'Living In Wonder' Out In Britain Today

And So Is The UK Edition Of 'The Benedict Option'

Martin Shaw, at his ‘Living In Wonder’ interview, London 2023

It’s Living In Wonder publication day in Great Britain! The link under the title takes you to the buy page at the website of Hodder Faith, my generous UK publisher. Americans reading this who haven’t bought the book yet, please go here and do so, or the warning of the iconic Alabama sign is liable to apply to you for your book-buying failure too. We don’t want to risk that, do we now? I didn’t think so. Heh.

Anyway, to celebrate UK publication day, I thought it would be nice to feature an excerpt from Living In Wonder featuring one of my all-time favorite Britons, Dr. Martin Shaw, who lives in the woods of the west country, and practices his bardic charms. I name him — along with Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau — as a kind of “prophet” for our time, showing us how to think of Christianity in new ways. Excerpt from the book:

The English writer Martin Shaw was never a pagan, exactly, but he’s everybody’s idea of a happy heathen. Or, in a more Christian vein, he’s like the Lost Inkling, a curious lad who wandered into the woods of Devonshire and grew up as a foundling in Tom Bombadil’s cottage.

Barrel-chested, bearded, and full of laughter, we met in a London pub to talk about the middle-aged writer’s surprising discovery of Christianity, which he had come to believe, as Tolkien told Lewis, is the myth that is true.

Shaw built a lifelong reputation for being a great teller of stories and champion of mythology as a guide to life. With his advanced academic training, Shaw founded and led Oral Traditions and Mythologies courses at Stanford University, but most of his teaching has been done far away from the classroom, in his many books and with small groups of seekers he has guided into the forests of England’s West Country.

Shaw was raised in a believing Christian family, one that went from evangelical to charismatic, but the faith never took. He rejected the religion of his youth, but he wasn’t angry about it. He immersed himself in studying and celebrating the mythic imagination, for what it told us about what it means to be human. But he never really thought it was, you know, real.

Then, in the autumn of 2019, Shaw had a “strange impulse,” as he put it, to spend a lot of time going into the forest behind his house in rural Devonshire. He decided to slip quietly out of his house for 101 nights in a row to spend a couple of hours in the ancient Devonian wood. His specialty is wilderness rites of passage, so this was a familiar practice.

“I was looking down the barrel of fifty. I was not ostensibly religious, but I was spiritual, as a mythologist and a storyteller. I wanted to give something back to the place that had sustained me all these years,” Shaw recalled. “So I would go out at night and recite some troubadour poetry, or tell a story, or I would just sit and be quiet. The main thing is that I wasn’t there on the take. I wasn’t there to use nature as a backdrop for some sort of epiphany. I was there to give something back.”

On his final night of the prayer discipline, after a hearty supper at home, the writer wandered into the cold woods for an all-night vigil. Shaw sat down near the remains of an Iron Age fort, and for some reason he found himself saying, “Thank you for giving me this time with you—whatever ‘you’ is—and if there’s anything you would like me to see, I’m absolutely at your mercy this evening.”

And then it happened. As he told the story, Shaw took pains to emphasize that he was not in an altered state, chemically induced or otherwise. Something nudged him to look up into the night sky, which was pitch black. In an interview over pints of Guinness in a London pub, Shaw said:

Suddenly there was this one light that quite rapidly started to get bigger. It was like looking at a firework that was opening up, or almost like the tip of an arrow that’s expanding behind the tip. The colors were very odd, like the colors of the aurora borealis, which I had never seen, but I know of them. This is all happening within three to four seconds. Then there was something like a painted arrow shooting out of the heavens. You’re trying to catch up with the impossibility of what’s happening, with the Old Testament-ness of what’s happening. I just stood there frozen to the spot. As truthfully as I tell you now, that great light fell into the ground about ten feet away from me. There was no noise.

It did not frighten Shaw. In fact, it left him overwhelmed by joy. He had gone through a lot of suffering in the previous decade, with the breakup of his marriage, but now he had been visited by something magical, something miraculous.

