EMDR Therapy In Action

And: Matthew Rose On Mircea Eliade; Interview With A Celtic Harpist

An example of EMDR therapy (via Healing Pathways Houston)

What ho! Late out the gate this morning. I went to Vienna yesterday for my second EMDR therapy session. This stuff is really something. I explained it earlier to you in this space, so I won’t revisit that. Let’s just say that it almost feels like woo — but the clinical results speak for themselves. Basically, the therapist induces what feels like a waking dream, but you’re fully conscious, and guides you through a process that pretty much rewires your brain to defuse the power the traumatic memory had over you.

Yesterday was the first day we worked on stuff from the decade of misery in which my marriage was dying. I knew this was going to be the big one, because it was a shocking PTSD episode I had back in January, triggered by an innocent remark a friend made to me (that recalled the first major fight my ex-wife and I had had when things went bad for us — it was the first time I realized that we might not make it) — it was that particular trauma that caused the PTSD, and led me to find the EMDR therapist.

It really was hard yesterday — much harder than the first session a couple of weeks ago, when we worked on some childhood material. But what happened was very, very powerful, but also healing. By the end of yesterday’s session, I was completely spent. Met my son Matt for dinner, and then went to the train station to catch a late train back to Budapest. The train was quite late, and I didn’t get back home till 1:30 am. Fell into bed and slept hard for nine hours. I’m still exhausted this morning from the session, but it’s a good kind of tired.

I’m only two sessions in, but I really can’t recommend this therapy strongly enough. Here’s a basic explainer from Cleveland Clinic of how it works — including the admission that nobody knows exactly how it works, but that it works has been well established in study after study. It basically rewires the brain so that traumatic memories can be safely processed, and lose their emotional power over the patient.

It’s strange, because I always associated “traumatic memories” with something utterly horrific, like combat experience (EMDR has been proven to be especially effective helping combat veterans). But a psychiatrist friend told me that it is certainly possible to experience trauma within a failing marriage, even if there is no physical violence present. He urged me to try EMDR, and so far, I’m very pleased.

I had intended to give today’s newsletter over to writing about Ross Douthat’s new book, but I woke up this morning so late and so fried by yesterday’s therapy session that I’m going to kick that to tomorrow. Watch this space, brethren and sistren.

I Feel Seen

Matthew Rose On Mircea Eliade

From the new issue of First Things, here’s a link to Matthew Rose’s essay about Mircea Eliade, the great 20th century scholar of religion. It might be paywalled, so sorry if you can’t read it; why not become a subscriber like Your Working Boy? In Living In Wonder, I praise Eliade’s work, writing:

The great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade taught that modern man has a radically impoverished idea of religion, at least compared to archaic man and even Christians of the premodern era. In his classic work The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade writes that, to the religious man, experiencing the “living God” is not like encountering the God of the philosophers. “It was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.”

This holy terror, this fear of God, is not like what it means to be scared by an encounter with a bear in the woods. It is more like what one feels when one is confronted with an overwhelming manifestation of power, mystery, majesty, “in which the perfect fullness of being flowers.”

The sacred, in this sense, is a manifestation of “a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities.” Eliade prefers the term hierophany—meaning “manifestation of the sacred”—to refer to this phenomenon. So, for traditional man, the material world can be saturated with divinity and becomes something else while remaining itself. In other words, a sacred grove is indeed a grove like any other to outward appearances, but to those who hold it to be holy, it is also grounded in transcendent reality. To traditional man, the entire cosmos can become a hierophany.

Translated into Christian language, the universe and everything in it is sacramental—it is a symbol of a spiritual reality that both points to transcendent reality and participates in it. Christians use the term customarily with reference to the Eucharist, baptism, and other sacraments. These are special instances in which God’s power and being is made manifest within the life of the church. To call the cosmos sacramental means that, in a mysterious way, all created things bear divine power and participate in the life of God.

The thrust of my own argument is to agree with Eliade that modern man — even believing Christians — have an impoverished view of what religion is. We need to recover as much as we can of the pre-modern conception of God, and of religion.

