Heathrow Postcard

Notes From A Trip Interrupted

Hello dollinks from the American Airlines departure lounge at London Heathrow. I should have been drinking coffee in America this morning, but as you know, We In Revelations™, so nothing went as planned. After a six-hour layover in LHR yesterday, I spent the next five hours with 500 of my best friends on the tarmac, sitting in a Dreamliner waiting for permission to take off for Charlotte.

It never came. The pilot was super-apologetic, telling us that the plane was fine, but that the problem had to do with air traffic control in both London and Dallas, and them unable to sort themselves over “permissions” to land. The poor pilot told us, “In 33 years of flying, this has never happened to me.” At last they returned to the terminal, unloaded us, and sent us all to airport hotels.

(Note: I will never, ever, ever understand how it is that British people can eat baked beans for breakfast.)

On the way out of the airport hotel to catch the tube back to Heathrow, I spied the background in the photo above, and thought it might make a nice background to record a short video message about the book for X. Click here to watch it. Screenshot:

In the five-hour braising I received yesterday, I began reading the galleys of Ross Douthat’s next book, titled Believe. It will be published by Zondervan on Feb. 11, 2025 — pre-order it here. From the explanatory text on the Amazon site:

Do you ever wish you had more faith, but struggle to make religious belief fit with modern assumptions about the world and human life? With a rare combination of empathy, open-mindedness, and persuasive argument, Ross Douthat offers a blueprint for thinking one's way from doubt to belief.

As a columnist for the New York Times who writes often about spiritual topics for a skeptical audience, Ross Douthat understands that many of us--whether we are agnostic, somewhat religious, or longtime believers--want to have more faith than we do. But we think we can't believe the way our ancestors did, knowing what we know now--can we?

With clear and straightforward arguments, Believe shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural.

I’m halfway through it, and man, this really is Douthat at his best. I texted him to say that many people will come to faith through this book. They will probably not be the same people who will come to faith from reading Living In Wonder, though there will be some overlap. My book is more for people who already believe, though it also appeals to faith-curious agnostics. Ross’s book is for unbelievers who are interested in exploring the case for religious belief. So far, he is arguing for a general theism, though Ross indicates in the introduction that he is a believing Catholic Christian, so I expect he will get down to particulars by the end of the book.

I was delighted to discover that he begins his chapter on the supernatural with reference to this stunning 2014 personal account by the professional skeptic and atheist Michael Shermer, which first appeared in his regular column on skepticism that used to appear in Scientific American. It’s fairly well known, but if it’s new to you, by all means read it. Shermer is one of the leading voices in the New Atheist movement, but in my brief experiences with him, a decent guy who treats people kindly (as distinct from the scornful atheists, like the Kirkus reviewer of my book who sneered at believers in an “invisible sky deity” — yeah, I’m a little bitter). Shermer tells a story about an event that happened on his wedding day that has absolutely no materialist explanation.

I won’t spoil it by giving details, but it is so poetic and beautiful. It’s like something from a movie. He concludes:

I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

I texted Ross a few chapters in, and told him how good I think the book is (authors need to hear this from early readers, if it’s true). What delights me is that he and I both work the same fields, writing about the intersection of religion, culture, and politics, but we go about it in very different ways. Ross is the cool, analytical Yankee who considers his subjects in careful, elegant prose. I am a Southerner who wears his heart on his sleeve and leans heavily into storytelling. Our styles of writing and thinking express our character. There are people who would never pick up Living In Wonder, thinking it too driven by the fantastical, who would open Ross’s book, and be enthralled. Conversely, some readers of Living In Wonder will open Believe and rightly admire it, but find it a bit chilly. I hope that everyone who likes my book will give Ross’s a chance, because even though I do believe, Ross has given me a new and deeper understanding of the reasons for believing.

It’s also pretty funny that two sacramental Christians — Ross a Catholic, Rod an Orthodox — have found a publishing home at Zondervan, the biggest Evangelical publisher. I could not be happier with how my Zondervan experience has been. I asked my editor there how it is that an Evangelical publishing powerhouse decided to publish a book arguing for sacramental ontology within a context of theophanies and other manifestations of the supernatural. He told me that the Evangelical world has changed a lot in recent years.