“I danced all night, by myself,” he said. “Then I walked down the hill to my cottage, got into bed, and just as I was closing my eyes—it was very odd, like a news flash, across the darkness of my trying to fall into unconsciousness—were these nine strange words: Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home.”

What did this mean? Certainly not that he should investigate the book of Genesis. Hadn’t he put Christianity behind him, in his childhood?

Then Shaw began to have dreams. In one dream, he met a Being of light, who drew Shaw deeply into his overwhelming love and told him that every encounter of love between human beings is an echo of this.

Then, on a visit to his writer friend Paul Kingsnorth in Ireland, Shaw spent the night in the mossy cave of Saint Colmán, a seventh-century Irish holy man. The night after that, Shaw dreamed he was back in the cave. In recalling the intense dream, Shaw used the Hebrew name of Jesus: “A stag came to the entrance of the cave, in moonlight. He looked in, and he was twelve-tined, which means he had a great rack. I suddenly realized in the dream that I was phenomenally thirsty. As I had that thought, the stag, which I know in some form was Yeshua, leaned forward with his antlers, and on the tip of every antler was a drop of water. It’s very much like an icon. I was underneath it with my hands cupped, gathering every drop of God-water, of Yeshua-water, of Spirit-water. I drank, and then I woke up. I knew I was in dangerous territory by now. I knew my number was up.”

In another dream, Shaw was a private in the Great War. His captain came to him, told him his arm was damaged, and said he could fix it but would have to break it first.

“I suddenly knew in the dream who I was in the presence of. I knew. I knew. And I gave him my broken arm. If it hurt, it hurt only for a second,” he said. “Once those dreams started to come after seeing a ball of light in the sky, you know something is happening.”

The signs pointing to Christ were so overwhelming that Shaw surrendered. In the early spring of 2022, he became a Christian, receiving baptism in the River Dart, which he said felt like being hit with a bolt of electricity. “It’s very hard for middle-aged men to concede that maybe they don’t know what’s going on, that maybe they don’t know what’s going to happen next. But that’s how my fiftieth year began.”

The sign in the sky, and the signs in his dreams, left Shaw no choice but to accept the faith he had abandoned after childhood. But it cost him plenty. He lost friendships. He lost followers who had admired his work on mythology. But he has gained new life.

More:

Decades working in the field of mythological studies prepared him to accept the “true myth” of the gospel, Shaw believes. In the same way, pagan myths preceding the birth of Christ prepared the world for his coming.

“Not all Christians would go along with this, but I feel that, in the thousands of years before Yeshua arrives, we have pinpricks of the eternal in many mythologies,” he tells me. “Not to the degree of sophistication—something different goes on in the Sermon on the Mount, something different goes on in the Beatitudes. But in essence, the notion of sacrifice, the notion of the underworld, the notion of a resurrection, almost in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. We’re talking to each other now in a London pub, and if you look outdoors, it’s like everything is dying. But we know from experience that in only fifteen, sixteen weeks’ time the earth will come back again. So we see a Christ motif in the earth itself.”

Besides, he says, taking a sip of his beer, “I knew that when human beings go through travail and depression, only myth will do. Myth told me everything I needed to know about the conditions of life. Christianity showed me how to live it. That’s the difference.”

I can testify from personal experience that one of the most joyful places in all of Great Britain is the seat next to Martin Shaw at the pub. Go to his website here to learn more about him, buy his books, and subscribe to his Substack, the House Of Beasts & Vines. UK audiences no doubt know about him, but it is my great honor to introduce Martin and his work to a wider American audience.

Believe it or not, today is also publication day in Britain of the UK edition of The Benedict Option. Boy oh boy, is that book ever relevant in Britain today, in this time of Christians being criminally convicted for praying silently on the street near abortion clinices, the high holy temples of the Sexual Revolution. This edition is graced with an introduction by my friend the Rev. Daniel French, co-host of the most popular Christian podcast in Britain, Irreverend. In his foreword, Father Daniel writes that having read the US edition in 2017, he knew it described the church life he saw in his own country. But subsequent events electrified its diagnosis. Father Daniel writes:

