Our communities and households must be active in reaching out to those whose lack of virtue, tradition, or culture is harming themselves and others, the countless refugees from human nature that technological destruction is creating. This of course includes political refugees fleeing climate change or violence, many of whom probably have a thing or two to teach us about human nature, but far more often it includes the people in our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and counties whose capacity for flourishing has been decimated by the forces conservatives love to decry but rarely have a strategy to do something about. Going from “a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla” means that we are no longer protecting “ourselves” from “them”, but trying to help the most of vulnerable of them become one of us.

As Loftus wrote in an earlier essay:

This is not simply a matter of the rich and powerful sacrificing for the sake of people in poor urban communities. It is also not a matter of poor urban communities since many rural places and even many suburban places need more good neighbours working with local churches. But we need to come to terms with the fact that exercising ourselves in service and challenging ourselves by frequent, intimate exposure to another culture’s expression of faith is a means of discipleship. It also a testimony to the watching world that Christ’s sufficiency transcends our cultural impetus to protect ourselves from “those kinds of people.” We don’t need an elite corps of radical Christians, we need faithful believers with power and privilege to simply spread out and join with brothers and sisters who don’t have the same resources we do.

Good heavenly days, this is a challenge.

I want to return to these thoughts in a couple of months, when an essay of mine appears: I’ve written for The New Atlantis about the fiftieth anniversary of Oliver Sacks’s book Awakenings.

Also, I’ll have more on “the path of the guerrilla” in another post.