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 senior editor and blogger at the American Conservative and author of How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, and Live Not by Lies: A Survival Manual for Christian Dissidents. He is Eastern Orthodox and lives with his wife, Julie, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They have three children.
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more on imagination from the online archives
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
11.5—September/October 1998
Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp
An Essay on Myth & 'Real Life' by Stratford Caldecott
more from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
on the Wisdom of the Good Doctor Edmund Pellegrino by Allen H. Roberts II
21.10—December 2008
Early Christian Teaching on the Incarnation & Redemption by Patrick Henry Reardon
31.5—September/October 2018
The Rise of the Gnostic Liberal State After Christianity by Andrew Latham
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