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

19.10—December 2006

Enchanting Children

Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills

18.4—May 2005

Of Weeds & Fairy Tales

The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian

10.4—Fall 1997

Lessons from the Nursery

The Catholic Imagination Encounters Bambi by James L. Sauer


more from the online archives

20.2—March 2007

Simply Lewis

Reflections on a Master Apologist After 60 Years by N. T. Wright

22.8—November/December 2009

The Origin of Aesthetics

Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro

32.1—January/February 2019

Role Reversals

Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena

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