so it is still

Alisdair MacIntyre, in the prologue to the 25th anniversary edition of After Virtue:

In the last sentence of After Virtue I spoke of us waiting for another St. Benedict. Benedict’s greatness lay in making possible a quite new kind of institution, that of the monastery of prayer, learning, and labor, in which and around which communities could not only survive, but flourish in a period of social and cultural darkness. The effects of Benedict’s founding insights and of their institutional embodiment by those who learned from them were from the standpoint of his age quite unpredictable. And it was my intention to suggest, when I wrote that last sentence in 1980, that ours too is a time of waiting for new and unpredictable possibilities of renewal. It is also a time for resisting as prudently and courageously and justly and temperately as possible the dominant social, economic, and political order of advanced modernity. So it was twenty six years ago, so it is still.

Me to a fellow academic friend via text, an hour before reading the above:

Knowing people like you are still in higher ed shores up my own commitment to it: systems work, but more paradoxically urgent, people work. The dialogic encounter. In the end, nothing can extinguish how we decide to treat each other, in the unscalable gift economy of day to day? Not a retreatist stance, I hope.