Indeed, not even monks deserve this critique! As I have already suggested, "alternative" monastic communities are not a withdrawal from culture as such. They are attempts to resist a dominant and corrosive direction of cultural institutions by embodying alternative configurations which reflect the possibilities for re-directing these institutions in Christ. The monastic community has an economic ordering, too. The Church catholic—the first globalized institution—holds out the possibility for a global alternative of redeemed institutions and practices of commerce, distribution, and exchange, which resist the dominant direction of commerce under the sway of capitalism. Desertion, then, is not a way of abandoning the world, but a way of showing the world what it could be.