Living in wonder Finding mystery and meaning in a secular age

Dreher (The Benedict Option), an editor at the American Conservative, offers an eclectic invitation for Christians to find the sacred in the everyday. Tracing the West's "progressive disenchantment" with a more mystical faith "since the High Middle Ages," he explains how the industrial revolution propelled a rise of capitalism that has left humans obsessed with their own power and knowledge, blinded to the signs of "divine reality" that permeated the lives of "our enchanted ancestors." As a corrective, readers are advised to adopt an attitude of vulnerability and openness to the existence of God, "or at least... meaning, beyond your head." According to Dreher, doing so opens up a world where music, art, and natural beauty are evidence of "God's handiwork"; "signs, wonders, and miracles" abound; and "demonic" activity is a reality. Dreher's message about making room for life's unknowns is often stimulating, though he struggles to tie together a surfeit of topics--UFOs, artificial intelligence, exorcisms--and has a tendency to wander into distracting hyperbole ("If AI becomes sentient, or so convincingly mimics sentience that it's a distinction without a difference, then we will treat AI entities like gods"). Flaws aside, this has much for the spiritually curious to chew on. (Oct.)

An admittedly "strange book" about religious faith and its necessary willing suspension of disbelief. It's one thing to believe in an invisible sky deity. It's quite another to believe in demons that require exorcism in UFOs, whose extraterrestrial occupants, one religious scholar believes, "are likely to be at the bottom of a new religion that will arrive in the future." For the moment, Dreher writes, Christianity will have to do--and not just any Christianity, but its Eastern Orthodox variant, which retains the ecstatic and the mystical in place of more rational, less awestruck Western strands. Dreher is committed to bringing his reader to adopt this extrarational way of being in the world, his or her every breath devoted to religious practice. (Toward the end of the book, he prescribes the "Jesus Prayer," its four simple lines punctuated by breath and spoken as if a mantra.) Dreher is capable of stirring exaltations, as when he likens humans to fish at the bottom of a pond: "Sometimes we catch a flash of light reflected in a piece of matter drifting down from on high, and our attraction to it causes us to rise toward the light beyond the surface," he writes, going on to say that the beauty brought to humans by the arts fuels that gracious light. Regrettably, he also punctuates his argument with flashes of rightist thought, as when he describes American teenagers who convinced an Eastern European pal that she "might be genderqueer"--and so she might have been--and says that "witchcraft and paganism typically track with progressive political commitments, especially around feminism, environmentalism, and queer activism." Such moments make it clear that Dreher's "confident belief that there is deep meaning to life" doesn't tolerate much wiggle room. If you're inclined to Orthodox fundamentalism, then this is your book. If not, not. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.