I didn’t press for more of an explanation, but my guess is that more and more ordinary Christians of all confessions are coming to understand that the most meaningful divisions within Christianity do not follow the old lines, but are rather between those Christians who, whatever their tradition, believe in the objective moral authority of the Bible and the vital existence of “supernatural” realities; and those who believe both that the deposit of faith can be altered to fit perceived current needs, and that the faith is mostly about intellection, morality, and social justice (as conceived by the theological Left or the theological Right).

The former are my people, those I write for — the small-o orthodox Christians. I don’t believe in false ecumenism; I am an Orthodox Christian, and that means I believe things that are not fully compatible with orthodox Catholicism or the varieties of traditional Protestantism. I don’t shy away from that. But I also think that what separates us, though significant, is not the most significant thing in this time and place. What I hope Living In Wonder does is bring the deep spiritual wisdom of the Christian East to Western Christians who have never encountered it before. If some readers get to the end of it and decide they want to visit an Orthodox church, well, glory to God! But I didn’t write it as an apologetic for Orthodoxy.

A writer named Ben Christenson read an advance copy of Living In Wonder, and writes about its Orthodox content — and about how Orthodoxy may be about to have a moment in American life. Excerpt:

Dreher has a knack for naming and contextualizing trends that the public may sense but not fully see. With The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, he delineated the nascent soft totalitarianism of the post-Christian West, and now he’s concluding this trilogy by speaking to what he tells me is “the heart of the matter, which is the visceral experience of the living God.” In short, he’s making the case for “re-enchantment,” specifically via the “authentic, time-tested mysticism” of Eastern Orthodoxy.

For Dreher, re-enchantment is about rejecting the nominalism and materialism of modernity and instead recovering the ancient Christian understanding of reality, one where God is preeminent over the powers and principalities, everywhere present, and filling all things. And while “enchantment” is in vogue right now, Dreher is trying to move beyond philosophical, academic debate to make an accessible case for Christian re-enchantment through story rather than syllogism, a right-brained appeal for a right-brained way of being.

While Dreher is not an Orthodox apologist, he does believe that Orthodoxy has something special to offer the disenchanted West. And he’s not alone. Though small in absolute numbers, Orthodoxy is seeing a relative surge in convert interest and cultural influence. Converts like Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau and Orthodox-adjacent public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, and Iain McGilchrist are emerging as some of our sharpest social critics. Dreher sees Orthodoxy’s appeal at a personal level as well—he is regularly contacted by young people from Evangelical or Catholic backgrounds who say they are “dying of spiritual thirst in their churches and want to know more about Orthodoxy.”

But as any Orthodox seeker soon finds out, the most common advice is “come and see.” Dreher told me he used to view that answer as a cop-out, but after eighteen years in Orthodoxy, he now understands that “Orthodoxy is more of an experience than a set of propositions.” You cannot just read your way into it.

With that in mind, I reached out to Dreher and a few other notable converts, hoping to get more of the human angle on why Eastern Orthodoxy—a Church famous for its lack of change—has suddenly become the hot new thing.

More:

Early in the book as Dreher is introducing re-enchantment, he jokes, “Relax, Protestants: It’s probably overstated to say that a contemporary Christian must join a sacramental confession or they will never experience re-enchantment.” But just the fact that he must make this disclaimer gives an idea of how this book may ruffle feathers.

In the end, Dreher agrees with the twentieth century Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who said the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he won’t be anything at all. Dreher elaborated for me: “Rahner meant that tomorrow’s Christian would have to make the mysterious encounter with God at the center of his faith life—this, as distinct from intellectualism or moralism.”

Since his conversion in 2006, Dreher has become more mystical and less argumentative about spirituality, and perhaps his willingness now to talk about the miraculous in his own life will open the floodgates. For her part, Frederica Mathewes-Green told me she’s just going to start talking about miracles: “I don’t really care if people think I’m a nut. I'll just start saying, you know, this happened and then that happened, and I'll just tell the stories.”

Read it all. It’s really good.

Flight is boarding. Y’all be good!