08/19/2024

Dreher (The Benedict Option), an editor at the American Conservative, offers an eclectic invitation for Christians to find the sacred in the everyday. Tracing the West’s “progressive disenchantment” with a more mystical faith “since the High Middle Ages,” he explains how the industrial revolution propelled a rise of capitalism that has left humans obsessed with their own power and knowledge, blinded to the signs of “divine reality” that permeated the lives of “our enchanted ancestors.” As a corrective, readers are advised to adopt an attitude of vulnerability and openness to the existence of God, “or at least... meaning, beyond your head.” According to Dreher, doing so opens up a world where music, art, and natural beauty are evidence of “God’s handiwork”; “signs, wonders, and miracles” abound; and “demonic” activity is a reality. Dreher’s message about making room for life’s unknowns is often stimulating, though he struggles to tie together a surfeit of topics—UFOs, artificial intelligence, exorcisms—and has a tendency to wander into distracting hyperbole (“If AI becomes sentient, or so convincingly mimics sentience that it’s a distinction without a difference, then we will treat AI entities like gods”). Flaws aside, this has much for the spiritually curious to chew on. (Oct.)

It's thrilling to read an honest and courageous writer like Rod Dreher on the great subject of the age: how to re-enchant our disenchanted world. God is not dead. We have learned not to see him. Through books like this, we can learn to see truly again. Timely, necessary, and wise.

A brave, lucid, and absolutely compelling book. Dreher brings his substantial storytelling skills to a subject in turns both disturbing and visionary: the business of enchantment. We live in a time of peril and opportunity, and Rod-as-guide leads us through the swamps and snares of a world on fire. He reveals a God with a soft spot for beauty, and the urgent need to cleave to his presence among the trance states of much of modern life. This is antidote to anyone perceiving Christianity as a worn-out husk rather than a vessel of wonder and vocation. Dreher is holding a light in the dark with this, maybe his most important, book.

Open this book and it gets real weird, real fast. Or don't open it—things are going to get weird anyway. A society founded on the dogmatic exclusion of everything that eludes reductive explanation will ultimately find itself at a loss, and this is now our situation. As the crisis of the West unfolds, we have begun to get an inkling that our picture of reality has been cramped and partial. The good news is that this bewilderment makes our time pregnant with the possibility of discovery. In Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher tells us that 'the world is not what we think it is. It is far more mysterious, exciting, and adventurous.' Transcending cultural doomsaying, Dreher achieves, and invites us to, a new freshness of spirit.

Living in Wonder captures the tectonic shift happening deep under politics, culture, and, in many ways, religion. Dreher sees how the worldview set to replace Enlightenment rationalism is already here. This new world is full of living presence, glimmering with intelligences that act on and through us. Hopefully, with his help, we can learn to discern the spirits.

The yawning gulf beneath the surface of our culture is becoming clearer every day, but Rod Dreher shows us that it doesn't have to be this way. The world is enchanted, magical, and soaked with God. Our ancestors knew it, here in the West as elsewhere. Modernity has hidden this truth from us, but it can't be hidden forever. Living in Wonder points the way out of the delusions of our modern dream and back toward reality. This is an important book.

Apocalypse comes cheap these days. You can find it prophesied in paperback at any airport bookstand: the end of this, the crisis of that, the decline of the other. Our sense of being drained—drained of spirit, of resources, of energy—is pervasive enough that it has become a source of exhaustion in itself. We are weary of being wearied, bored of the end of the world. But Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder is apocalyptic in the true and costly sense of the word. Which is to say it is a revelation. The light hasn't been sapped out of the world, Dreher suggests, but out of us—by our distractions, by our technological ambitions, by the dull ache of our compulsive pleasures. 'As a man is, so he sees,' wrote William Blake. Our highest imperative is to relearn how to really look and really see. Dreher walks with us as a fellow novice alongside unassuming masters of this sacred practice: miraculously rescued former addicts, impish mystics disguised as lawyers, grateful survivors of demonic possession. Like all works of true religion, this book is not a didactic exercise in moralism but an adventure into endless mystery, an escape route from the dreary certainties of the disenchanted world.