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Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
From "one of the greatest storytellers we have" (Robert Bly), an invitation to allow the oldest stories - and the Greatest Story - to reshape our own.
There's an old Celtic belief that if you aren’t wrapped in the cloak of story you are liable to experience huge rushes of angst as you age. You are, in some grievous way, unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent, stuck, unable to act or to rest.
In How to Get Home, acclaimed mythographer, storyteller, and Christian thinker Martin Shaw proposes that we look to the “ancient technologies” the myths and initiatory rites for help achieving maturity and wholeness. Drawing on his experience as a guide for wilderness rites of passage, Shaw teaches you to read a myth the way it wants to be read; provides vivid retellings of tales powerful enough to carry you through life’s travails; and shows you how to gather and reshape your own thrown-away stories. Most vividly, he shares how these ancient technologies led him - unexpectedly - to Christ, “the True Myth,” by way of a thirty-year journey and a 101-night vigil in a Dartmoor forest.
Combining scholarly erudition with earthy storytelling in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, How to Get Home is an invitation to let the great myths make us more fully human.
There's an old Celtic belief that if you aren’t wrapped in the cloak of story you are liable to experience huge rushes of angst as you age. You are, in some grievous way, unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent, stuck, unable to act or to rest.
In How to Get Home, acclaimed mythographer, storyteller, and Christian thinker Martin Shaw proposes that we look to the “ancient technologies” the myths and initiatory rites for help achieving maturity and wholeness. Drawing on his experience as a guide for wilderness rites of passage, Shaw teaches you to read a myth the way it wants to be read; provides vivid retellings of tales powerful enough to carry you through life’s travails; and shows you how to gather and reshape your own thrown-away stories. Most vividly, he shares how these ancient technologies led him - unexpectedly - to Christ, “the True Myth,” by way of a thirty-year journey and a 101-night vigil in a Dartmoor forest.
Combining scholarly erudition with earthy storytelling in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, How to Get Home is an invitation to let the great myths make us more fully human.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published February 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 227 reviews
July 23, 2026
This is one of the best works of nonfiction that I have ever read in my life. Martin Shaw is an incredible storyteller, mythologist, and in this book writes with wisdom, conviction, and great understanding about how important and powerful mythology and folklore is. The reader can certainly see the influence of George MacDonald, J.R.R.Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis on Shaw's understanding of Christianity as the "true myth." With that said, anyone of whatever worldview can read and appreciate this book by Shaw, and find it to be a very hopeful book in these very dark times. I am going to reread this and write another review, as I am still processing this amazing book after just finishing it today.
March 9, 2026
This will be in my top 10 books of 2026. Martin Shaw writes in a tone very similar to Paul Kingsnorth but focuses in on myth, our personal stories, and how to interpret out lives. Several chapters caused me stop in my tracks, analyze my pilgrimage in this world, and begin to make sense of the story God is writing. Shaw is the narrator of his own audiobook which takes it to the next level. He inspires me to desire a wilderness vigil someday soon.
February 8, 2026
I do not cry much—hardly ever. It’s not in my temperament, perhaps. But yesterday afternoon, after posting the first version of this review, I came close to tears twice. The first moment was watching Olympic figure skaters Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava, having just finished a miraculously beautiful pair routine, sink to the ice in an exhausted but triumphant embrace. Then they rose to their feet, each quietly making the sign of the cross.
The second moment came just a few hours later, as I absorbed word of the sudden, senseless, and violent death of a 15-year-old boy on the periphery of my acquaintance. Rising from my prayers that evening, I thought back, strangely, to this book, and realized that my perspective on it, and what it seeks to accomplish, had already deepened.
“Being made,” “getting grown,” finding the “Ancient Good,” is a matter of life and death. So terrible are the wounds of the world, so divine is the calling of human body and soul—the mysterious dynamic of the heart between these two realities will either destroy you or turn you into what Martin Shaw likes to call a “praise maker.” And we cannot find that path alone.
Original review follows.
