In “The Benedict Option,” Dreher says that Christians have lost the culture wars, and calls for a “strategic retreat.” Photograph by Maude Schuyler Clay for The New Yorker

Rod Dreher was forty-four when his little sister died. At the time, he was living in Philadelphia with his wife and children. His sister, Ruthie, lived in their Louisiana home town, outside St. Francisville (pop. 1,712). Dreher’s family had been there for generations, but he had never fit in. As a teen-ager, when his father and sister went hunting he stayed in his room and listened to the Talking Heads; he read “A Moveable Feast” and dreamed of Paris. He left as soon as he could, becoming a television critic for the Washington Times and then a film critic for the New York Post. He was living in Cobble Hill on 9/11, and watched the South Tower fall. He walked with his wife in Central Park. He wrote a book, “Crunchy Cons,” about how conservatives like him—“Birkenstocked Burkeans” and “hip homeschooling mamas”—might change America. Ruthie never left. She was a middle-school teacher, and her husband was a firefighter. She could give a damn about Edmund Burke and the New York Post. She was not a crunchy con, and she found her brother annoying.

In truth, annoying wasn’t the half of it—there was a rift between Dreher and his family. His father, a health inspector, had never forgiven him for moving away; his nieces found his urbanity condescending. During one New Year’s visit, Dreher made bouillabaisse for his parents and his sister; they watched him cook the stew and let him serve it, then declined to eat any: they preferred meals made by a “country cook.” Later, Dreher learned that Ruthie and her husband were struggling financially and resented the fact that he made twice their combined salaries for reviewing movies. His father considered him a “user”—someone who succeeded by flouting the rules. Dreher loved his father and sister for their rootedness and their vibrancy. He longed for their approval with painful intensity.

On Mardi Gras, 2010, Ruthie was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. She was forty years old and had three daughters. Dreher began visiting St. Francisville as often as he could, and discovered that she was a pillar of the community that he had left behind. She gave Christmas gifts to the poorest neighbors and mentored the most difficult kids in school; she was a joyful presence at bonfires, creek parties, and crawfish boils. Though exhausted by chemotherapy, she drew up a list of friends in need and prayed for them every night. She made a new rule for her family: “We will not be angry at God.” When friends threw her a benefit concert, a thousand people came. To Dreher, a devout Christian, she seemed beatific in her suffering. He wondered, Why does she like everybody but me?

All through Ruthie’s illness, Dreher wrote about her and the rest of his family on his blog, which is hosted on the Web site of The American Conservative, where he is a senior editor. For a decade, daily and at length, Dreher has written about his obsessions—orthodox Christianity, religious freedom, the “L.G.B.T. agenda,” the hypocrisy of privileged liberals, the nihilism of secular capitalism, the appeal of monasticism, the spiritual impoverishment of modernity, brisket—while sharing candid, emotional stories about his life. Dreher writes with graphomaniacal fervor and ardent changeability. He is as likely to admire Ta-Nehisi Coates’s dispatches from Paris as to inveigh against “safe spaces” on college campuses, and he delights in skewering the left and the right simultaneously—a recent post was called “How Are Pope Francis & Donald Trump Alike?” Because Dreher is at once spiritually and intellectually restless, his blog has become a destination for the ideologically bi-curious. Last year, his interview with J. D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” was largely responsible for bringing the book to the attention of both liberal and conservative readers. He gets around a million page views a month.

A bad Dreher post can be mean-spirited and overwrought, but when he’s at his best his posts are unique: deeply confessional, achingly sincere, intellectually searching. The day after Ruthie died, in September, 2011, Dreher wrote a twenty-seven-hundred-word entry describing her funeral. He recalled how, the night before the service, half of St. Francisville had waited in the rain to pay their respects. Her friends sprinkled creek sand over her body, pulled up beach chairs, and sang to her. The next morning, because Ruthie often went barefoot, her daughters stood barefoot in their pew. When the funeral party arrived at the cemetery, Dreher saw that the pallbearers, too, had removed their shoes. The six burly men “carried Ruthie to her grave across the damp cemetery grounds in their bare feet,” Dreher wrote. The love he had seen was “of such intense beauty that it was hard to look upon it and hold yourself together.”

Ruthie’s funeral made him wonder about his own life, in Philadelphia. He and his wife, Julie, had friends there, and a rich cultural life, but it was impossible to replicate the deep roots his family had in St. Francisville, which seemed an illuminated place. The people there had an expansive, natural, spontaneous relationship to God that made his own faith feel intellectual and disembodied by comparison. This, he thought, was a function of how they lived: to really know God, one had to feel as much love as possible, and to really feel love one had to live among loved ones. The following month, Dreher moved with his wife and kids to St. Francisville. His plan was to fall back in love with his family and with God at the same time.

From the porch of a rented house, he began to codify his intuitions. He had long been fascinated by Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century monk who, convinced that it was impossible to live virtuously in a fallen Roman Empire, founded a monastery where the flame of Christianity might be tended during the Dark Ages. This March, Dreher published “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” which David Brooks, in the Times, has called “the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

Dreher’s answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe a way of life in which “change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.” The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable. He urges Christians, therefore, to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism.

As a longtime reader of Dreher’s blog—an experience alternately enthralling and exasperating—I’d always wondered what he’d be like in person. I imagined him as argumentative and intense: a twenty-first-century version of a nineteenth-century preacher. In most of the photographs I could find online, he wears thick, round glasses; as a result, I nearly didn’t recognize him when we met, earlier this spring, at a Manhattan steak house. Without them, Dreher, now fifty, has an open, vulnerable, and strikingly handsome face. His graying beard and fashionably upswept haircut suggest a Confederate soldier in a historical drama. He wore black Chelsea boots and an oversized black leather jacket, and, around his left wrist, a knotted prayer rope. “Nice to meet you, brother,” he said. He speaks slowly and quietly, with a soft Louisiana drawl.