So, here’s Matthew Rose:

Eliade explained in his landmark 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane that the archaic world, indeed most of the world before Western modernity, cannot be fully understood except as a religious response to the pressures of history. Human beings live under the sign of time: We are born, we grow, we decay, and we die. As Eliade put it in his autobiography, we live with the unsettling awareness that “there are things which once were but are no longer.” Provoked by his own experiences of war and dislocation, Eliade asked how we can preserve our humanity in a fleeting world visited by frequent destruction and inevitable death. He conceded that modern people are right to fear their vulnerability to revolutionary ideologies and promethean science. But he also believed that they are profoundly mistaken about the nature of power, despite being consumed with its pursuit. The highest human power is not found in technological prowess, the scientific method, or material wealth. It is rooted in religious capacities that modern people have forgotten. Eliade undertook to show that, although the homo religiosus of pre-modern and archaic society was technologically simple, he was metaphysically powerful—far more so than contemporary Westerners, who have been spiritually weakened by their own creations. Like his modern counterpart, homo religiosus lived in “terror” of being “overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence.” Yet his response was not to master the world through ingenuity. It was to endow his life with sacrality.

For homo religiosus, real human power did not depend on controlling nature. It depended on annulling history. “Killing time” was therefore his highest imperative. He killed time, Eliade claimed, through the enactment of rituals and the recitation of myths that enable him to enter a momentary state of timelessness. In ritual, he becomes present at creation, the origin of time. In myth, he learns of the truths whose eternity time cannot touch. ­Eliade’s basic claim, which he elaborated in every book and found confirmed in nearly every ­archaic culture, was remarkably simple. Human beings must eat, sleep, mate, hunt, work, play, fight, and die. ­Rituals transform these human necessities into sacred ceremonies. From Siberia to Australia, Eliade found rituals that sacramentally transfigured the daily requirements of life, saving them from dissolution by the unceasing flow of time. Eliade was adamant that these rituals—which give sacred, ­unchanging form to life’s core activities—were in no way a sabbath from the “real world.” Rather, they served as portals into the only “real world,” a passage out of the false world of impermanence and change and into a higher, unchanging, and superhuman order. Eliade did not claim that primitive man lived in a permanent state of ritual ecstasy or that he was blissfully unaware of mundane life. He merely credited primitive societies for discovering a powerful form of “therapy,” on which their cultures were founded, and which relieved their spiritual terrors and turned bodily sufferings into initiations.

Beautifully articulated! You longtime readers of mine will recall that Cambridge social anthropologist Paul Connerton found that all small traditional societies that held on to their ways of life in liquid modernity had a few things in common. They 1) shared a sacred story — that is, a narrative that told them who they are as a people, and what they are to do; 2) they tell that sacred story in an unvarying ritual; 3) that ritual is understood by society’s members as somehow taking the people outside of time; and 4) the ritual requires use of the body, which ends up taking the sacred story and “sedimenting it into the bones.”

This makes me think about one way my faith in Christ has helped me cope with all the losses, traumas, and tragedies of my own life. I believe in eternity, and in the redemption of all things in God’s time. I take seriously Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming Messiah: “By his stripes [wounds] we are healed.” There is a mysterious connection between suffering, sacrifice, and redemption. If we can find a way to join our own suffering to Christ’s, through faith — an active faith, not just a conceptual one — then we will ultimately be able to bear it in this life, and overcome death to live forever.

This is the truth proclaimed and participated in at every Divine Liturgy. And this is one reason why I have realized lately how much I need to be in a church where I can understand the language of the liturgy. I don’t speak Serbian, the language of the liturgy at my local parish, but of course I know what is happening in the liturgy, and I know also that the communion I receive really is the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Yet it is not a mechanical act. The liturgical worship that precedes communion prepares one to receive the graces in the Eucharist. If I can’t get that, I am impoverished. I realized earlier this week that oh my Lord, it’s almost Lent! I hadn’t realized, because I have not been able to pick up the liturgical clues that prepare us for Lent, simply because I can’t follow the language of liturgy here. That’s not the fault of the local parish, but it is a serious problem for me. Lent is a very big deal in the life of Orthodox Christians. This is the first time in my 19 years as an Orthodox that Lent has snuck up on me. It’s a sign that I need to change, to get closer to worship in a community where I can be more than an outsider.

