Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age

by Rod Dreher

Join the bestselling author of The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies on an exploration of the mystery and meaning of the supernatural world and discover that the universe is not what we think it it is far more strange, exciting, connected, and adventurous.

The West has become "disenchanted"--closed to the idea that the universe contains the supernatural, the metaphysical, or the non-material. Christianity is in crisis. People today are leaving the Church because faith has become dry and lifeless. But people aren't leaving faith for atheism. They are still searching for the divine, and it might just be right under their noses.

In Living in Wonder, thought leader, cultural critic, and New York Times bestselling author Rod Dreher shows you how to encounter and embrace wonder in the world. In his trademark mixture of analysis, reporting, and personal story, Dreher brings together history, cultural anthropology, neuroscience, and the ancient Church to show you--no matter your religious affiliation--how to reconnect with the natural world and the Great Tradition of Christianity so you can relate to the world with more depth and connection.

He shares stories of miracles, rumors of angels, and outbreaks of awe to offer hope, as well as a guide for discerning and defending the truth in a confusing and spiritually dark culture, full of contemporary spiritual deceptions and tempting counterfeit spiritualities.

The world is not what we think it is. It is far more mysterious, exciting, connected, and adventurous. As you learn practical ways to regain a sense of wonder and awaken your sense of God's presence--through prayer, attention, and living by spiritual disciplines--your eyes will be opened, and you will find the very thing every one of us searches our ultimate meaning.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion, Christian, Christianity, Theology, Philosophy, Cultural

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2024

About the author

Rod Dreher is an American writer known for his work on religion, culture, and politics from a traditional Christian perspective. He holds a B.A. in Journalism from Louisiana State University and has served as senior editor and now editor-at-large of The American Conservative. His best-known books include The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not by Lies (2020), which explore how believers can live faithfully amid secular modernity. He writes widely on religion, culture and contemporary society, and currently resides in Budapest, Hungary.

Reviews

[Anne White · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book for all kinds of strange reasons. Dreher reminds me of Lucy coming back from Narnia, a bit disheveled and insisting to the others that there IS something out there...and when they ask the professor what he thinks, he advises them to pay attention to Lucy's story. Dreher's advice for us who live in these disenchanted times but who still long for that place seen out of the corner of our eye: push through the fur coats, expect the unexpected, and let the magic hit us as it did Peter and the others. But it comes with one warning: don't be an Edmund. 'Nuff said.

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review. On one hand, so much of it is excellent. I absolutely agree that the materialistic experiment is a failure and that there is a lot more to the world than what people want to reduce it to. I agree that mystery is part of the wonder of the world, and I believe that, much like GK Chesterton, our response to these mysteries ought to be amazement.

On the other hand, I am not incredibly mystical. This book deals a lot with exorcisms, the occult, UFOs, and psychedelics. His point is, again, to avoid our materialist reductionism, but we are a little bit beyond where I normally go on issues like this. I'm not necessarily dismissing what he said out of hand, but this is definitely outside my comfort zone. I suppose that is probably the point, though.

Dreher is always worth reading, and this is no exception, even if you disagree with parts of it. His general message is one that I have seen play out again and again. We are people that want meaning, we have stripped meaning away from just about everything, and we are going to look for that meaning somewhere. As Christians, we ought to always be pushing towards a good vision of enchantment.

[Gina Dalfonzo]

Couldn't get through it. I tried.

I used to read Rod Dreher long ago when he was writing about "Crunchy Cons." I watched him go through his "moving to a small town will make things better" phase. I watched him go through his "the small town actually made it worse, but Dante made it better" phase. Only nothing seems to make it better for long. Now it's "woo" (his word) that's going to make it better (although if you look at his social media, seems more like it's authoritarianism and misogyny that he's relying on to make it better). I wonder when the woo phase will be over and the next phase will start.

I believe the great Dorothy L. Sayers said it best:

"He has a hankering after some sort of a thing called 'spiritual religion,' which gives you lovely feelings."

For his sake I hope he finds what he's looking for, because it all must be exhausting.

[Phil Cotnoir · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've got a full review online (link below), so I will just say here that it is very good, but unnecessarily abrasive towards Protestants and the Reformation, making it that much harder for evangelicals to give it a generous reading and careful consideration. It is a field manual for disentangling your faith from modernism.

Full review essay:
https://mereorthodoxy.com/navigating-...

[Joseph O’Reilly Tynan]

Quick synopsis:
UFOs —> satanic
Psychiatric Hallucinogenic Trips to Mexico —> satanic
A.I. —-> satanic

Say the Jesus prayer. Look at flowers.

