\u201cLike all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.\u201d Those pithy words, penned by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, encapsulate the plight of the modern West. It\u2019s this plight that writer and journalist Rod Dreher confronts in his latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age<\/em> (Zondervan, 288 pp.).<\/p>\nDisenchantment, 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\u2014such as a sense of God\u2019s presence, intrinsic beauty, the miraculous, the demonic, the providential, or the sacred\u2014must 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\u2014in media, academia, science, business, and even religion\u2014typically operate.<\/p>\n
Think, for example, of that memorable section from The Abolition of Man<\/em> 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\u2014which for many of our compatriots has attained the status of a truism\u2014it actually teaches schoolchildren that the transcendental qualities that we attrib\u00adute 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, \u201chas no notion that ethics, theology, and \u00adpolitics are all at stake.\u201d<\/p>\nAn 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You can read the rest here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the November 2024 issue of World Magazine is my review of Rod Dreher\u2019s new book, Living In Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age\u00a0(Zondervan, 2024). \u00a0Entitled \u201cDisenchantment and Truth,\u201d here\u2019s how the review begins:\u00a0 \u201cLike all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.\u201d Those pithy words, penned by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":7438,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22184,181,22591],"class_list":["post-7432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-eastern-orthodoxy","tag-miracles"],"yoast_head":"\n
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