Anyway, back to Matthew Rose’s excellent essay:

Eliade realized that he could never adopt primitive and Eastern religions as his own. But in studying them with great sympathy, he gained insight into the peculiar nature of Western culture, whose influence, he concluded, he could not fully escape. Whether he was describing Eskimo shamans or Bantu hymns, Eliade always returned to the same diagnosis: Modern Western culture represents a fateful inversion of the traditional world of archaic and primitive cultures. He meant that our culture, unlike that of our early ancestors, is not founded on abolishing the profane and annihilating time. Instead, it is ­founded on dismantling the sacred, and thus abandoning us to the ravages of accelerating time. Eliade was often criticized for simplifying primitive life, and for ignoring what the Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas called “secular savages.” But if he simplified, he argued, he did so to help people see modernity as a radical transvaluation of the way human beings have, since the dawn of ­recorded time, understood and coped with reality. Eliade described this modern deviation, this renunciation of the hardest-won wisdom, by means of stark contrasts, and often in apocalyptic terms. Rather than imitate archetypes, he observed, we value individual creativity. Rather than aspire to reverse time, we quicken it. Rather than elevate the real to the holy, we demean it to the profane. “Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation,” Eliade dramatically ­concluded. “He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.”

This is exactly right, and makes me wish I had devoted more space in my book to Eliade. Rose goes on to say that Eliade, though baptized Christian, had come to believe that Judaism and Christianity were dying. He welcomed a revival of pagan vitalism, and saw the Sexual Revolution as fundamentally a religious repaganization. “One might say we are witnessing the triumph of divinities similar to Baal and Astarte,” he wrote, “but which are desacralized.”

Eliade, who admitted his own temptations to immerse himself in the power of the primitive, thought this wasn’t a bad thing. The Christian cannot agree. I do believe he was right in interpreting the Sexual Revolution in religious terms — not just as a rejection of the God of the Bible, but the worship (conscious or not) of pagan gods of the Ancient Near East. And in our time, the Messianic Jewish pastor Jonathan Cahn has written powerfully about what he calls The Return Of The Gods. He means precisely the gods of the Ancient Near East, as I explain here. Specifically, Cahn mentions Baal, Astarte, and Molech.

Within the “religious” UFO community — people who interpret the UFO phenomenon in religious terms, and the “aliens” (or “NHI” — non-human intelligences) as quasi-divinities — there are some who believe them to be manifestations of these same Ancient Near East gods. I certainly don’t know if that’s true or not; I’m just reporting that some truly believe it, and welcome it as an antidote to the God of the Bible. And this, in turn, is why some Christians regard them as real, but demonic, and why these same Christians are fascinated with the apkallu of ancient Babylon: the divinities that descended and taught technology to the ancients. The concern of such Christians (I wrote about this somewhat yesterday, in the Robin Phillips item) is that these demons are once again engaging with eager humans to teach them technologies, including AI. You might find this bonkers, but you should know that some people who are a major figures in that world — including Simone (Planté) from Diana Pasulka’s book Encounters — may not share the ANE angle, but very much believe that higher intelligences are communicating with them, and bringing technological truths and enlightening insights.

Like I keep saying, the world is re-enchanting, whether you want it to or not. Only a powerful pre-modern Christianity is going to be capable of understanding what’s happening, and contending with it. This is a core message of Living In Wonder.

I’ll tell you another reason I worry about this stuff. Yesterday on the train to and from Vienna, I dove into a book one of you recommended, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History Of The Third Reich, by Eric Kurlander. It’s not a sensationalist tome, but rather a dense, scholarly one (from Yale University Press) about the role that occult and quasi-occult ideas played in opening the door for Nazism, and in vivifying the Nazi regime. I’ll write more about it when I finish the book, but I can say here that pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany was far more saturated by the occult — in serious and trivial ways both — than I had realized. Interest in the occult skyrocketed after the country’s devastating loss in the First World War, and the economic apocalypse that followed. Kurlander makes clear how the kinds of occultism that flourished were mostly German-specific, having to do with deep myths from Germany’s pagan past, and how those myths fed into Aryan racist fantasies. The Nazis absolutely hated Christianity as a Jewish thing that degraded the Aryan race; they worked to co-opt what they could of Christianity, and planned to destroy the whole thing once they won the war.