* * *
There was once a boy who dwelt with his mother and father in a wide cultivated valley. Sometimes, his mother would take him beyond the green hills to his grandfather’s wilder kingdom by the sea, where he would wander in the mornings through misty forests, picking berries, and in the evenings play chess with his grandfather by the crackling hearth. Yet there was a nameless sadness in this boy, an unspoken fear, one his good parents, who gave him so much and shielded him from all outer darkness, could not understand, any more than the boy could himself. Then hard years came. The boy’s grandfather died, and exile followed: the boy’s father, seeing his livelihood among the fields of black and gold diminish and poverty threaten, sought a more secure fortune in a distant city, and the boy left his childhood home forever. Deep loneliness fell upon him in this new place, where the people were numerous, but all seemed busy in search of money and seats of power, things the boy little understood. Soon he found a book of stories, and his dreams grew bright with unseen lands as fair as those he had left, and almost more real to him than his waking life. But he also found a darkness in these worlds of imagination, a darkness that reflected his childish fear and grew in him silently. Some years later he left all to seek his own fortune, carrying away a small red stone that his mother had pressed into his hand. He studied under men and women wise in the world, and found success and praise in his every endeavor, but his dreams and darkness followed him. Yet in his studies, he also discovered the nature of the red stone from his mother: that it was, in fact, a seed of paradise. And a fresh hope blew into his life, that he might by this seed restore what he had long lost. So he planted it in the land of his exile. Not very well, for the soil was hard, and the boy knew almost nothing about gardening. For a long time, there was no sprout, and the boy spent his days hunched over that little bit of soil, his head often clouded with darkness. What did finally appear seemed a sorry plant indeed, and in it, the boy could see nothing of paradise. But he knew that this was his only hope, so he remained by it. As it grew slowly larger, as its branches began to reach outward, birds began to gather there. Around its stem he built a chapel, and he sang to the birds songs the wind had taught him, which he believed to come from his lost home. And he hoped that one day the tree would grow so tall that he could ascend by it, and leave the vaporous darkness behind, and find among the stars his own true country again.
What is the end of this story? I don’t know yet.
Martin Shaw advises us to tell such stories about ourselves, to take our dreams seriously, to let ourselves be “made” by the right myths. There are some readers who will dive into Liturgies of the Wild expecting an argument or manual of some kind, takeaways conducive to bullet-point format, and will end up frustrated. Shaw is not above a little preaching, but his approach to truth is typically allusive, wandering through personal anecdotes and ancient narratives that bleed freely into one another. His decades of meditation on life and story may have been brought into new focus by his self-startling conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but the “mossy face of Christ” he adores is a presence, not a thesis. And he wants us all to share in that presence. Boil away the rich Martin Shaw-ness of it all, and perhaps the residue is just religious truisms; but that approach would be to miss the point. This book is for people who want to take a journey with Martin, whose particular genius is to remind us, with the most charming whimsy, of what may we already know to be true but perhaps have not given due attention.
As I sit in my little study beneath a cheap reproduction of the Panagia Portaitissa, and under the bowed gaze of Charbel Makhlouf, I again ponder the image on the dust jacket of Liturgies of the Wild. I have often prayed in this study for a guiding star, for the peculiar path that will lead me most surely to the Ancient Good. Where are the wise elders in this day, the men and woman whole-formed and clear-sighted? Shaw would not claim any title like staretz or spiritual father for himself, and we too would be unwise to attribute it to him. Give him a decade or two in trail of the Cross. But what he suggests here is the possibility that we can deepen our lives and bring them into contact with Divine Ground by simply accepting our own littleness, by sinking our minds into the great silence of the heart and waiting for illumination. Some things “can’t be said with effect until they’re known, and God has his timing for that. How do we find something we were once gifted by grace? We can’t. We simply can’t. But we can take heart from the fairy tales….” The old stories teach us patterns of spiritual maturation; they give us metaphors to interpret our course into the trackless waters of the future. And there must be few more genial and gifted guides to those stories than Martin Shaw.