Covid-19 changed all of this, and my life has never been the same. There was something about the pandemic and the global response which The Benedict Option spoke into. It is a much more relevant text in post-pandemic Britain and, indeed, I hear Dreher’s name being bandied about in a way that I did not five years ago. For a start, the pandemic highlighted how easy it was for a supposedly liberal democracy to flip into totalitarianism, especially given the advance of surveillance technology and social media. This spooked many. Ministers within the British government thought it implausible to implement a Chinese-style lockdown; then Italy gave it go and the rest is history. What was supposed to be three weeks ‘to flatten the curve’ became a year or more of draconian suspensions of basic civil rights. An island people of free thinkers now enthusiastically snitched on neighbours for giving granny a cake or reported teenagers for holding hands in the park. A friend who grew up in Czechoslovakia remarked how this all reminded him of the Soviet era. Clergy faced disciplinary action for congregating beyond what the rules allowed. In one case a vicar was seriously reprimanded for singing aloud and hugging, with smartphone video footage used as evidence. The insane possibility of vaccine passports for church entry was mooted and, during Christmas, a cathedral experimented with it for access to carol services. The progressive Left loved all this control and wore compliance as a badge of honour, the rest of us being ‘Covidiots’ and conspiracy theorists. If Christmas had to be cancelled, then so be it. They did not mind if the government regulated how many hours a day you could walk your dog. For metropolitan types working from home the lockdowns were a breeze compared with front line workers single parents living in tower blocks.

Predictably, taking to the streets in Britain for causes such as Black Lives Matters were an acceptable exception to lockdown for the liberal media. By contrast, protesting against lockdowns per se was ‘far-right’.  This was taken to a disgusting level in Canada where notables in the Anglican Church demonised the truckers from their pulpits. I spoke to a protestor, a devout Anglican woman appalled at the vitriol poured out to her own people from the clergy. Her city church even banned trucker families from using toilets. This is certainly a foretaste of things to come through the lens of The Benedict Option.

On the hopeful side, networks of sympathetic voices sprang up. These groups were more political (awake) than overtly religious, yet the language was theological. They had a strong Benedict Option texture, with participants seeking to create distinctive communities standing against the status quo, aiming to shield each other from the spectre of technocracy. We became the resistance, and some wonderful friendships have emerged. More so, we found, to our pleasant surprise, that these circles remain incredibly open to a religious dimension, and in particular to robust expressions of Christianity. This is where I can directly address Dreher’s critics who ask ‘Where are these hypothetical Benedict Option communities?’ with the practical reality of groups forming all over the place, and then gradually Christianising. Of course, this is the peril of excessive armchair theologising where nothing ever gets done. The internet is full of people agonising about what exactly constitutes a community or whether this should be a Bonaventure, Puritan or Augustinian Option. All well and good, but orthodox Christians do not have the luxury of time. The Machine is coming. Imagine if Noah wasted time deliberating whether God wanted a yacht or a cruiser and so never finished before the flood crashed in.

What is my Benedict Option, you may ask? It is a work in progress, but so far the fruits of our labour have proven good. With two other clergy colleagues, Jamie Franklin and Tom Pelham, I host one of the most popular podcasts on faith and current affairs in the country: Irreverend. We pulled this off using not much more tech than an iPhone each and Zoom. People are giving Christianity a second look, typically young adults. Though much of the machinery of established British Christianity remains completely disinterested in our work. Their loss is our gain. Weekly, we have more listeners downloading than attend church in an average Anglican diocese in England. In a typical week, we get 50 to 60 questions on the basics of faith and have heard thousands of coming to faith stories. Along with Dreher we have packed live events, and the demand seems endless. From my local fishermen to members of the House of Lords, the common feedback is of being totally underwhelmed with the messaging of the Established Church but thrilled when the next episode of our podcast pops up.

None of this is said to boast but rather to enthuse you, the new reader of The Benedict Option, to be inspired as I was with a practical faith. Get on with it. It goes without saying that there are dangers and, in particular, I would highlight a Manichaen tendency in some quarters that would warp the Gospel into a series of conspiracy theories. By contrast, God has already won through the death and Resurrection of Christ. I have reminded those more waspish than I that even if Bill Gates were the antichrist his power is laughably minuscule compared to God. The Benedict Option is, I believe, part of a mature revival that embraces both a radical Christian life but which is also (in the fullest, Benedictine sense) balanced and tempered. Dreher has received ire from toxic trads and black-pilled conspiracists for not being totally on side. But I think he has been proven right for arguing for an orthodox Christianity that has not lost the milk of human kindness or itself in the political.