The situation with occultism in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany was very different from what we have today — but not so different that we shouldn’t worry. The German people gave themselves over to the occult because they no longer believed that Christianity, in either its Catholic or Protestant forms, could meet their felt spiritual needs for meaning, purpose, and transcendence. Rationalists in Germany of the era scoffed at people’s eagerness to believe crackpot ideas, but the joke, if that’s the word, was on them.

And that, readers, is why we should be worried today. I am very glad to read the news from Pew this week that America’s de-Christianization seems to have stalled. But don’t be fooled: most Germans of the early 20th century still identified as Christians, but they were also into various forms of the occult (Tarot cards, astrology, and deeper, darker things). Formal, institutional German Christianity, as it existed in that time and place, was not enough to answer the longings of the German people. Eventually they turned to a figure they believed could: Adolf Hitler.

The big turn towards the occult in American life is at the very least a sign of a profound religious void. Normie middle-class Christianity is not enough to fill it, and to keep the more primitive religions from moving into the space we have left behind. Here’s a passage from Living In Wonder from my conversation with an academic, “Jonah,” who was raised a suburban Evangelical, and ended up a demon-worshiper, until he fled and converted to Orthodoxy:

I asked Jonah to recall key turning points in which he made fateful decisions that led him down the dark path. He said in retrospect that it was “just being continually seduced by ideologies that felt like the completely natural conclusion of the last one.”

He considers his normie American evangelical upbringing to have been “deeply tragic, considering how unequipped the authority figures in my life were to shield me from the increasingly demonic spiritual and intellectual paths to which I became enslaved.

“Plenty of these authority figures recognized the reality of the demonic but they brought a knife to a gun fight in their attempt to stave off such influences,” he says. “Some had simply no answers, or wholly unsatisfying ones, for my myriad youthful theological curiosities. Theology as presented within the evangelical world all seemed so arbitrary. Mostly, it was emotional experiences of worship that were cast as the foundation of the faith. So, when those dried up for me, my conservative faith seemed untenable.”

Diving headlong into pop culture as a teenager, Jonah spent a lot of time online and soon saw that liberal views were treated as “cool and profound” and the conservative religious views with which he was raised were dumb and nerdy. He didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, but his embracing liberal cultural and political views around hot-button issues such as abortion and gay marriage was a real turning point. This is not surprising, given that so much cutting-edge occultism has embraced feminist and LGBT politics.

In college, Jonah followed his instincts into studying theology and philosophy, with an orientation toward religious pluralism (entailing the idea that all religions are basically the same) and spiritual experiences as guides to truth. These seemed to the former evangelical to define “the horizons of sophisticated modern approaches to religion.” And he found his experiential, open-minded approach encouraged by the academy.

“The forms of Christianity I was immersed in were already so hopelessly heretical and syncretic that I don’t even think it was a particularly important moment when I finally became a self-identifying neo-pagan,” Jonah tells me. “Of course, I regret the first time I took a psychedelic drug, or first celebrated a pagan ritual, or first bought a deck of tarot cards, but each of those actions seemed perfectly reasonable within the metaparadigm of spiritual plurality and open-ended emphasis on experience that I had been situated in for years.”

I’m not saying that America is headed for Nazism. We Americans don’t have the mythological background of the Germans, for one thing. History will not repeat itself like that. But history rhymes.

Interview With The Celtic Harpist

Last weekend at The Moorings, in Cambridge, I met one of its residents, a young Irish woman named Sophia Abraham, a Protestant Christian. She lives there with her husband Davis, who is a Cambridge student. Her harp playing was so lovely, and I later fell into conversation with her about her views that the music of the harp could help heal the brokenness throughout her homeland. I asked her if she would sit for a short interview. What follows is a record of our conversation.

SOPHIA ABRAHAM: I'm from, Ireland, County Cork. I'm from a small town in the Sliabh Luacra area which is kind of a very rich Irish musical town.

ROD DREHER: How long have you been playing?

SA: I have been learning the harp since I was about 13 years old. I've always loved it.