Plz be careful out there folks.

[Abby Litrenta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for book club and am glad I read it, though I wouldn’t really recommend it. I liked Dreher’s emphases on the importance of focus in prayer, the reality of the spiritual realm, and the role of beauty in drawing us closer to the divine. I didn’t love the style of the book, disagreed with some of his arguments, and I didn’t love him as an author. I am thankful for the fruit of this book in my life though; it was a challenge to my natural skepticism of supernatural happenings (though I still am not sold on UFOs lol), and some of his principles have helped my focus in prayer.

[John Damon Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired me to be personally enchanted. For a long while I have propositionally dismissed the modernistic narrow framework of the natural world, but I had yet to have it bleed over into my personal life. Dreher compelled me to embrace wonder.
But in a book that talks about UFOs, relics, neolithic gods inhabiting AI, and holy flames, I really only had objections with his doctrine of sanctification. I largely disagree with his (which is the Eastern) way of conceiving of the Christian life as a journey to Christ as opposed to a achieved reality that becomes manifest.

Also if you didn't know he was divorced before reading the book you really, really know it now.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I reviewed this book at Front Porch Republic.

Here's a link to the 1983 film Nostalghia that Dreher mentions multiple times.

[Grace Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Everything good about this book wasn’t original, and every original thing about this book was bad. Don’t recommend.

[Sue · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rather than reading this book. I'm going to hold a baby, dig in the dirt, look at the stars, get really cold and then slowly but surely warm up.

There's wonder for you. And mystery. And meaning.

[Luke W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5

In Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher provides a remedy for our lifeless, postmodernist age that says materialism is all that there is. He argues that the Western mind has become disenchanted - sapped of any sense of wonder, mystery, and the supernatural - and we must re-enchant our worldview in order to see that everything in the visible and invisible world is connected through God and that "all things have ultimate meaning because they participate in the life of the Creator."

In many ways, this was a challenging read. As an Eastern Orthodox, Rod Dreher operates under and presents a Christian worldview that is foreign to me. In particular, panentheism - "the principle that God is, as the Orthodox prayer says, everywhere present and filling all things" - presides over the text and is a central ontological assumption. He argues that throughout the majority of church history, Christians believed the cosmos was constructed in a way that heaven and earth interpenetrate each other and share a participatory relationship. While there is a richness in this perspective that I'm certainly sympathetic to and likely growing in, I struggled to fully accept these assumptions, which made some of Dreher's insights and prescriptions more difficult for me to receive. There were also sections of this book that completely lost me (Ch. 5-6 on the occult, UFOs, AI, and demonic activity), and I found his writing style a bit haphazard and his romanticism of Orthodoxy over the top.

That said, there is still much to be gleaned from Living in Wonder. I think Dreher is right in identifying disenchantment as a central culprit in the Western "meaningless crisis," and, of course, understanding the problem is the first step in solving it. He does a great job in challenging our preconceived assumptions about the world through captivating stories and testimonies, and he helps open our eyes to the spiritual vitality all around us, like the fish who first realizes he's in water. To use another analogy, in Death in the City, Francis Schaeffer talks about how there are two portions of the universe, a seen portion and an unseen portion. To relegate ourselves to a purely materialist worldview is like taking an orange, slicing it in half, and only concerning ourselves with one of the halves. To understand reality in our universe properly, we have to consider both halves - both the seen and the unseen. Reading Living in Wonder helps us consider the oft-forgotten unseen half.

Although at times I felt like the book was disconnected from scripture (how do you not quote or discuss Eph. 6:12 in a book about spiritual realities?) and veered from the centrality of Christ, I was moved by the importance Dreher's places on the power of prayer and communion with God in re-enchantment. He argues that "prayer is the most important part" to re-enchantment and that it is the "main way the Christian experiences faith as percept, not concept" (percept being a sensory impression, i.e. "taste and see that the Lord is good", rather than a concept, a mental idea or representation). He also underlines the significance of where we place our attention and speaks truth into a distracted age. He writes, "The bottom line is that what we attend to determines what we think about and how we think about it. If our attention is scattered, the flow of our consciousness spreads out like a river's delta, into still waters that go nowhere. But if it is gathered and focus, the flow becomes powerful enough to take us where we want to go - even in to the presences of the unseen God." We will never experience enchantment nor experience God's presence in our lives if we remain distracted and do not set our minds on things above.

