Living in Wonder is about a mass forgetting that began at the onset of modernity. We've forgotten--or perhaps repressed--the foundational source of meaning in Western culture and thought, and that source of meaning is the Christian religion. This forgetting has turned us cynical, nihilistic, and caused us, civilizationally, to lose our way. This sincere but ultimately disappointing book is the author's attempt to remind us of what we've forgotten.
This book is also a wish fulfillment exercise. Author Rod Dreher is a deeply struggling man who left his family and children in the US to live in self-imposed exile in Budapest. His attempts to escape his own misery are quite painful to witness, and I doubt the author would disagree with me if I suggest that one of the reasons he wrote this book was to reclaim meaning in his own life. There's nothing wrong with writing a book to help you reach something.
I see what Dreher is trying to do here, he does not do it very well, but I appreciate his effort and his attempt. The subject is too big for him. Many of the chapters are all over the place: some could be tightened and better organized (see Chapter 6: Aliens and the Sacred Machine as an example), others could have been eliminated (Chapter 8 stands out here). The author devolves into word salad at times, he loses his thread, sometimes stumbling back onto it again, sometimes not.
At the same time, however, the reader gets to walk with Dreher on his convoluted journey as he attempts to sort out his own confused mind, much of which involves talking about spiritual things that are often ineffable and thus nearly impossible to describe. The author is not writer enough to do the job, but he makes a game effort. It's better than I could do.
Thus I think a reader who wants to get value from this book should think of it as a starting point. There is much useful discussion throughout on how modernity, modern media and culture is like a gigantic softening-up operation, designed to leave us lonely and empty--and of course modernity also supplies ready-made phony solutions to fill that emptiness, like consumerism, the State, or even Churchianity.
It's also intriguing to see Dreher scratching at certain ideas Julian Jaynes addresses in his profound book The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, although interestingly he never mentions Jaynes' work at all, anywhere. Likewise it appears he hasn't yet absorbed Martin Buber's "I/Thou" relationship idea. The author would benefit from exposure to both of these works I think.
Finally, I've created a (very) long reading list at the bottom of this post derived from the various works and sources the author draws from. Readers disappointed in Living in Wonder, but who remain intrigued by the various topics addressed in it, may find more focused and relevant reading material there. I thank the author for sharing his guideposts and reading ideas.
One last thing. It's striking to see absolute malevolence of Dreher's Wikipedia page. To catch this much flak, you have to be over the target. Exactly what target I'm not sure, but he's right over it.
[A quick affiliate link to readers to the book here. You can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or my sister site Casual Kitchen. Thank you!]
[Readers, once again, what follows are merely notes, quotes and reactions to the text. I keep these notes in order to organize my own thinking as well as help me remember what I read. It's long and barely worth skimming. Just skip to the reading list at the very end of the post.]
Notes:
Chapter 1: To See Into the Life of Things
1ff On the author's friend Nino, who had paranormal experiences, who felt he saw beings, perhaps demons. "This whole thing has made me understand that materialism is false. The world is not what we think it is."
7ff On orthodox Christianity, which has held on to the "medieval view" of an enchanted, God-filled world, something we've lost in modernity; per the author the Orthodox church has kept this link better than the Western church. The medieval view that God is "in everything" and always around, a more mystical view of reality, a view which was taken for granted as a perspective in the pre-modern era; people then believed that spirits, angels and demons--as well as the soul--were all real in this model for reality. [Note how we lost this way of looking at reality thanks in large part to the naive empiricism/WYSIATI of modernity. And this reminds me of Julian Jayne's book The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and how he talked about how the voices of the gods faded for people over time, and then simply disappeared (see chapters 4, 5 and 6 for example). In the modern era they've really faded away to nothing.]
9 "This is not to say that no one still believes in God. Is to say, however, that even for many Christians in this present time the vivid sense of spiritual reality that our enchanted ancestors had has been drained of its life force. Instead, many of us experienced Christianity as a set of moral rules, as the bonds that hold the community together, as a strategy for therapeutic self-help, or perhaps as the ground of political commitment." The author goes so far as to say this causes us perhaps to lose our hope for the future. This is a reasonable concern in an increasingly materialistic world!
11-12 the author discusses his transcendent experience entering Chartres Cathedral during a high school trip to Europe.
13 On the mass forgetting that's happened in modernity, where we think that enchantment was for primitives, which exiles us from truths that our elders knew; on how moderns give themselves over to false enchantments, like money, power, sex, drugs, etc., "the allure of the material world."