If I have a critique, it is that Shaw does not sufficiently consider what his own Orthodox tradition calls prelest, delusion. Much he says, especially in his chapter on evil, resonates with Evagrian psychology and the later tradition, but he dismisses the hesychastic suspicion of dreams and imagination with barely more than a hand-wave. He is clearly aware that “enchantment” can go bad, and as this issue goes to the core of his Romantic project, I wish he had devoted more space to marking spiritual pitfalls. How often are the stories we make of our lives fundamentally false and self-serving? But as the flame lit at his baptism licks over ever more of his life, perhaps he will have more to say on discrimination in future.
For now, there is much to be found in the affirmative path. It is a rich feast indeed to which Shaw beckons us.
The second moment came just a few hours later, as I absorbed word of the sudden, senseless, and violent death of a 15-year-old boy on the periphery of my acquaintance. Rising from my prayers that evening, I thought back, strangely, to this book, and realized that my perspective on it, and what it seeks to accomplish, had already deepened.
“Being made,” “getting grown,” finding the “Ancient Good,” is a matter of life and death. So terrible are the wounds of the world, so divine is the calling of human body and soul—the mysterious dynamic of the heart between these two realities will either destroy you or turn you into what Martin Shaw likes to call a “praise maker.” And we cannot find that path alone.
Original review follows.
* * *
There was once a boy who dwelt with his mother and father in a wide cultivated valley. Sometimes, his mother would take him beyond the green hills to his grandfather’s wilder kingdom by the sea, where he would wander in the mornings through misty forests, picking berries, and in the evenings play chess with his grandfather by the crackling hearth. Yet there was a nameless sadness in this boy, an unspoken fear, one his good parents, who gave him so much and shielded him from all outer darkness, could not understand, any more than the boy could himself. Then hard years came. The boy’s grandfather died, and exile followed: the boy’s father, seeing his livelihood among the fields of black and gold diminish and poverty threaten, sought a more secure fortune in a distant city, and the boy left his childhood home forever. Deep loneliness fell upon him in this new place, where the people were numerous, but all seemed busy in search of money and seats of power, things the boy little understood. Soon he found a book of stories, and his dreams grew bright with unseen lands as fair as those he had left, and almost more real to him than his waking life. But he also found a darkness in these worlds of imagination, a darkness that reflected his childish fear and grew in him silently. Some years later he left all to seek his own fortune, carrying away a small red stone that his mother had pressed into his hand. He studied under men and women wise in the world, and found success and praise in his every endeavor, but his dreams and darkness followed him. Yet in his studies, he also discovered the nature of the red stone from his mother: that it was, in fact, a seed of paradise. And a fresh hope blew into his life, that he might by this seed restore what he had long lost. So he planted it in the land of his exile. Not very well, for the soil was hard, and the boy knew almost nothing about gardening. For a long time, there was no sprout, and the boy spent his days hunched over that little bit of soil, his head often clouded with darkness. What did finally appear seemed a sorry plant indeed, and in it, the boy could see nothing of paradise. But he knew that this was his only hope, so he remained by it. As it grew slowly larger, as its branches began to reach outward, birds began to gather there. Around its stem he built a chapel, and he sang to the birds songs the wind had taught him, which he believed to come from his lost home. And he hoped that one day the tree would grow so tall that he could ascend by it, and leave the vaporous darkness behind, and find among the stars his own true country again.
What is the end of this story? I don’t know yet.
Martin Shaw advises us to tell such stories about ourselves, to take our dreams seriously, to let ourselves be “made” by the right myths. There are some readers who will dive into Liturgies of the Wild expecting an argument or manual of some kind, takeaways conducive to bullet-point format, and will end up frustrated. Shaw is not above a little preaching, but his approach to truth is typically allusive, wandering through personal anecdotes and ancient narratives that bleed freely into one another. His decades of meditation on life and story may have been brought into new focus by his self-startling conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but the “mossy face of Christ” he adores is a presence, not a thesis. And he wants us all to share in that presence. Boil away the rich Martin Shaw-ness of it all, and perhaps the residue is just religious truisms; but that approach would be to miss the point. This book is for people who want to take a journey with Martin, whose particular genius is to remind us, with the most charming whimsy, of what may we already know to be true but perhaps have not given due attention.