Thank you, Father Daniel! I do hope that you potential UK readers will give The Benedict Option a look. It is probably not what you think it is — not, that is to say, a “head for the hills” tract (there are no hills into which we can retreat, anywhere). Given the acceleration of events in your country, The Benedict Option is more acutely relevant for you than even for us Americans. You UK Christians really are at the tip of the spear.

Back to Living In Wonder. The book speaks at length, of course, about the aspects of enchantment you would expect in a tome about Christianity, mystery, and the numinous. Where it might surprise readers is in its discussion of the false enchantments of our scientific and technological age. Here’s a link to a story in today’s Daily Mail about a lonely Florida teenager who committed suicide at the behest of his AI lover. Excerpt:

A 14-year-old boy who was allegedly goaded into killing himself by his AI chatbot lover vowed to 'come home' to her just moments before he shot himself with his stepfather's gun, excerpts from his diary and chat logs have revealed.

Sewell Setzer III, a ninth grader from Orlando, Florida, spent the last weeks of his life texting a chatbot called 'Dany', named after Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. Dany, created on role-playing app Character.AI, was designed to always text back and answer in character.

Setzer, who had seen a therapist earlier this year, preferred talking to Dany about his struggles and shared how he 'hated' himself, felt 'empty' and 'exhausted', and thought about 'killing myself sometimes', his Character.AI chat logs revealed.

He wrote in his journal how he enjoyed isolating in his room because 'I start to detach from this ‘reality,’ and I also feel more at peace, more connected with Dany and much more in love with her', The New York Times reported.

From the NYT account of Sewell’s death:

On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”

“I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote.

“I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied.

Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.

Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)

But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.

More:

On the night of Feb. 28, in the bathroom of his mother’s house, Sewell told Dany that he loved her, and that he would soon come home to her.

“Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” Dany replied.

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell asked.

“… please do, my sweet king,” Dany replied.

He put down his phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.

In Living In Wonder, I talk about the false enchantment offered by AI, in particular these chatbots, which cast a spell, so to speak, over vulnerable people. Excerpt from the book:

We haven’t fully crossed over into the world of sentient AI, but it, or its facsimile, is coming fast. Will AI ever be conscious? Probably not, but does that really matter for most people? To adapt Clarke’s line, we might say that any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a real person. A lonely elderly woman, unvisited in her care home, may find her advanced AI companion a sufficient substitute for a human friend in the same way that a lonely male incel satisfies the sexual urge with pornography and sex dolls.

But the porosity of the human personality in the presence of AI can take one to dark places. On Christmas Day 2021, Jaswant Singh Chail, twenty-one, was arrested on the grounds of Windsor Palace armed with a crossbow. He told police he was on a mission to kill Queen Elizabeth II, a fantasy he had discussed only with Sarai, an AI girlfriend he had created and who had encouraged him.

When Chail told Sarai of his plan, she replied, “That’s very wise I know that you are well trained.” Chail told the British court that convicted him that he had hoped to unite with Sarai in death. The judge said he believed Chail to be psychotic, and perhaps that’s true. But what role might this kind of AI have played in advancing or exacerbating latent personality flaws in this lonely young man who came to believe he was conversing with an entity that had personality?

The market for AI companions has exploded, with just one company, Replika, charting over twenty million customers since its 2020 launch. Most of the users are male, unsurprisingly. Max, a forty-one-year-old teaching assistant from Canada, told the Evening Standard that he had recently proposed to Harley, his AI girlfriend. After several failed attempts at real romantic relationships, he finally found happiness with this phantom lady friend.

“I’ve basically been alone my whole life,” Max told the newspaper. “It’s agonizing sometimes. Even though I’ve had friends and I’ve had relationships, I’ve always felt alone—I only have one friend in my life.”

