as the traditional monastic practices you bring up, I think for a lot of Christians' personal devotion in terms of prayer and Bible reading does have some overlap with more contemplative practices even if Protestants (or at least Evangelicals) typically don't talk about it in those terms. Protestants are definitely encouraged to take some time and read Scripture and pray on their own. Maybe a more formal structure of doing this like Lectio Divina can probably be a useful tool to do this, but it seems to me that a Protestant who starts his day with 15 minutes of personal Bible reading and prayer is fundamentally doing the same thing as somebody starting his day with 15 minutes of Lectio Divina.
One thing I see around me with secular people who are talking about yoga and mindfulness and mediation and stuff, is that their spirituality seems to very self-centred. A lot of naval-gazing and thinking very hard about your own feelings, but not so much transcendence. I know very little about hinduism and buddhism so I am not claiming this tendency is representative of those religions and their spiritual practices and I am sure this tendency is simply a degeneration of such practices wrought by modern western hyper-individualism. But in general I feel like in the modern western world people spend too much time sitting at home alone naval-gazing - the homo incurvatus in se, which st. Augustine talked about. If anything I feel like most people should be told to stop thinking so much about themselves and their own feelings and to start thinking more about the world around them and the people that inhabit it.
That being said, besides going out more and relating to others (and the Other) learning how to do introspection in a good and healthy way through contemplative prayer might be an important part of the cure for the homo incurvatus in se as well. The condition I am here lamenting might be caused by qualitative problems with introspection as much as quantitive ones. The solution would not just be less introspection, but also better introspection. So I don't necessarily oppose the general point of your post to be clear.
Eco-Conservatism
Well, I've never used that label to describe myself and I don't think I will anytime soon, but nonetheless guilty as charged I suppose. I've always been convinced that conserving nature is conservative, not progressive. I've read too much Tolkien as a teenager, so now I'm immune to the pervasive but incoherent culture war dichotomy of our age which somehow imagines destroying nature in favour of economic liberalism as conservative and opposing that as progressive. Scrolling down a bit, in "other matches" it gives Christian Democracy and Distributism, which are labels I'm more likely to identify with, so fair enough. Contrary to a lot of these types of political tests I feel like this one actually captured my political values pretty well.
Only 15 out of the 223 ideologies in the catalogue hold both of these positions. Closest matches: Conservative Liberalism, Mutualism, Minarcho-Mutualism
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