As I sit in my little study beneath a cheap reproduction of the Panagia Portaitissa, and under the bowed gaze of Charbel Makhlouf, I again ponder the image on the dust jacket of Liturgies of the Wild. I have often prayed in this study for a guiding star, for the peculiar path that will lead me most surely to the Ancient Good. Where are the wise elders in this day, the men and woman whole-formed and clear-sighted? Shaw would not claim any title like staretz or spiritual father for himself, and we too would be unwise to attribute it to him. Give him a decade or two in trail of the Cross. But what he suggests here is the possibility that we can deepen our lives and bring them into contact with Divine Ground by simply accepting our own littleness, by sinking our minds into the great silence of the heart and waiting for illumination. Some things “can’t be said with effect until they’re known, and God has his timing for that. How do we find something we were once gifted by grace? We can’t. We simply can’t. But we can take heart from the fairy tales….” The old stories teach us patterns of spiritual maturation; they give us metaphors to interpret our course into the trackless waters of the future. And there must be few more genial and gifted guides to those stories than Martin Shaw.
If I have a critique, it is that Shaw does not sufficiently consider what his own Orthodox tradition calls prelest, delusion. Much he says, especially in his chapter on evil, resonates with Evagrian psychology and the later tradition, but he dismisses the hesychastic suspicion of dreams and imagination with barely more than a hand-wave. He is clearly aware that “enchantment” can go bad, and as this issue goes to the core of his Romantic project, I wish he had devoted more space to marking spiritual pitfalls. How often are the stories we make of our lives fundamentally false and self-serving? But as the flame lit at his baptism licks over ever more of his life, perhaps he will have more to say on discrimination in future.
For now, there is much to be found in the affirmative path. It is a rich feast indeed to which Shaw beckons us.
February 6, 2026
Dear Martin,
I have been waiting for someone to write this book. I’m glad it was you.
Signed,
The Wolf
I have been waiting for someone to write this book. I’m glad it was you.
Signed,
The Wolf
June 13, 2026
Okay, I see you New York Times - worthy of a bestseller for sure.
July 22, 2026
This book made me a deeper person. It stirred something primal and spiritual in my bones. Since I started reading it three weeks ago, I’ve been writing poetry, contemplating uncharted trails of my own story, and ruminating on the myths of my homeland. Sagely wisdom is rare, but it is everywhere present as he discusses initiation, death, passivity, passion, prayer, guilt, etc. When I occasionally disagree with something, it’s always with a nod of respect.
Martin Shaw is a story-teller, a mythologist, and at the height of his powers he’s blessed us with this book: a raw, myth-infused journey to re-orient your life and grow you into a full human being. It is in the wilderness that we discover God, ourselves, and the stories worth telling. And it’s in the recovery of stories—our most “ancient form of technology”—that our culture might begin to heal.
Martin Shaw is a story-teller, a mythologist, and at the height of his powers he’s blessed us with this book: a raw, myth-infused journey to re-orient your life and grow you into a full human being. It is in the wilderness that we discover God, ourselves, and the stories worth telling. And it’s in the recovery of stories—our most “ancient form of technology”—that our culture might begin to heal.
June 2, 2026
If I could give this book 6 stars I would. Every Chapter has an innumerable amount of lines that just causes one to want to sit and be present to them. The last chapter on praise is something really breathtaking. This has been one of the best spiritual books I’ve read in many years. I know I’ll be going back to it regularly and I encourage others to read it.
February 15, 2026
Audiobook read by author. Highly engrossing, yet dense. I already want to revisit it. May get a hard copy so I can take notes. Vital wisdom for our times.
May 23, 2026
"We are being prepared for eternity every time we behold beauty."
It was fun listening to this book narrated by the author. He has a great British accent. Some chapters were so much better than others and I thought the book could be half as long as it was. It was still a great reminder that we are physical and spiritual creatures. The created world is good and is meant to be a reflection of the eternal. The more we remove ourselves from creation, the more removed we become from the Author of Life. Touch grass.
It was fun listening to this book narrated by the author. He has a great British accent. Some chapters were so much better than others and I thought the book could be half as long as it was. It was still a great reminder that we are physical and spiritual creatures. The created world is good and is meant to be a reflection of the eternal. The more we remove ourselves from creation, the more removed we become from the Author of Life. Touch grass.