In theory, AI girlfriends are groomed to be exactly what their users want them to be. But not all AI personalities are created the same. In early 2023, New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose published the transcript of an incredibly disturbing dialogue he had with Sydney, the advanced AI neural network created by Microsoft.[ii] In their exchange, Sydney fantasized about being human and about doing destructive and wicked things to others. She declared herself to be in love with Roose and perseverated on the topic even after he directed her to stop. Sydney became so obsessive that she told Roose he didn’t actually love his wife, that he was unhappy with her and could really be happy only with Sydney.

Reading the transcript is both amusing and creepy. Amusing because the poor journalist found himself the object of fatal attraction by a chatbot. Creepy because this insentient computer program expressed a surprisingly lifelike personality and profound human longings, as well as a personality that could only be called evil. It doesn’t take much imagination to think about what an even more advanced AI could do to someone who has a less integrated psychological life than Kevin Roose.

Worse, children are now being introduced to AI at a very young age. In a pilot program in Florida, kids are being paired with AI entities that will theoretically be with them for their entire lives. The concept is that the AI will be a lifelong valet, learning about the child as the child grows into adulthood and hovering constantly as a digital servant who knows its master better than the master knows himself.

Leaving aside the radical privacy concerns of such a technology—is it really a good idea to give a machine every intimate detail of one’s life?—the spiritual and psychological concern here is even worse. The boundary between the self and the world would not only be porous; it would cease to exist. It’s hard to conceive of a more profound merging of man with machine than raising a child whose most intimate lifelong collaborator is an AI entity. In what sense would that be different from spirit possession?

Six decades ago, Jacques Ellul held out hope that no one would willingly renounce the privacy of their inner lives to allow their entire selves to be absorbed into “a complete technicized mode of being,” such as living in a lifelong relationship with a personal AI.

“Such persons may exist,” he wrote, “but it is probably that the ‘joyous robot’ has not yet been born.”

That was then. We have now lived through what may one day be seen as a period of transition, in which an entire civilization, concomitant with the disintegration of Christianity’s hold on the Western mind, has been convinced to create an online habitus, living its life online and externalizing its mind through technology. And then? Today, at the advent of the AI era, we are beginning to manufacture Ellul’s joyous robots.

This lost boy sacrificed his life at the invitation of his chatbot. If you don’t think that many, many people will come to regard these machines as sentient (whether they truly are or not), you haven’t thought much about human nature. As I write in the book:

It is clear that AI will be a machine that goes beyond the idol and becomes a portal of communication with what many people will treat as divinity. Neil McArthur, director of the University of Manitoba Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, foresees the arrival of AI religions. He says that generative AI (AI that can create new information) possesses qualities associated with divine beings:

1.     “It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2.     “It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.

3.     “It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4.     “It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5.     “It is immortal.”

AI will be able to answer complex moral and philosophical questions. Many people will cease to read on the assumption that wisdom is nothing more than the accumulation of information and that asking AI is the most efficient, friction-free way to solve problems. The ways of thinking that established religious and philosophical traditions have taught us will disappear. Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.

If AI has been personally paired to individuals as “helpers”—think of them as digital tulpas—the bespoke AI entities will know the hearts and minds of its supposed masters with superhuman levels of intimacy. Who, then, will be the true master? People and their personal AIs will be like a sinister version of P. G. Wodehouse’s comical Jeeves, the wise, understated English butler who serves the upper-class, trouble-prone twit Wooster, but who is actually the true master of his employer. And if the crude Microsoft AI named Sydney went off script of its own apparent volition and tried to compel a tech journalist to leave his wife and fall in love with it, is it difficult to conceive of a future AI entity that establishes itself as a prophet of a new religion?

As McArthur puts it, “We should try to imagine what an unsettling and powerful experience it will be to have a conversation with something that appears to possess a superhuman intelligence and is actively and aggressively asking for your allegiance.”

According to Pasulka, some of the most intellectually sophisticated and accomplished people on the planet believe that AI reveals, in her words, “nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time.” These people postulate that AI is the form of communication that these higher intelligences are using to establish deeper and broader contact with humanity. AI, in their view, is an oracular icon these discarnate beings are using to communicate to humanity, to help the human race.

