Eyes Fixed
Notes Towards Overcoming Our Spiritual Blindness
Max Weber famously called the modern condition “disenchanted.” He meant that in the modern world, people in the West have come to value science and rationality more than religion. For truly religious people, said Weber, “the world remains a great enchanted garden.” But that is no longer true, even for most Christians, who may not realize the extent to which they have been formed by the structures of disenchantment. This is why Christianity seems so powerless today, having retained the form of the faith without its power.
The only way Christianity is going to survive this new Dark Age is by Christians recovering authentic Christian enchantment—or, to use an Orthodox phrase, coming to sense that God is everywhere present and fills all things.
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Rod Dreher is a contributing editor to Touchstone. He is a writer and blogger and the author of several books, including The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020).
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more on imagination from the online archives
11.5—September/October 1998
Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp
An Essay on Myth & 'Real Life' by Stratford Caldecott
19.10—December 2006
Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills
more from the online archives
30.2—March/April 2017
The Education of Children Takes Generations of Fidelity by W. Ross Blackburn
29.4—July/August 2016
on Noticing That Modern Science Has Rendered Atheism Irrational by Harry Biltz
19.4—May 2006
The Culture War Is Between Religious Believers on Both Sides by Howard P. Kainz
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