Rule 
Articles and posts specifically teaching the Rule of St. Benedict. Articles divided into two categories: Benedictine Wisdom, the teaching of the Benedictine Fathers; and Instruction, teaching by more modern day Benedictine scholars.
Self Fusion and Human Personality
The root of personality is to be sought in the “true Self” which is manifested in the basic unification of consciousness in which subject and object are one. Hence the highest good is “the self’s fusion with the highest reality.”* Human personality is regarded as the force which effects this fusion. The hopes and desires… Read More ›
Propaganda
The real violence exerted by propaganda is this: by means of apparent truth and apparent reason, it induces us to surrender our freedom and self-possession. It predetermines us to certain conclusions, and does so in such a way that we imagine that we are fully free in reaching them by our own judgment and our… Read More ›
What is God?
(Read this as Lectio — it cannot be read quickly without reflection.) What is God? That without which nothing exists. Just as nothing can exist without him, so he cannot exist without himself: he exists for himself, he exists for all, and consequently in some way he alone exists who is his own existence and… Read More ›
Technology and it’s threat to Society
If technology really represented the rule of reason, there would be much less to regret about our present situation. Actually, technology represents the rule of quantity, not the rule of reason (quality=value=relation of means to authentic human ends). It is by means of technology that man the person, the subject of qualified and perfectible freedom, becomes quantified,… Read More ›
Wash, make yourselves clean
You urge me to lay down for you some rule for contemplating the Beloved and to give you a method for this discovery and vision. What does this mean? Would you have me confine within a rule the bounty of God’s gift? This vision results not from human effort but from grace. It is the… Read More ›
Discover your own inner ground
The way to find the real ‘world’ is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self. This ‘ground,’ this ‘world’ where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and… Read More ›
Earthly desires are shadows
The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new… Read More ›
True solitude
True solitude is found in humility, which is infinitely rich. False solitude is the refuge of pride, and it is infinitely poor. The poverty of false solitude comes from an illusion which pretends, by adorning itself in things it can never possess, to distinguish one individual self from the mass of other men. True solitude… Read More ›
One heart and one soul
Since they have but one heart and one soul and all things in common, there is concord and unanimity throughout, and they always put the general profit and the common good before their own individual convenience. They so far renounce themselves and what is theirs that none of them, if indeed he is truly one… Read More ›
Love in Deed and Truth
If a brother or sister has nothing and cannot even find enough to eat, we ought to give them the basic necessities of life. Likewise if we notice that they are deficient in spiritual things, we ought to guide them in whatever way we can. Of course we must be sincere in doing this, not… Read More ›