While I won't be becoming Eastern Orthodox anytime soon, I think there are principles in its worldview and theology that are worth adopting, or at least taking more seriously, such as its reverence of nature and recognizing the mystery of God and his creation. Paul Kingsnorth, another Orthodox champion, writes that true enchantment from a Christian point of view is "a love of God and love of creation. Instead of becoming enchanted by what you've created, you become enchanted by what already exists. You become enchanted by nature. You become enchanted by the Creator of nature. You become enchanted by the liturgy, by storytelling. You become enchanted by something you can never fully understand. Enchantment comes from mystery and beauty and putting yourself in right relation to mystery."

Other notable quotes:
- "There are some things about the world that we can know only through physical experience, particularly through the kind of discipline, repeated experience that someone who apprentices himself to a master of the craft knows."
- "You should read the Bible, and you should read the book of nature, in which the Creator expresses himself."
- "True beauty is the visible manifestation of a prayer that has tuned in to the divine frequency and transmits grace to those who harmonize with it."

Reading method: book

[Nate Jacques · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is surprisingly difficult to write a review of this book. There is tons of gold in this book, but unfortunately there is equally as much dross.

I support Dreher's concern regarding the "disenchantment" of the western mind. I can honestly say that my perspectives on many matters have matured greatly as a result of reading this book. A solid third of this book is simply an alarm bell regarding the technological developments of our current age and their impending consequences. Another third is evaluating the materialistic, disenchanted, western worldview. But then there is the last third. It is almost as if 60% of the book is an attempt to create a gap and the last 30% is an attempt to fill it with Eastern Orthodoxy. This conspicuous nature of the Eastern Orthodox thrust was almost unbearable to read as the author's extreme attempt to paint Eastern Orthodoxy in a shining light was never clearly acknowledged.

Nevertheless, I found this book to effectively shine light on a dark and unaddressed corner of our age. However, the author's unacknowledged Eastern Orthodox bias and poor scriptural interpretation made the book relatively burdensome. I highly recommend to all who desire to address the materialistic mindset of the west.

[Jonathan Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am all for what this book is trying to do. I think we are disenchanted and I agree with the Bible that there is more to this universe than the physicals Dreher does a good job with putting this forward and arguing for it. I struggled with the use of mysticism and Orthodox Church doctrine. I struggle with the tales in this story though some I believed others (“Christian healers” is that a thing? And Catholic exorcists?). Now it could be these are all true, but I struggle with them. Dreher says we should be skeptical too. So anyway there were some good nuggets and I really liked the intro chapter or two and the concluding chapter.

[Joe Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciated his push against the disenchanted mind of believers in the west. But for a book about knowing and experiencing God….there was very little about God, His Word, who Jesus is, and how to experience Him…other than join the Orthodox Church and maybe travel the world to meet interesting people.

[Jon Anderson]

"The world is not what we think it is." So begins Dreher's new tome, which he refers to as his "woo" book. Lots here that may be hard to believe but the main thrust, the need for us to be re-enchanted, is spot on. Chapter on AI and tech is particularly acute and a bit scary. Also, check out the work of the three prophets (Shaw, Kingnorth, Pageau) of chapter 10. Kingsnorth has already become a favorite and has a book of his own coming out this year.

And don't let the Orthodoxy stuff put you off. It is simply the world in which Dreher is working out the argument of his book.

[Paul Creasy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

Exactly the right book for the right time. Dreher has crafted another masterpiece. This, along with Live not by Lies and The Benedict Option are must reads for any Christian. I highly recommend!

[Sophia Jesson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was definitely a good book but I will need to digest it further. The main thesis is the argument that we need to reconnect with a worldview that sees the world with both a physical and spiritual aspect to it (this process being called reenchantment). In this argument, Dreher also explores the twisted pursuit of reenchantment as well, mainly the occult and neo-paganistic. He points out the potential for aliens and AI to become new gods as humans seek out greater meaning in things that seemingly know more then they do.

I think some of his most interesting points came to how he connects these ideas and problems to solutions found in Christianity and specifically Orthodox Christianity. To him, the mysticism that is more accepted and incoporated in Orthodoxy is essential to being fully enchanted. I don't think I fully agree with him on that last point. A careful embrace of the supernatural is important for enchantment, but I don't think the Protestant tradition is as lacking as he makes out, even if we have forgotten that tradition.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, 3.5. I think your average westerner should probably read this as it does delve into the spiritual reality that most westerners rather ignore or see as entertainment through a horror movie. However, I think he believes the only answer to that lack of knowledge/experience is orthodoxy. I simply think that is untrue. As someone who was raised Protestant/evangelical, this has always been a reality in my upbringing and things we discussed in a healthy way growing up.

[Laura Housley]

from Ross Douthat: "This means that of the three, the Dreher book is the most fun, it tells the best stories, and it covers aspects of human life that are more fundamental to religion’s resilience than any argument or theory — above all, the fact that even in societies that exclude any hint of supernaturalism from their systems of official knowledge, strange experiences just keep on breaking in."

