THERE IS NO CHRISTIANITY IN THE CLOISTER:

If you read just one work of serious nonfiction this spring, let it be Rod Dreher's beautiful, moving memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. At the center of the book is the emotionally gripping story of the death of the author's sister from cancer at the age of 42. But that story is embedded in an another -- an intellectually and spiritually provocative account of Dreher's youthful flight from and eventual return (after Ruthie's death) to his Louisiana hometown (population 1,700). It is these bracing reflections on place and community, ambition and happiness that transform the book into something far more than a tragic autobiography. Dreher has written a powerful statement about how we live today -- and more importantly, about how we should live. [...]

On visits back home during the 19 months she waged a losing battle with cancer and in the days immediately following her death, Dreher was repeatedly stunned by everyday acts of kindness and love in his hometown. Neighbors cooked meals and cleaned house for the overwhelmed Leming family. The community raised $43,000 in a single night to help them pay their medical bills. At Ruthie's funeral, the pallbearers removed their shoes, carrying her coffin barefoot in tribute to her love of the outdoors. As Mike Leming put it shortly after Ruthie's death, "We're leanin', but we're leanin' on each other."

When Dreher resolved to follow Ruthie's "little way" by giving up his life on the East Coast, returning to rural Louisiana, and writing a book defending the decision, he placed himself firmly in the camp of conservatives who congregate at a website called Front Porch Republic and contribute regularly to The American Conservative (by far the freshest and most intellectually serious magazine on the Right). Unlike the leaders of the mainstream conservative movement, Patrick Deneen, Mark T. Mitchell, Russell Arben Fox, Jeremy Beer, and the other "Porchers" have little interest in engaging with inside-the-Beltway power politics. Instead, they prefer to act as gadflies, denouncing the imperial ethos and influence-peddling that dominates Washington, as well as the boundless greed that drives would-be Masters of the Universe from around the country to seek their fortunes on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Influenced by an eclectic range of thinkers, including sociologists Christopher Lasch and Philip Rieff, political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams, Catholic philosopher David Schindler, and poet and essayist Wendell Berry, the Porchers see conservatism as a disposition or way of living locally, within moral, religious, economic, and environmental limits, in tightly knit, sustainable community with neighbors and the natural world. If they have a rallying cry, it's "Stay Put!" Or, in Dreher's case, "Go Home!" 

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