Is it time for the Benedict option? I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

A highly anticipated book was released this week: Rod Dreher’s provocatively titled “The Benedict Option.”

St. Benedict, of course, was the father of Western monasticism. So is Dreher saying that the culture is so corrupt that Christians need to head for the hills—or to a monastery? That’s what his critics seem to think.

But as Dreher wrote in Christianity Today, the Benedict option is “the idea that serious Christian conservatives [can] no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. We … have to … make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity, or we [will] doom our children and our children’s children to assimilation.”

Even if it’s not time for the Benedict option, it is time to talk about it. Come to BreakPoint.org for our symposium with leading Christian thinkers on “The Benedict Option.” Then visit our store to pick up the book.