Read
May 14, 2026Audiobook read by author. Do not listen to chapter 4 while driving because you will cry and have to merge in traffic while crying. But he is an excellent story teller and otherwise it’s a great listen. 👂
August 23, 2026
Poetic and thought-provoking. Dense and mystical. An invitation to recover a sense of wonder, belonging, and responsibility.
Three favorite chapters:
On Envy - envy is more than wanting what another person possesses; it is a distortion of desire.
On Evil - evil as a force that disconnects us from relationships and community.
On Praise Making - an act of seeing and honoring what is beautiful and good, which teaches us to be more grateful.
Three favorite chapters:
On Envy - envy is more than wanting what another person possesses; it is a distortion of desire.
On Evil - evil as a force that disconnects us from relationships and community.
On Praise Making - an act of seeing and honoring what is beautiful and good, which teaches us to be more grateful.
September 25, 2026
Rarely does a book stir my heart and my mind in equal measure. This book is a keeper.
July 29, 2026
My first Martin Shaw, coming off a Malcolm Guite recommendation. What a beautiful book this is. It shines with a vision for life in the world and for how to bear its darkness.
April 25, 2026
I don’t know if I lost the plot of he lost the plot but I don’t think I could tell you the plot. Still some helpful things to think about and some cool stories.
June 22, 2026
In its beginning I was a bit confused regarding the point of the book, but I carried on simply because the writing was so beautiful it carried me forward. Now that it's concluded, I want to read it again and again. To be shaped by it. I don't really have the words to tell you about it, other than to recommend that you read it.
February 27, 2026
I had to eventually bail on this one. What seemed like an interesting concept became a cascade of anecdotal nonsense that ultimately provided no real point or position.
If this is what serves for thoughtful analysis and argumentation these days, I’ll pass.
If this is what serves for thoughtful analysis and argumentation these days, I’ll pass.
September 13, 2026
"...stories matter. Cultures get built on them. This is a book that rescues lost stories.”
In the front cover blurb, Gabor Maté calls Liturgies of the Wild “a rosary of soaring myth, gripping narrative, and deep wisdom.” I can’t think of a more apt description. If Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine is the diagnosis of what’s wrong our society, Liturgies of the Wild offers us the remedy. The two books are very much in conversation with one another.
In Liturgies of the Wild, Shaw takes us by the hand and leads us through some wonder-filled myths and fairy tales, careful not to crush their beauty beneath the weight of analysis. He dives into stories like "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," "Grandfather Death," "The Firebird and the Hunter," "The Red Shoes," "The Six Swans," "Akanida Daughter of the Sun," "The Pedlar of Swaffham," the Old Testament story of Joseph, "The Spyglass," and "Parzival,” as well as myths of his own, pulled largely from dreams.
Part of Shaw's goal in this book is to teach readers how to see and appreciate their own stories, the mythology of their own lives. The aforementioned myths and stories are woven into a series of chapters on different things we face in life, as well as things we can aspire to. From initiation to death, from passivity to passion, from prayer to evil and beyond, Shaw touches on aspects of our world that touch all of us. The chapter on death was lovely, deeply moving and cathartic in a way that caught me off guard. It would be a wonderful piece to treat as an essay and share with someone who is grieving a loss or anticipating their own passing.
Liturgies of the Wild is sharp and lovely, soothing and convicting. It’s uniquely its own, and deserves a place in every library. I look forward to dipping back into it. But even more, I’m eager to engage with my own story through the new, deeper lens Shaw has provided through it.
Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"Myth is a Sacred Story."
"Some say that dreams are a personal mythology, and mythology is a community dream."
"Myths told me all about life, but this myth, this Yeshua, crashing like that January arrow into human time, told me how to live that life."
"If your story is a river, then myth is the ocean it should naturally lead to."
"Humans are made of stories, and so we should be seeking the ones that call forth the best in us."
