In the November 2024 issue of World Magazine is my review of Rod Dreher’s new book, Living In Wonder:
“Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.” Those pithy words, penned by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, encapsulate the plight of the modern West. It’s this plight that writer and journalist Rod Dreher confronts in his latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 288 pp.).
Disenchantment, as Dreher defines it, is the perceptual state that results when a culture believes that all there is to the universe is what we observe through our senses, measure by our scientific instruments, and interpret through the lens of a materialist worldview. Anything else in our experience about which we may think we have immediate awareness—such as a sense of God’s presence, intrinsic beauty, the miraculous, the demonic, the providential, or the sacred—must be illusory and thus a social artifact of our imaginations. Because we live in a secular age, disenchantment is the default position in which our elites—in media, academia, science, business, and even religion—typically operate.
Think, for example, of that memorable section from The Abolition of Man in which C.S. Lewis writes about an English textbook, intended for use in British schools, that instructs its young readers to think of the sublime beauty in a waterfall as only existing in the minds of those observing it rather than in the waterfall itself. Although seemingly innocent in suggesting that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder—which for many of our compatriots has attained the status of a truism—it actually teaches schoolchildren that the transcendental qualities that we attribute to natural objects, such as goodness, truth, and beauty, are really about our emotional reaction to those objects rather than about the objects themselves. The student, writes Lewis, “has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake.”
An ex-Catholic who grew up in a nominal Methodist home, but who is now Eastern Orthodox, Dreher provides his readers with both theoretical and practical guidance for re-enchantment. On the theoretical side of things, he tells the familiar story of Western disenchantment, one found in the works of writers like Charles Taylor, Richard Weaver, and Brad S. Gregory.
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