RD: What drew you to playing the harp

SA: I always loved Celtic style imagery, and I always really saw the harp as being really healing. And I always prayed that I could have one. And then someone came over to my house with a small harp and said, I really feel this is for you, something that you should learn. I was thirteen. And then that was it, then. I just really loved it.

RD: When you say the harp is healing, what do you mean?

SA: The harp has been used for thousands of years for healing. We can see this in the bible, in the Torah, where David heals Saul with his harp. The harp has always been something that's been used for worship and healing, and it's also been used for war and politics too. So it has these two parts to it. I did my master’s degree in music and harp therapy, could really see that the harp could be very healing for things like neurological rehab.

Thinking about the two hemispheres we have in our brain and cognitively, actually through the harp, we are able to rewire our pathways. Also, the harp is one of the only instruments with the sound holes face inwards. So normally, if you play something like piano, it's outwards, it's for people to hear. But the harp is inwards. It's for you. It can permeate your cells. And when you lean the harp into you and you play it, it can permeate you, and can be very healing.

RD: How do you feel when you feel healed by playing the harp?

SA: You can tune your harp to hertzes that are healing. As humans, you know that we were made of earth. We are crafted out of earth, and we know that the earth has an electromagnetic field. That means that we also have that as well, which is why people do earthing -- they put their feet in the earth, or they go for a swim in the sea, is because they feel like they return to how they were created to be. And so, when we play the harp in a lower hertz, we can feel really calmed down. We can feel really relaxed and much more recalibrated.

RD: Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist and a Christian. He wrote a book a few years ago about having suffered from Lyme disease. One of the only things that gave him relief was a sort of machine that fills the body with certain frequencies. He admits that it sounds very woo, but it worked. [Readers: I wrote about that in my 2021 appraisal of Ross’s book; read to the end for the discussion of the Rife machine. — RD]

SA: Yeah, is that the sort of thing I’m talking about. Every single cell also has its own hertz, has its own frequency -- even cancers as well, which is why not all music is healing. Concert pitch is 440 hertz, which was actually established only fairly recently. So prior to this, we had a much lower hertz. When you have that piercing, high hertz, it really can interfere with us and our cells.

RD: We are talking now because of a kitchen conversation we had earlier about Ireland. You are a Christian, a Protestant, but you have seen your homeland rapidly abandon the faith. Why has this happened?

SA: Ireland has such an amazing, rich monastic heritage. That is really who we are. There's been such a war over this land, over this ancient land. In modern Ireland, it is not the way that it was. We have forgotten who we are as a people. Marxism has become huge. I think there's a big wound as well because of what happened between Ireland and England. You know, colonialism, and then victim mentality -- sometimes a slave mentality, always wanting to be oppressed. Ireland also very much sides with Palestine, for example. We've actually gone from this land of saints and scholars into a love of terrorism -- and that is not who we are. The harp was important to the ancient Hebrews. So our national emblem is the harp, and that is an ancient Israeli instrument. So it's not this narrative that we have today. That is a counterfeit lie.

RD: Paul Kingsnorth is an Englishman who moved to the west country of Ireland, is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, a convert. He has said quite strongly that what he thinks will heal Ireland and bring it back to the faith are the example of what he and Martin Shaw call the wild saints, the bush saints. People like Saint Colman, whom I mentioned earlier, this seventh century hermit, who lived in a cave in the Burren-- saints like that, who are so intimately bound up with the land. Does that speak to you, that idea of Paul’s?

SA: Yes, we younger Irish people have not been taught about our rich past. We learned all about the Troubles, and what the English did to us, but not about the ancient Christian past. We are now living on the prayers of the past. And I think we all need to return to praying, praying for the land to be healed, and then, and then we can see this revival.

We had the Penal Laws, which is where the English would kill a lot of Catholic priests. Some Catholics were forced to become Protestant. Later, we had the abuse scandals, and the Magdalene laundries. I think that the answer is not to remove all of that and to look past the brokenness of our time, at our even more ancient past. We think that Saint Patrick was literally walking with God.

RD: You may not know this, but I have a new book out, Living In Wonder, which talks about re-connecting with the Holy Spirit through the things we perceive, like music. This is why I was interested in talking to you, because you're saying that the music of the harp could be a means through which we can reconnect with the Holy Spirit. Have I got that right?