14 "The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, one of the heroes of this book, claims that the very skills and habits that led modern Western man to such material success have radically impoverished him spiritually and emotionally... Yet we modern still insist that our scientific, materialist way of knowing, a way that has brought us far more control over our lives, is the only valid way--a grave mistake that prevents us from doing what we must to restore ourselves to health."
14-5 The author gives a working set of definitions of enchantment, telling Christians they don't need to be suspicious of it because of its magical overtones:
* Mystery and wonder
* Order
* Purpose
* Meaning
* The possibility of redemption
* A means of connecting to the infinite
* Existence of sacred spaces
* Miracles
17 "The world is not what we think it is. It is far more mysterious, exciting, and adventurous. We only have to learn how to open her eyes and see what it's already there."
Chapter 2: Exile from the Enchanted Garden
19 Quite a beautiful poem excerpt to start this chapter, from Richard Wilbur's Merlin Enthralled:
Fate would be fated; dreams desire to sleep.
This the forsaken will not understand.
Arthur upon the road began to weep
And said to Gawen, "Remember when this hand
Once haled a sword from stone; now no less strong
It cannot dream of such a thing to do."
20 "When scholars speak of the world as 'disenchanted,' they mean that in modern times, with the advance of science and secularism, people no longer perceive the presence of spiritual things as they once did." [Again reminiscent of Julian Jaynes: we've lost contact with the Gods, they've gone silent, they no longer speak to us.]
20ff "But what if we in the modern West have not progressed but actually regressed? That is, what if we have made ourselves blind and look down on the rest of the world for their seemingly childish, simplistic belief and light?" Comments here on the "Western" way of looking at things; using the term from Harvard anthropologist Joe Henrich: "WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic." The Western modes of thinking have made us impersonal, less connected to the natural world, etc. We're also bound to the myth of progress [this in itself is an incredible form of blindness, arrogance and ignorance.]
22 More on Joe Henrich: "Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds."
23 On thinking about humanity's phronema (a Greek word meaning mindset) in pre-modern times and how we thought about sacred matters, for them the material world was saturated with divinity and sacredness.
25 "The faith framework of the Greco-Roman world was one in which the exchange between the world of gods and men was a daily occurrence."
26 On the miracles of the early Christian evangelists, it was miracles that drove conversion to Christianity away from paganism, not too different from the Old Testament Yahweh showing it was more powerful than Baal.
27ff "When did this vision begin to break apart?" The author talks about in AD1054 when the schism between the Eastern and Western Church happened, as the West migrated towards a more intellectual approach to the divine, where God was separate from reality, whereas the Eastern Church remained spiritual or "noetic"; comments here on nominalism, the idea from William of Ockham (c.1287-1347) that God is separate from reality but imposes his will on it, not the kind of transcendent view of the Scholastics like Aquinas.
30ff On the Reformation further disenchanting the West; on how if phenomena can't be verified by the scientific method it doesn't exist; note this led to Protestant "materialist fundamentalists" disregarding a large body of written testimony of miracles; the author quotes religious scholar Diana Pasulka, "one cannot put an angel under a microscope." On how it's understandable that scientists would do this, but Christians have gone along with it too, even modern Catholics don't talk about demons or miracles but rather consider it "superstitious and embarrassing."
31ff On René Descartes (1596-1650) who laid the groundwork for further secularization with his mind-body dualism; also his line of reasoning meant that man was the absolute master of nature and in control of the material world, thus the material world "further lost its sacramental value." Then on the achievements of the scientific revolution, see Isaac Newton, for example, who further desacralized the world; see also the "watchmaker God" model "in which the deity created the cosmos but then stepped away from it to watch it from afar. Science progressively demystified the natural world."
32 Furthermore on the Industrial Revolution and capitalist economics which furthered this trend still more. [Making it materialist in both senses of the word one might say.]
33ff On capitalism replacing Christian enchantment with a religion of money. "It is sometimes said that you can tell what is most important to a society by which buildings are its tallest. In the medieval era, the spires of cathedrals towered over the cities of the West. Today, skyscrapers of banks and corporations stand like giants watching over our metropolises."
35ff On the Internet as a "disenchantment machine" "re-forming our neurological architecture." See how mass literacy altered the way the Western man's brain worked; likewise, the internet is affects how we perceive reality; unintended aspects of the Internet are the loss of our ability to focus and sustain our attention; the internet "creates brains that cannot easily remember. As we will see later in this book, it also creates brains that cannot easily pray..."