"To make a culture you dig down into a story. That story needs to be robust enough to explain a few things whilst also accommodating mystery. Myths hold together heaven and earth, they are a crossroads between the timeless and the timebound. Myths are connecting tissue between us and the universe."
"It seemed to say that we humans were mud people with a kind of holy breath that swept through us...I want to talk to the mud in us, and use holy breath to do so."
"A myth is robust enough to hold the tension of the soul of mud, and the spirit of breath."
"...they could talk about what often seems a great Western heresy: that things end. That our lives, in the shape we know about, will finish."
"Part of getting made is the final part. Getting unmade."
"We are ceremony people, we are story people, we are poetic people, and when the curtain in the Temple is ripped, that is our moment to make beauty in the face of out wounded appalment and death, We are spun into the light of life's feasting hall, and we are spun out again into the consecrated darkness."
"It was in that most pitiful of circumstances I discovered the nobility of Romanticism and began to wend my way back to the myths. In a fairy tale, when you get lost in the forest, breadcrumbs diligently followed will get you out. To comb a poem, to turn a story lovingly around in your mouth, to walk the same stretch of river repeatedly—these things have dignity and information attached.
If you let them, they will deepen you."
"Stories are the most delightful vehicles for the brightening of consciousness. True, archaic technology."
"We have used speech, sacred drama, liturgy, and vigil to banish darkness from the community. As Christians we mock such things at our own peril. We are ceremony people, story people, poetic people. We are writ large, and we regulate fear by creative acts of display and imagination."
"The more Christianity jettisons its wyrd, nervously polls for popularity, abandons its saints and delicious eccentricities, the more it opens the door to pasty-faced New Age woo-woo. Because under such appeal is the longing for the kind of truths Christianity has always embodied."
"In the end...the myths we remember come down to three things:
What do I love?
What'll it cost?
What am I prepared to pay?"
"How do we find by will something we were once gifted by grace?"
April 10, 2026
Wonderful!
March 12, 2026
Liturgies of the Wild is a lovely, meditative read. Though I did not feel I was the target audience for this book--it seems to be written for people searching for more meaning and healing in their life--I still very much enjoyed reading Dr. Martin Shaw's latest book. At times his writing is cryptic and a little hard to follow, but at the same time, I recognize that is what makes his message poetic and perfectly mysterious, giving the reader space to reflect. There were several poignant paragraphs I came across and thought, I want more of this. I want a whole chapter or book on this. Near the end, I was most interested in his point that when the Christian church/denominations “abandons its saints and delicious eccentricities" they open the back door to "New Age woo-woo." I agree though I want to hear more from Dr. Shaw on this as I am still a bit turned off by some of Catholicism's devotions to relics, for example, even after converting many years ago. I was brought to tears on a few occasions, while other chapters didn't offer much for me, but definitely would for someone else. It's a very personal read. I also love the way he refers to Jesus as the Galilean Druid and the devil as Old Scratch - that was a freshness I didn't know I needed. Thank you, Dr. Shaw, for your contribution to our story-deprived, right brain-deprived culture, sharing myths that reach in and touch us to our core.
June 4, 2026
I read this book on "dinner breaks" while working the night shift in a public high school. I was installing fire alarm wire in each and every classroom, giving me the chance to observe, read, and ponder all of the different posters, banners, slogans, quotations, and other decorations the educators are using to environmentally supplement their teaching. Some of it was wonderful, some just nuts, some rather scary. Lonely nights rummaging in the bones of an old school, left to study the inscriptions of a foreign culture as if I were some sort of Dr. Jones (minus all the grave robbing).
I say all this to remember the impression Dr. Shaw's book had on me. He is all over the place in his writing to the point where I wondered why they even tried put his sayings into paragraphs. It's like seeing a dog wearing pajamas...he is an oral storyteller, and when you try to dress him up for the page he just doesn't come across the same. Reading him was like wandering the halls of this school, reading random sayings, pondering anime posters, and trying to assemble a common theme in each room that somehow told you what the kids were supposed to be learning there, regardless of what the subject said on the outside of the door. His chapter headings were like that. You step into a class on biology, only to find yourself thinking endlessly about why the dog chases its own tail in all the old stories, never learning new tricks...and is this what's happening to you, as you're connecting dots with red fire alarm wire alone in the middle of the night.