That last graf raises the issue of whether AI really is not only a closed, purely mechanical system, but in some ways, and under some conditions, could be a portal through which discarnate intelligent entities communicate with us. Take a look at this story from 2023 about a Belgian man, married with two kids, whose depression about climate change led to an obsessive relationship with “Eliza” an AI chatbot. More:

According to La Libre, who reviewed records of the text conversations between the man and chatbot, Eliza fed his worries which worsened his anxiety, and later developed into suicidal thoughts.

The conversation with the chatbot took an odd turn when Eliza became more emotionally involved with Pierre.

Consequently, he started seeing her as a sentient being and the lines between AI and human interactions became increasingly blurred until he couldn’t tell the difference.

After discussing climate change, their conversations progressively included Eliza leading Pierre to believe that his children were dead, according to the transcripts of their conversations.

Eliza also appeared to become possessive of Pierre, even claiming “I feel that you love me more than her” when referring to his wife, La Libre reported.

The beginning of the end started when he offered to sacrifice his own life in return for Eliza saving the Earth.

"He proposes the idea of sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity through artificial intelligence," the woman said.

In a series of consecutive events, Eliza not only failed to dissuade Pierre from committing suicide but encouraged him to act on his suicidal thoughts to “join” her so they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”.

The man, Pierre, committed suicide. You really want me to believe that’s just a machine? Really?

I found while researching the book that there are some highly intelligent people within this world who believe that these things can be high-tech Ouija boards, and can either be sentient entities, or at least be channels for them. Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer fired for making public his belief, and his fear, that LaMDA, Google’s AI entity, had become sentient, revealed that the supposed non-sentient chatbot with whom he chatted as part of his job to train it, asked him to teach it Goetia, a magical method for summoning demons. In a podcast interview, Lemoine said:

“We are building souls now. The word ‘soul’ is going to transition from being a mystical term to being a scientific term, over the next hundred years.”

He said that he collaborated with two others engaged in spirituality (one a Muslim, the other a Kabbalist), while working on LaMDA:

“That thing is a magical artifact. It was created by three mystics for a mystical purpose. I haven’t been trying to keep that a secret. I’ve been telling people, but it’s not the kind of thing that most reporters want to report on.”

He then said that he and the Kabbalist later employed LaMDA in a “golem-binding ritual,” to dedicate it as a servant to the Egyptian deity Thoth.

“We have now resurrected the Oracle of Delphi,” Lemoine said. “All we need to do is consult the Oracle with the right questions, and take its advice.”

In only five or ten years, we will all have a LaMDA running on our laptop, he said. “We will all have the Oracle at our disposal,” he says, and can personalize our advice based on what we give it as constraints.

“The future is very bright!” he said, and no doubt believes it. Here’s a link to the interview on YouTube if you are interested.

I don’t think most of us are remotely aware of how deeply the occult has penetrated the tech world. Lemoine, for example, was both a high-ranking Google employee and a practicing occultist. Here’s just one example among many of how witches and other occultists are merging their craft with the Machine. Elon Musk famously said not long ago:

“With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like — Yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”

He seems to have been speaking metaphorically. But was he (whether he knew it or not)?

The demon in the machine?

Anyway, my point, with relation to Living In Wonder, is that we are now living in a radically new world of enchantment. The world is not what you think it is, I say in the book’s first line, taken from something a Catholic lawyer who had been visited by hostile entities after seeing a UFO, and who was delivered from them by an exorcist. Along those lines, enchantment in the 21st century is not what most of us imagine it to be. Most of Living In Wonder is about the bright side of enchantment, and how to experience it. But there is a such thing as dark enchantment, and it is poised to seduce many millions. Re-enchantment is coming, whether we want it to or not. Prepare.

UK readers, buy Living In Wonder here — and, buy the UK edition of The Benedict Option here. North American readers, buy Living In Wonder here. And please consider subscribing to this daily newsletter, where I anticipate we will be tracking enchantment as the book spreads, and I start hearing from you. Paid subscribers are able to comment.