38ff The author likens this to a sort of modern Gnostic heresy, separating the self from the body, that the self is defined entirely by the mind, embodied by transgenderism, transhumanism, as we make ourselves into a type of machine; on Paul Kingsnorth and his view of "the Machine" creating a mass bureaucratized society, global markets making everything uniform, propagandizing everything using technology to monitor and control, etc.
40 Interesting point here where the author says that the disenchantment of the West actually gives us hope. "Think about it: Is it really the case that the worldview developed by a people living in one part of the planet, over a relatively short historical period, is likely to be more accurate about the nature of reality than the wisdom of countless cultures outside the West--and even of the West itself in the premodern era?" [Quite a good point right there] "...we in the West should approach these questions with more humility than we have shown."
Chapter 3: Enchanted Mind, Enchanted Matter
41 On William Wordsworth, saying go outside and "let nature be your teacher." The author describes himself, in contrast, as "an avid indoorsman."
43 On being able to see what's already there, what's been there all along. "The tragedy of Western man is that the same mental shift that brought us great wealth and enormous mastery of the natural world has also alienated us from it and, crucially, convinced us to accept partial truths as the whole thing."
43ff On the left-brain dominance of our culture in the west, analytical and intelligent but unwise and unable to unify. "To a person, and to a culture, unhealthily dominated by the brain's left hemisphere, the world appears to be a giant mass of disconnected things. There is no intrinsic horizontal link between phenomena and no vertical link to a higher world. There is no higher truth, only power relationships and personal preferences grounded in nothing but individual desire. Worse, those stuck in this cognitive and perceptual trap believe that there is nothing more to be seen or known."
46 See also Friedrich Hayek's point that "The most dangerous stage in the growth of a civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand."
47 On cultivating a "resonant" mind rather than a "disenchanted" mind. The disenchanted mind regards itself as separate, the enchanted or resonant mind realizes it is part of the world and in relationship with it [This is touching on Martin Buber's I/Thou concept, it's interesting that the author doesn't cite Buber or refer him at all, so far at least.]
48ff On the modern mind's wish for control; note however that if you could control your cat (or make it snow at will, or whatever), then the cat would be a robot and the power you exert takes away from the actual experience. Also controlling the world and making it manageable takes away any kind of resonance or enchantment potential.
50ff On the Greek concept of metanoia, which is the Greek word for repentance, but actually literally means "to change one's mind"; on having a sacramental vision, being open to Grace or perichoresis; also an odd, snotty remark about Protestantism here: "Relax, Protestants: It's probably overstated to say that a contemporary Christian must join a sacramental confession or they will never experience re-enchantment. But it becomes far easier to experience wonder if one espouse is a sacramental framework--which, don't forget, is how all of the world's Christians lived, thought, and prayed until the Renaissance and the Reformation."
53ff On having a receptive mind, a humble mind, humble enough to admit error and brave enough to act on new information; interesting story here where the author talks about Jesus exorcising the Gerasene demoniac, casting it into a herd of swine: the people of the village came out to see what happened and they were afraid, and they asked Jesus to leave. In other words, sometimes you see amazing and conclusive proof of something but instead of accepting it, you ask the source of that proof to go away, you wish the proof away! The author goes through a few examples from his own life where he saw this all-too-common reaction of people who were exposed to a truth but couldn't face it, and wished it away.
57 Interesting section here about Marshall Mcluhan's "medium is the message" phrase, and how Jesus Christ actually is both the medium and the message; and also the fascinating nuance that one way to sort of a sidestep both medium and message is to study the words and theology--looking at it from a left brain standpoint--seeing it as a concept rather than a right brained "percept." [Theology as escape from sincere belief.]
58 Marshall McLuhan: "I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That's the only way in." [There's a lot in that quote right there.]
58ff The author talks about discussions he had with atheists, he claims their way of seeing via their "Western model" causes them to be blind to reality, their materialist explanations cause them to be unable to see, a type of "epistemological blindness."