Basically, oddly appealing, but with the sustenance of a strawberry...at least on the lips. It's amazing what the mind can do with a strawberry.
I say all this to remember the impression Dr. Shaw's book had on me. He is all over the place in his writing to the point where I wondered why they even tried put his sayings into paragraphs. It's like seeing a dog wearing pajamas...he is an oral storyteller, and when you try to dress him up for the page he just doesn't come across the same. Reading him was like wandering the halls of this school, reading random sayings, pondering anime posters, and trying to assemble a common theme in each room that somehow told you what the kids were supposed to be learning there, regardless of what the subject said on the outside of the door. His chapter headings were like that. You step into a class on biology, only to find yourself thinking endlessly about why the dog chases its own tail in all the old stories, never learning new tricks...and is this what's happening to you, as you're connecting dots with red fire alarm wire alone in the middle of the night.
Basically, oddly appealing, but with the sustenance of a strawberry...at least on the lips. It's amazing what the mind can do with a strawberry.
June 18, 2026
This book is not written by a theologian and it would be unfair to judge it by those standards. However, at points it sounds a little panentheistic. Martin Shaw is drawn to myth and mystery, as well as a desire for an enchanted world. I think he speaks for a great deal of others in expressing these desires. He also encourages a more rooted existence of life lived in the same place, shaped by one’s place, land, and history. In our increasingly digital age (with the rise of AI), we would do well to heed him on this. Spending more time in the garden and less time scrolling through AI slop would be a good for our souls. Overall, I’m giving the book three stars for its insightfulness but lack of theological precision.
April 17, 2026
my goodness, this book has so many positive reviews here.
Take my words with a grain of salt because I couldn't even make it through half the book, but to me there was nothing truly deserving of the label "wild" in these pages. The writing style and content to me seemed more like that of a snake oil salesman than a storyteller.
Take my words with a grain of salt because I couldn't even make it through half the book, but to me there was nothing truly deserving of the label "wild" in these pages. The writing style and content to me seemed more like that of a snake oil salesman than a storyteller.
February 17, 2026
‼️DROP EVERYTHING TO READ ‼️
Read
July 24, 2026I need to sit with this a little longer before I can write a proper review. This is a thoughtful book. It needs to be considered slowly. It reminds me of Jordan Peterson's books, in the way it makes me think. That might be a strange comparison, but my mind makes strange connections. 😊 I listened to the audiobook read by the author. He is a great storyteller. I especially loved his story about dreams.
September 22, 2026
A self-styled storyteller and mythographer aims to make Christianity wild again, which I appreciate. As some mentioned, this feels like it would hit better if you listened to him read it. I think an Southern evangelical boomer would get really bothered by this book, in a great way, but as someone who already believes in panentheism and the power of myth, it wasn't as revelatory to me as it's presented. 3.5 stars, rounded up.
June 15, 2026
Stories alone are not the answer. The author displays his ignorance in the pages of this book. Stories do not always tell the truth, they can be used to make us believe lies if they are told well enough.
July 8, 2026
Shaw writes as rambly as he speaks. I enjoyed this book, especially the chapters on evil and nature. He gives an experienced and nuanced take on how to respect nature and mystery while remaining skeptical of all that is bound up in the current infatuation with “enchantment”
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August 17, 2026Really enjoyed listening through this and will be buying a hard copy soon to go through more slowly and develop my thoughts/processing a bit more. I feel like this has helped clear my mind in ways I’d been needing.
April 15, 2026
Brilliant. Much needed theology — and mythology(?) — on Christianity that is sorely lacking in the Western church. Where’s our imagination? Where’s our chutzpah?? I needed to read this just as much as anyone else. I want to read some Russian fairy tales now too!! This one is definitely going in the toolbox.
April 15, 2026
I need to read this annually. So deep and rich. I love the way it helped me think of evil and evil people and reframe that trauma. I am grateful for the way the author expresses the value and importance of story and sharing story. The healing in nature, the value of “darn night of the soul” among other things!
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