SA: Actually, yes. If you hold a harp up to the wind, the wind can play it. The wind makes its own sound. And the Hebrew word for wind is ruach, which means “spirit breath”. When we hold our harp up to the wind, we can hear tangibly and feel the breath of God flowing through the harp. That is very powerful.

RD: Do you use the harp yourself in worship or prayer?

SA: I use it often. I use it when I sing, and I use it when I write as well. We can see the harp is used all the way through Psalms. David says, “Praise him with your harp and your ten-stringed lyre” (Psalms 33: 2-4). This is something that we're called to do. That's why my husband and I, we have a project now, where we make smaller harps that people can use, because I do feel like worshiping with the harp is so powerful and very healing.

RD: If someone wanted to learn how to play the Celtic harp, how would they get started?

SA: It’s actually very easy. The harp is, is the exact same as a piano turned over. You have the same scale of C, D, E, F, G, so all you need to know, really, is your chord of C and F, and then you're already there. It’s really not as hard as you might think, and that's why I'm so passionate for people, especially in Ireland, to start to learn harp-playing, which is a dying art, and to praise with it. I really think that that key to who we are and to become who we are.

DAVIS ABRAHAM: You asked, how does someone learn the harp? Since we've been married, this has been a project we've been on, because when we've moved around, people have been so touched by Sophia playing the harp, and specifically in Christian circles, they want to introduce that as part of their meditation, part of their prayer. You know what she talked about, about the frequency, the music going into a heart? It's a very intimate thing, and you can almost imagine, you know, David tending the sheep and being alone with God, playing the harp.

As we have been moving around, we’ve met people wanted to learn the harp. People wanted to purchase harps. Sophia would suggest, “Oh, try out this brand of harp.” Then the people would be struck by the $2,000 price tag, and say, “I don't have that.” So we've been working on a project with a harp maker in Dublin to make these smaller harps that are suitable for beginners and for therapy, specifically so that people can learn on these kind of smaller harps that are about half the price and quite good.

Also, Sophia has been making an online platform where she's got videos taking people through step by step. She also does weekly Zoom calls. And she's got a few people subscribing now to that, and it's been an amazing thing, both for believers and the worship component, but also for people that are kind of in the New Age and exploring spirituality. Especially in Ireland, they're curious about this idea of frequency. Yes, there's a New Age aspect, but actually the harp is being used as a tool to connect with the Lord, it’s there all through Psalms, all through the Book of Revelation.

We were once in China, doing some outreach ministry with the harp. China is very restricted in terms of faith, but we were marched to the front of [Communist Party] meetings for Sophia to do cultural exchanges. She would sing “Amazing Grace,” and all these CCP officials would react by clutching their hearts in amazement. So there's something happening. What is it? The harp has opened up amazing conversations because there’s something disarming about music of the harp.

SA: You know, the harp has been used for war and politics in Ireland and also in ancient Israel, for thousands of years. One of our oldest tunes is called “Brian Boru’s March, and it's a thousand years old. Brian Boru was our last high king. He would go into war with his harps, and he would always win. He was a very Christian man as well, and he would restore a lot of churches plundered by the Vikings. You can actually see Brian Boru’s harp in Trinity College Dublin. We also have his tune as well.

RD: As a Christian, I find that talking about things like enchantment and the sort of conversation we've had, it really unnerves some Christians. They think it sounds magical or New Agey. What would you say to them?

SA: I think that the new age is the counterfeit version of what we have. I think that the New Age isn't allowed to take that from us. That is ours.

Sophia Abraham can be found on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/sophiawisdomharps/

Her website is: https://www.wisdomharps.com/. You can also order small harps and learn the harp through this website.

Her online platform: https://www.skool.com/wisdom-harps-9618/about

Here she is on YouTube performing:

I’m sending today’s newsletter out to the entire list, including non-subscribers, because I want people to know about Sophia Abraham’s amazing work. But if you like what you read here, won’t you consider becoming a subscriber? It’s only six dollars per month, for at least five posts a week (one per weekday), and usually more. The Cambridge divinity professor James Orr said recently, on the (not yet released) podcast interview I did with him, that future historians will learn a lot about our time and place by looking at the archives of Rod Dreher’s Diary. Get ahead of the crowd!