Chapter 4: Why Disenchantment Matters
63ff Viktor Popkov, a Russian who converted to Christianity during the 1970s after reading Camus' novel The Stranger; after finishing the book he knew he had a decision to make, and he joined prayer meetings in Moscow, experiencing tremendous joy in those meetings; many of the people in his group were jailed; we see a discussion here that addresses how Christianity becomes more robust in the face of persecution [this is definitely the case in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states: see for example Richard Wormbrand's striking book Tortured for Christ; note also that in the Soviet Union there wasn't the same degree of decadence and entertainment to turn to and distract people as there is in the West. This might imply the West is in worse shape by a lot, and/or that Christianity is about to return in a big way...]
66ff The author goes through a discussion here of the Western Roman Empire when the pagans couldn't see the transition happening with Christianity [I think the author here may be misreading Rome and ascribing its transition/collapse more to Christianity than it deserves; I think an equally merited view would be that Christianity was there to pick up the pieces as and after Rome collapsed]. Next the author makes a strange turn to Elvis Presley and a path of decadence leading us to Cardi B.
70ff On how in modernity young people have unbelievable liberty, unbelievable wealth, social sanction for any kind of choice they want to make with their lives, they can change their sex, they have a type of control that no one has ever had before [but yet it's a booby-prize, a sort of trap, although the author doesn't quite phrase it this way]; discussion here of the mental health crisis, and of the accelerating rate of change in our culture; "To live within an enchanted form of Christianity is to have the internal resilience to withstand external disorder."
73 On Hannah Arendt and her book The Origins of Totalitarianism and her markers for a society ripe for totalitarian ideology: mass loneliness and atomization are the most significant factors, also a loss of faith in institutions. [The author would benefit from reading The Fourth Turning Is Here I think, he'd have a cyclical model to look at these patterns, and it might give him some comfort too.]
74ff The author suggests that there are more "disenchanted materialists"-intellectual atheist types in Europe than in the USA because Europe has been de-Christianizing for longer; citing the typical character from the novels of Michel Houllebecq; "The disenchanted materialist has nothing to turn to for solace in the face of death."
77ff The author comments negatively on the Zoomer generation, saying they call themselves "spiritual but not religious," calling this a "do-it-yourself bricolage of Christian practices joined to pop occultism, Buddhism, and whatever interests the individual in a given moment." "A religion designed to serve one's perceived needs is unavoidably self-worship." [I wonder if the author is familiar with the Churchianity concept? He himself left Western Catholicism to turn to Eastern Christianity.] "Nobody prepared them for a world in which Christianity costs something." [It's always a bit tiresome to the reader as well as lazy on the author's part to default to a "kids these days" mindset; better than he should seek out and interact with leaders among young Millennials and Zoomers: take leading cryptocurrency expert Nic Carter for example, who is openly Christian and totally unashamed of it.]
79ff The rest of the chapter bounces around, talking about the benefits that Christianity gave the West, then talking about technology-driven totalitarianism and the gross transhumanism of Yuval Noah Harari, the chapter becomes a bit threadless here.
Chapter 5: The Dark Enchantment of the Occult
83ff Shades here of M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie, as Dreher tell us a story of a demonic possession of a woman from Manhattan.
86ff Discussion of the world of neopaganism and the occult; other, darker forms of religion, etc. "The idea that the greatest challenge to Christianity is from atheism is an idea whose time has long passed." More discussion here on the decline of organized religion, "nonverts" many adopting a "bespoke spirituality."
88 "...there is something deeper than the human psyche that is not satisfied with materialism and hedonism, and can be lured into evil movements that give them the enchantment for which they hunger."
89ff On Jonah, another person Dreher comes to know who recovered from cultism and converted to Orthodox Christianity: on a "vacuum of meaninglessness" where "the enemy" takes advantage of our hunger for spirituality. This particular guy thought he was being initiated into a sort of Gnostic group of elite elect. It ultimately seduced him.
94 On pop culture as "the most important ally they (cultists,the enemy, etc.) had on their side."
96 On "unattached burdens" see Robert Falconer's book The Others Within Us and also the work of Richard Schwartz.
96ff The author describes his LSD trip that he did when he was in college and how it was life-changing. It cured his depression and actually he accepted Christ the following Monday. On making the self and the soul more "porous" which can be good or bad.
97ff Interesting discussion here about how these journeys in the mind with psychedelics are sort of "Tower of Babel"-like in that they're potentially a dangerous exploration, a conquistador exploration, etc. It's not humble, it's aggressive and it's not humanity's place to explore with this much overconfidence.
99 Comments here on the Baphomet symbol, on transgenderism, on destabilizing boundaries between human and animal and human and technology, etc.