[Chad D · Rating 5 out of 5]

It isn't so much that I learned a lot from this book. It's more that Rod Dreher writes what I have been learning and living, well apart from his influence, which is heartening and validating. He's onto something. I have seen it.

It is very much parallel to Ronald Rolheiser's A Shattered Lantern -- both provide a calm explanation that we in the West have lost our capacity for spiritual experience, and some practical tips for how to get some of that capacity back, to widen our hearts.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate this book.
The premise is that we don't see miracles in the west because we rely on science and reason.
In this book Dreher gives accounts of people who have experienced modern day miracles.
I appreciate that he firmly teaches that a person should not go down the rabbit hole of psychedelics or the occult to have a supernatural experience. I also appreciate that he teaches nothing apart from Christ is real and satisfying, even pertaining to the non-physical world.

I did get a little annoyed with all the experiences seeming to be based in Orthodox theology and icons.

But I think this is a good book to read regardless. I found encouragement in thinking about these things.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of the things Rod said in the book are things I have said and believed myself. Stay open to seeing and finding the Holy Spirit in your life and you’ll be amazed. If you don’t look, you won’t find..

[Leah CE · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much of this book was excellent. And so much of it, for me, was fraught with discomfort. Dreher makes outstanding arguments on avoiding materialist reductionism, pursuing mystery and enchantment, and awakening oneself to the stripping away of meaning from everything in the world. The Eastern Orthodox bias is heavy throughout, but overall, this book is 100% worth reading.

[Danielle Hardy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read all of Mr. Dreher's books and I was excited when I saw he had a new book, then I read the first chapter he shared online, and I was put off a little thinking wow is this off the deep end. I decided to give it a try, and wow, am I ever glad I did. It was beautiful and inspiring and compelling. I blew through the book and have a million book darts to look through and copy down. It seems like Mr. Dreher's books are one tiny step ahead of the curve, and he most certainly is again with this book. A must-read for all and a must implement in my personal Christian walk.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone disenchanted out there? Rod Dreher provides so many insights for living in wonder. Even though he thought he quotes Dante, Aristotle, Solzhenitsyn and other great thinkers, this book is accessible while being thought provoking and action-inducing. Oh and he advocates for silence and rest too. It reminded me, ironically, that I need to both close my eyes and hear God to see and open my eyes to His wonder around me.

[Geoff Ayers · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is compelling but lacks substance. I found it really fun and enjoyable to read, however it will not change my life meaningfully. The chapters on the demonic, magick, and aliens are particularly enjoyable (but more or less completely unsubstantiated speculation, my favorite kind). The last chapter of the book is the most useful for living.

It's a fun beach read! He ties together personal anecdotes, interviews with folks who've had supernatural experiences, and top-tier scholarship into a neat package that will leave your itch for transcendence satisfied but doesn't require any thought or substantive engagement.

[Kaylin Verbrugge]

“Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one” (1).

“It is a book about recovering the deeper and richer dimensions of our lives that have been obscured in modern times, because we have forgotten how to see the world as it really is” (13).

“What we attend to us what we love, and what we love, we will become” (61).

“Disenchantment is a loss of meaningful sense of God’s presence and of the existence of meaning and purpose in the world” (69).

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The important collecting together of different dimensions of reenchantment can be appreciated without following Dreher in all his opinions. Dreher has helpfully pointed me in the direction of many sources to read in my own research of these matters. For that I am thankful. I hope people who find themselves farther left of Dreher who may be aware of his conservative firebrand reputation do not dismiss reading this work offhand. In doing so, they would miss a work pointing them towards the richness of life that they long for. Richard Beck's work is recommended as a more progressive supplement.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn’t the book I thought it was going to be. In one way it was much stranger than I expected and on the other it leaned hard into the more mystical and wonder of being Christian than I thought it would.
It is a difficult book to describe, but I do recommend it. The book seems in some way a bit of an odd duck and I am pretty sure the author and I don’t agree on his fervent need to hyper analyze politics on a moment by moment basis. But when he slows down and goes deep with a subject he brings something relevant and inspiring at times.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

The majority of this book is anecdotal, experiential, and subjective. While I agree with the basic premise that Westerners need to recover a firmer grasp of the supernatural instead of secular materialism, I do not agree that this necessitates swinging to the other side of the pendulum in embracing Eastern mysticism, even if it is the Christian variety of Eastern Orthodoxy. This book would have benefited from a robust interaction with Scripture and centering King Jesus.