Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16Plough Quarterly • Summer 2016 17 Stanley Hauerwas, professor emeritus of theological ethics and of law at Duke University, is author or editor of more than thirty books including (with William H. Willimon) Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Abingdon, 1989, 2014). Watch this interview at plough.com/hauerwas. to direct attention to real people, not just to beliefs or concepts. You’ve written extensively about how the church should respond to the “end of Christendom” – the fact that we no longer live in a culture whose ground rules stem from Christianity. What about the “Benedict Option” proposed by the writer Rod Dreher? He argues that Christians should respond to secularization by following the example of the early monastics, withdrawing Photograph by Masha Danilova, Unsplash   Is Dangerous from a heathen civilization to build alternative communities where Christian virtues can be nourished and passed on. Is he right? This Benedict Option idea comes from the last line of Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue, in which he observes that the barbarians have been ruling us for some time and that our future is “no doubt to have a Benedict, no doubt a very different Benedict.” Here’s the problem: Alasdair once told me that this is the