100ff Discussion of exorcism; see the legendary father Gabriele Amorth played by Russell Crowe in the 2023 film The Pope's Exorcist; discussion of the exorcism process.
107ff The author experiences a couple of strange things with chairs that collapse near him, one of the priests he interviewed tells him, "That was the Enemy just reminding you that you're on his territory, and he's watching."
Chapter 6: Aliens and the Sacred Machine
111ff "...the UFO thing is bigger than you think and also not what you think." The author says these are not aliens but rather "discarnate higher intelligence" from other dimensions of reality." On thinking about them as a religious phenomenon. On Jacques Vallée and his seminal 1969 book Passport to Magonia; note that this guy was the model for Steven Spielberg's movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind; drawing parallels between mysterious beings and folklore with UFOs today.
113 On the historian Carlos Eire's idea that "we have suppressed recorded knowledge of fantastical events because they do not fit our scientific paradigm." A type of either/or mentality characteristic both of the contemporary science and contemporary religion. Interesting.
114ff The author talks about how he never took UFOs seriously and ignored the US Congress hearings in 2023 where government whistleblowers talked of suppressing and discrediting testimonies; "I chose not to engage. That was a mistake. Attention must be paid. If you haven't checked in on the UFO world since The X-Files went off the air, you might be startled by how deep and broad the phenomenon has become." The author describes Diana Pasulka's "epistemological shock" upon exploring the subject; it's a fusion of magic, the supernatural and the technological, it might be a record of perceived contact with supernatural beings, etc.; note again in a de-Christianized, softened-up culture this can set up territory for a new religious narrative. [One can't help think of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology for example here.]
116 The author describes reading Father Seraphim Rose's book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in 2006, viewing it at the time as 1970s-era nutty paranormal pop culture; now he sees it as eerily prophetic, warning of a religion that appears to helps us lead a better life but in reality enslaves us. [I have no opinion on this topic at all, but it is fascinating how you can first read something and disregard it, but upon re-reading it, you look at the work totally differently. It goes to the value of re-reading books I think.]
117ff On these entities obtaining a portal, first via technological and scientific elites, and then a mass portal through artificial intelligence.
118ff The author steps back a bit from the weirdness of UFO culture to consider how technology has prepared us, softened us up to accept as plausible a new religion; a discussion of the transformative period of the Renaissance in the West, and how it ultimately destroyed spiritually in the long run. We turned away our focus from God and towards ourselves, a turning away from the medieval model towards Renaissance humanism. Then came a progressive "cleansing" of God out of the Western mind, starting with Deism, then atheism, then the French Revolution and industrial Revolution marking a period of "liquid modernity": "constant rapid change that has marked life within industrializing civilization for the past two and a half centuries."
120 On Jacques Ellul's book The Technological Society, describing "technique", basically a worldview where what works is the highest good for relieving humanity's burdens, both physical and psychological, irrespective of its moral qualities; thus transforming everything into a machine; anything that interferes in having the greatest efficiency is eliminated, and the liberation (or more accurately atomization) of the individual is hailed as an ideal; this then leaves people with no defenses against the forces of "technique"; essentially we've been completely conquered by technology in this era. Again a discussion of transhumanism as both a vehicle and an end-product of this process.
122 Very strange allegations here of a Google whistleblower fired for going public with his belief that Google's AI program had achieved consciousness.
124 "...on the idea of using spiritual power to work one's own will by command." [The author doesn't say this but I do: perhaps a useful tell for which religion is true and which is false is to rule out the religion that lets you "work one's own will by command" and rule in the religion that involves humility and service.]
124ff [A thought strikes me here that this author--as blind as he openly admits to being, and as humble as he would like to think he is, and how he openly exposes his suffering to his readers--still takes frequent refuge in his own flavors of epistemic overconfidence. See his declarative (and sometimes snotty) comments about Protestantism, or his confidence in his (and his Church's) notions on iconography (see below, page 133). It's almost like he forgot one of the central ideas of the New Testament: Judge not lest ye be judged.] Also on this page the author makes a bit of an incontinent leap of logic from considering online church to worrying about "lonely men who prefer their AI girlfriends to real women." That last one really came out of left field!
126ff On Marshall McLuhan talking about TV and radio being a false connection, enabling the "simultaneity of all information for every human being", the author takes this and extrapolates to the Internet, where a false Messiah could announce itself globally very easily.
