The purpose of the Fellowship of St. Benedict is to enable a revival of Christian, Catholic culture by promoting the following three deeply intertwined ideas:
Methodologically, the overall idea is to merge the spiritual and philosophical insights & perspectives of the Middle Ages with the latest insights of nonlinear science.
Anyone who finds himself in agreement with the purpose of the Fellowship of St. Benedict is automatically a member! There is no membership list. There are no dues. (In this respect the Fellowship of St. Benedict is somewhat like the fictional Fellowship of the Rings in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)
Group subjectivity (aka corporate personality) is the belief that groups have elements of consciousness that are important to acknowledge for purposes of ethics, religion, law, and even biology. This idea was accepted up until the end of the Middle Ages, but has largely been ridiculed as "unscientific" since then.
In saying that groups have elements of consciousness I am not saying that they are anywhere near as conscious and intelligent as individual human beings, nor am I saying that individual human beings should unthinkingly submerge themselves within groups. What I am saying is that, because in the case of group subjects the whole is within the part as well as the part being within the whole, the individual human being needs to integrate the points of view of the various group subjects of which he is a part in order to arrive at correct ethical and legal decisions: The points of view of putatively radically autonomous human individuals (as promoted by the Enlightenment) are not enough, even when the point of view of a transcendent God is taken into consideration (as promoted by Protestantism).
Ever since the Enlightenment, philosophers have tried to create a morality and ethics that is based solely on the wills of putatively radically autonomous human individuals, without any reference to group subjects or the "so-called" transcendent, patriarchal God. In general, one of two approaches has been tried:
In 1980 Alasdair MacIntyre's great book AFTER VIRTUE: A Study in Moral Theory was published. It reviewed in detail both of these approaches and concluded that they both were abject failures, in effect proving that it is impossible to create a coherent, workable ethics based solely on the wills of putatively radically autonomous human individuals.
Briefly, by supplying a trans-individualistic perspective at various levels of inclusion and subsidiarity. In other words, by integrating within himself the points of view of the various group subjects of which he is a part, the human individual can make ethical decisions that take into account the purposes and needs of each of those groups, as well as the purposes and needs of human individuals. (Note that theism is the other "leg" of a well-grounded ethics.)
See my book WORLDVIEWS by Phillip L. Engle, together with Alasdair MacIntyre's book AFTER VIRTUE: A Study in Moral Theory.
Macrodevelopment is a theory of biological evolution that was developed by the late Robert F. DeHaan. In a nutshell it says that the biosphere has "unfolded" over the vast stretches of geological time in a manner that is analogous to how an individual embryo develops within the womb: Just as an individual embryo develops from more-generic groups of cells to more-specific groups of cells during the course of its development, so the biosphere has diversified from more-generic taxons (genera, families, species) to more-specifc taxons over the course of the earth's history. (Such a view, of course, implies the existence of far more teleology and purpose within the biosphere than is implied by neo-Darwinism.)
For the following reasons, among many others:
Both neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design implicitly (and falsely) assume that, physically, the biosphere is essentially just a linear machine. (This is a common assumption of both the Enlightenment and Protestantism, as opposed to the organic view of nature that was prevalent up until the end of the Middle Ages.)
Yet the biosphere and its components clearly appear to have at least immanent teleology (e.g., predators seek to catch their prey, while prey seek to escape their predators.) Whence comes this apparent immanent teleogy and purpose? If the biosphere is essentially just a linear machine (loosely analogous to an automobile), as both neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design maintain, then there are really only two possibilities:
The theory of Intelligent Design chooses the first option, while neo-Darwinism chooses the second. And both Intelligent Design and classical neo-Darwinism are equally contemptuous of theories that (correctly) regard the biosphere to be nonlinear rather than linear (e.g., theories such as self-organization and macrodevelopment). Such nonlinear theories are much more likely to provide physical analogies to the immanent teleological properties of the biosphere.
See my book The Ten Facts of Evolution by Phillip L. Engle, together with the articles on macrodevelopment by Robert F. DeHaan listed on this website.
Scapegoat theology is theology that uses the literary and anthropological insights of Rene Girard to illuminate the deep, urgent theological truths that reside in Catholic Christianity. As Rene Girard has said:
I think the relativism of our time is the product of the failure of modern anthropology, of the attempt to resolve problems linked to the diversity of human cultures. Anthropology has failed because it has not succeeded in explaining the different human cultures as a unitary phenomenon, and that is why we are bogged down in relativism. In my opinion, [Catholic] Christianity proposes a solution to these problems precisely because it demonstrates that the obstacles, the limits that individuals put on one another, serve to avoid certain types of conflicts. It if was really understood that Jesus is the universal victim who came precisely to surmount these conflicts, the problem would be solved. [Verite o fede debole. Dialog su chrianesimo e relativismo ( "Truth or Weak Faith: Dialogue on Christianity and Relativism")]
The essential problem is that just-war theory and just-self-defense theory are proportionalist and consequentialist theories of a type that was decisively refuted by Pope John Paul II in his famous encyclical THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH ("Veritatis Splendor"). Perhaps the most serious problem with proportionalist and consequentialist theories in general is that they assume that we can predict and control the effects of our various proposed actions in a linear fashion.
For example, while accepting the general proposition that the killing of innocent human beings is wrong, we go on to argue that the unintended (but likely) killing of all of the orphans in an orphanage located near a weapons storage facility is nevertheless justified because it is our belief that fewer lives will be lost in the long run if we destroy the weapons storage facility. Unfortunately, even from a physical point of view, the systems involved (groups of human beings under immense stress) are complex nonlinear systems that are not remotely predictable, even if the methods of statistics are brought into play.
(Pope John Paul II did not, of course, explicitly condemn the just-war theory and just-violent-self-defense theory in THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH, but I maintain that an implicit condemnation is inescapable, centuries of Christian tradition to the contrary.)
The key is the recognition that the early Christians (up until the time of St. Augustine) were pacifists, but not anarchists. That is, they absolutely rejected war and violent self-defense. However, they did approve of the use of force for police purposes by the ruling authorities, up to and including capital punishment. (Whether or not Christians themselves could participate in such police-type violence was controversial during the period when Christians were in the minority.)
This strongly suggests that situations where war or violent self-defense is seen by today's Christian as being necessary can instead be re-cast as situations in which the Christian can regard himself to be the agent of an appropriately inclusive group subject, thus transforming war-type violence into police-type violence.
See my book SCAPEGOAT THEOLOGY And the Problem of Violence by Phillip L. Engle, together with the books The Scapegoat and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard.