Do we need crunchy cons? We need many people who have the sacramental view of life Rod describes. But we will be less complacent, and less likely to make our preferences into an ideology, if we don’t think of ourselves as part of a "movement." Moreover, others will likely be more open to the dispositions we want to encourage if they don’t see them as part of something that they must abandon their family, professional, or social circumstances to “join”.

Yet inasmuch as there is already a “crunchy con movement”, I wonder how much it will participate in the renewal of culture. I detect in some of the conversations Rod recounts a belief that being detached from our current culture means separating from it. But I fail to see how we can renew a culture in which we do not participate. More than to monasticism, I look to the example of the early Christians, expressed in the well-known passage from the 2nd century “Letter to Diognetus”:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. . . . But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. . . .