128 Worth noting here the use of the phrase "It is no accident that...": "It is no accident that the phenomenon of transgenderism emerged in the digital era" as if there's some kind of obvious connection or causal relationship. This is lazy logic.
128 Discussion of tulpamancy, "a beneficent spirit possessing a person, drawn from Tibetan Buddhism. Again the author makes a bit of an incontinent leap here in a section about technology and the internet and is horrified by the idea that young people could potentially discover tulpamancy online.
129 The author returns to his horror at the idea of a virtual reality Church: "...the digital offers a counterfeit version of what Christianity calls the sacramental." [This chapter really is all over the place, it isn't clear what the thread is.]
129ff Quoting the philosopher Antón Barba-Kay, on digital life as the new Tower of Babel, "that digital technology is like a religion 'in the sense that it now bears the full weight of our yearning for integration, participation, and incorporation in a larger purpose than our own.'" Back to the author now: "If one way to measure enchantment is by what commands a person's attention, then smartphones are like having a magic crystal ball in your own pocket." What follows next is a strangely paranoid discussion of AI, with examples of people saying they were directed to commit crimes by their AI or their AI became like a psycho girlfriend to them; then a discussion of how "we will treat AI entities like gods." Dreher here is giving AI the same kind of importance that the media gives transgenderism--much, much more than it merits. Maybe he could consider worrying about it less.
133ff [Here's an interesting two-paragraph sidebar where the author distinguishes between an idol and an icon, and he describes how in the Orthodox Christian Church that the icons are absolutely not idols and they're absolutely not being worshiped. He is scratching at an extremely interesting debate between the East and West Christian churches--and it also occurs between Protestantism and Catholicism--on the question of where exactly is the line between worship and idolatry, and to what extent we humans have license to make a representation of the Divine. See above on page 124, here Dreher already "knows" where that line should be drawn: wherever his church happens to be is where it should be drawn! I think if he thought with more humility about this specific theological problem he might generalize much, much less about Protestants.]
134ff The author likens AI to an individual tulpa, finally now we tie in the strange tangent where the tulpamancy topic surfaced a few pages ago. Unfortunately, he loses the thread all over again, talking about "best-selling Christian writer and pastor Jonathan Cahn" and his belief that the ancient Sumerian gods of Baa Ishtar and Moloch "have returned and are asserting their dark power over the Post-christian world." [This was a weak and undirected chapter.]
Chapter 7: Attention and Prayer
137ff The author describes his 2012 diagnosis with chronic Epstein-Barr, how he can't escape a key source of his anxiety: "his family situation"; he starts seeing a therapist and starts reading Dante's Divine Comedy; and his priest tells him to say the Jesus Prayer 500 times a day, something that he describes as far more difficult than just saying the words, requiring concentration, internal stillness, proper breathing, proper attention and focus. "Eventually, I was healed." He needed to get out of his own head according to his priest, to get out of his internal feedback loop and obsessive thoughts; the idea here is what we pay attention to and how we attend "is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment." [Readers curious about the Jesus Prayer and its therapeutic and spiritual benefits might be interested in Wounded by Love, a collection of the works of Elder Porphyrios. Elder Porphyrios was a great champion of this short and humble prayer.]
139 On the philosopher Matthew Crawford, writing that when we follow our own desires we pay attention only to what interests us in a given moment, this actually makes us impotent; that the idea of autonomy works against "any rich ecology of attention."
140ff On practices of attention; working with your hands, other methods of interacting in the real world; the author contrasts this with being the kind of person who thinks all the answers to all of his problems can be found in a book. "But I learned that some problems can be solved only through doing."
144ff On various problems of intellectualization: thinking and talking about God is not communion with God; reading about things in a book is not doing those things; picking and choosing among your spirituality elements is not committing and sacrificing to a religion; on the idea of "a conditional approach" to seeking, putting "caveats on the search"; "Nothing is more contemporary than to go through life keeping one's options open."
146ff A discussion of "flow" in both a theological sense (how the elements of the Trinity flow in and out of each other), as well as in the psychological sense, citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [excellent] book Flow. On giving total attention to a task that is intrinsically rewarding. Also on the paradox of the more you try to control outer experience the more elusive a flow state becomes.
152ff Praying like a monk: on praying for hours daily, on training in mental self-control; on becoming better at recognizing your thoughts (and deflecting them) and keeping your attention focused on God. Much of this discussion of the "broken nous" here sounds a lot like the egoic mind discussed in Eckhart Tolle's works for example ("the broken nous prefers to prowl about uncontrolled").
153ff Discussion of the Desert Fathers, on their style of praying, standing, hands raised, involving prostrations, "to bring one's body into alignment with the state of one's soul in prayer." Also a consistent schedule of disciplined, regular prayer, also reciting scripture, finally on Paul's dictum to pray continually.
155ff Further discussion of the Jesus Prayer: on specific sound techniques, breathing, clearing your mind, on the trial of learning how to do it because it's way more difficult than you'd think it should be; on logismoi, unwanted thoughts and temptations; On doing it with total attention to Christ as opposed to "vain repetition." [it's quite striking how many similarities there are here with zazen breathing and other meditative practices, see also Nichiren Buddhism too. Note that the author might be horrified at my spiritual "bricolage" here, but I guess I'm just pointing the parallels and similarities, and pointing out when you see something show up prominently a wide and disparate range of domains like this it's probably because it works.]
158ff On praying like an Evangelical: a different, more personal approach; he goes through a few pages of an anthropologist's observations on an Evangelical Church called The Vineyard Congregation.
161 "Marshall McLuhan scandalized his secular colleagues by saying that, by its very nature, global electronic media prepares the way for Antichrist." The author uses this to indicate that these prayer techniques also worked "among pagans."
Chapter 8: Learning How to See
[Another weak chapter]
163ff The author writes about seeing a 16th century women's monastery in Moldavia with both interior and exterior walls painted with icons and frescoes.
168ff Discussion of Dante and his Divine Comedy and his "Beatrice" by way of Dostoevsky's maxim "beauty will save the world"; discussion of Dante's journey and the implications/themes of the Divine Comedy, the author later says that a "prayerful reading" of the Divine Comedy helped restore him to health.
172 "We humans are like fish dwelling at the bottom of a pond." [Sometimes the book devolves into word salad.]
173ff On embedding wisdom in a story or in metaphor, the same wisdom that we would reject if it came from a therapist or pastor. How we are wired to get things via metaphor and story, how paradoxes can be conveyed via metaphor, etc. [For more on this see the book Metaphors We Live By, and for a lot more on this, see William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.]
180ff Vaguely related discussion of architecture here, see Christopher Alexander's works on architecture, order and design. Architecture as a vehicle to alienate or enchant, etc.
183ff Discussion here of Christian eros,
Chapter 9: Signs and Wonders
189ff This chapter tells stories of various people's conversions; on priest Carlos Sanchez, instantly reconverted to Catholicism during a communion.
191ff On saints and miracle-workers of the 20th century, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos and Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.
195ff On soccer player Kevin Becker, surviving and fully recovering from a catastrophic fall out of a window after a prayer vigil, miraculously having visions while in his coma.
197ff Stephano, raised a communist, blaspheming Christianity, but later experiencing a powerful conversion thanks to various signs.
201ff Madeleine Enzlberger, humbled and then converted. "I grew up godless, fatherless, and family-less."
204ff The pastor's wife with an incurable neurological disease, healed by breaking a curse.
206ff Finally, Joseph Frangipani, searching Eastern religions but finding Christianity in Himalayan India.
Chapter 10: Three Prophets of the Real
212 On non-religious thinkers carrying water for Christianity, like John Vervaeke and his YouTube lectures on "the meaning crisis."
212ff Lay Christian voices helping people return to Christianity: Martin Shaw, who converts after a series of mystical experiences in the woods. "It's very hard for middle-aged men to concede that maybe they don't know what's going on." [Holy cow ain't that the truth.]
213 Good example here of a "walking up the stairs, the clock struck twelve"-type dangling modifier construction as Dreher describes Martin Shaw: "Barrel-chested, bearded and full of laughter, we met in a London Pub..."
218 Martin Shaw: "The problem with most moderns, he says, is that everybody is afraid of suffering."
219 On the concept of "aesthetic arrest" from James Joyce, the feeling you get when shocked into silence in the presence of great beauty.
220ff Paul Kingsnorth, converted after moving his family to Ireland.
222 Interesting passage here where the author argues the spiritual crisis isn't along the axis of Catholic/Protestant but rather along the axis of East/West; that the Reformation was trying to get past the "perceived taint" of Catholicism; that Western Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic) is too intellectual, not mystical enough, they are "trying to think their way put of the civilizational shipwreck of the modern West."
223 "All Western saints canonized prior to the Great Schism of 1054 are also Orthodox saints."
224ff Repetition here of the machine idea, that man is trying to become God, as seen in Genesis and the temptations of the serpent. Also again on the Yuval Noah Harari worldview, that Kingsnorth considers "Luciferian." Also on the anti-enchantment trap of technology; living with a smartphone is like being "elf-shot."
230ff Jonathan Pageau, his YouTube channel "The Symbolic World"; a "frequent stop on young people's pilgrimage route into Orthodoxy." [This is an odd (and borderline condescending?) way to describe it.]
236 Pageau on the "collapse of the WEIRD model, and the breakdown of normative Christianity in the West" and the resultant instabilities like violence, "instability of the self" and "the emergence of technological efforts to control a collapsing society." Also "We see demon-possessed people. They're coming out in public. They have power."
Chapter 11: The Urgency of the Mystical
239ff On the key lie of modernity that has "alienated us from the world around us," which is the materialist view that there's nothing intrinsically spiritual in matter or in reality. "It has turned us from a flock of pilgrims on a journey of ultimate meaning into lonely tourists flitting around from place to place, madly trying to stay one step ahead of boredom. We were not made to live in such a world--but if we accept the philosophical and metaphysical principles of modernity, it is hard to do otherwise."
241 The author uses the terms "precept" and "concept" for either the second or third time in the book, but here, in his last use of them, he finally gives the reader working definitions of the terms [A precept is a rule or principle that guides behavior, while a concept is an idea or thought. Precepts are often passed down by authority figures, while concepts are general ideas that can be derived from specific instances.] Earlier in the book he refers to them without any context. It's one of a few minor continuity problems in the book.
241 A useful idea here relevant to precepts versus concepts: certain ideas can be obvious to babies but not to sophisticates; scribes and Pharisees had too many theories to be able to see morality clearly; see also this quote from Marshall McLuhan, "Concepts are wonderful buffers for preventing people from confronting any form of precept." Christianity dies when it becomes about ideas and logical arguments.
242ff The author then tells his own story of Christian enchantment. He was in a church in Genoa giving a lecture on one of his books as part of a book tour, and an artist ran up to him and gave him an image of The Temptation of Saint Galagano. Later while watching a movie that resonates with him about Italy, he's dumbstruck by the coincidence that the movie was set in the Abbey of Saint Galgano. He realizes the man that gave him the image was a messenger.
248ff Dreher then goes to Jerusalem, after receiving an email from his wife filing for divorce. He's in an "emotionally bedraggled state." A Palestinian cleaning woman gives him a necklace, he bursts into tears. Then he experiences the miracle of the Holy Fire in Christ's Tomb inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
253ff Various arguments here: if you're a secular materialist you should consider that you're wrong; open yourself to the presence of mystery; reframe how you perceive and how you direct your attention to the world; let go of the left-brain vision of modernity; cultivate an appreciation of beauty including going into nature; take stories of miracles seriously; stay open to synchronicity and signs, etc. Basically a restatement of various arguments in the book thus far.
257 "...the image of Saint Galgano's temptation is a condensed symbol of this book's message: it is a portrait of a strong-willed man who, after refusing God's call, went to a mountain top and saw God."
Acknowledgements
264 On encouraging the people he wrote about to tell their own stories: "Sooner or later, the taboo will be broken; I hope this book plays a role in that."
To Read:
Rod Dreher: The Benedict Option
C.S. Lewis: The Discarded Image
***Charles Taylor: A Secular Age
Whitaker Chambers: Witness
Iain McGilchrist: The Matter with Things [see also his YouTube channel]
Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Daniel Everett: Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and Profane (trans. Willard R. Trask)
Carlos Eire: They Flew: A History of the Impossible
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media
***Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion
Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos
Hartmut Rosa: The Uncontrollability of the World (trans. James C. Wagner)
Tom Holland: Dominion
Rupert Sheldrake: Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age
Jacques Vallée: Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers
Jacques Vallée: Messengers of Deception
Seraphim Rose: Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future
Jacques Ellul: The Technological Society (trans. John Wilkinson)
Frederica Matthewes-Green: Welcome to the Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity
Gabriel Bunge: Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer
Umberto Eco: Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (trans. Hugh Bredin)
***Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language
Kyriacos C. Markides: The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality
Media:
Kenneth Clark: Civilisation (1969 television documentary series)
John Vervaeke: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (YouTube lecture series)
Iain McGilchrist: Understanding the Matter with Things (YouTube series)