Several years ago, when I was working on The Kingdom Unleashed, I attended a lecture by Os Guinness. We’d been acquainted for several years, so when I spoke with him, he asked me what I was working on. I told him that I was looking at the explosive growth of the church in the Global South and asking why it wasn’t happening here. His immediate response was, “Well, they have a supernatural worldview!”

The unstated part was “and we don’t.”

Although my work has pulled me in other directions, I keep returning to this problem. I have argued to the Colson Fellows that antisupernaturalism is the single biggest challenge facing the church today, and reenchantment is going to be the focus of a lot of the work I’ll be doing in Every Square Inch Ministries over the upcoming year.

That is why I am so excited about Rod Dreher’s newest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.

This book couldn’t come at a better time. As Dreher himself shows, secularism is largely dead, particularly among 20- and 30-somethings. Postmodern ideology has attacked the idea of objective truth that secularism has traditionally tried to base its claims upon. More importantly, secularism offers no answers to fundamental questions of meaning and purpose, no sense of mystery, and no connection to anything beyond the self. Although Christianity has the resources to address all of these, most churches have fallen into the disenchantment of the age.

Dreher’s book lays out the problem and explains where the disenchanted worldview came from. He goes on to discuss “dark enchantment”—the growing pagan and occult turn in the culture and the demonization that has resulted, as well as what I call techno-paganism, the hope and expectation that UFOs are actually multidimensional intelligences trying to communicate with us, and that AI similarly is communicating with a non-physical intelligence, effectively channeling information from another realm.

All of these are obviously dangerous attempts at finding enchantment, and Dreher has the stories to show just how dangerous they can be, and accounts of deliverance from demons (i.e. exorcisms). From there, he turns to what Christian reenchantment should look like.

He starts with prayer, the same place I do when I’m talking about recovering a supernatural worldview. Dreher is Eastern Orthodox, so he begins by looking at Orthodox approaches to prayer, emphasizing learning to focus attention, eliminate distractions, and enter a flow state. He also presents an evangelical approach to prayer which, while less structured, carries many of the same benefits.

From there he turns to “learning to see,” by which he means actually paying attention to the world with an eye to recognizing beauty in all its forms. He argues that all beauty is a theophany, a revelation of God, since beauty has its source and origin in God. This was one of the more intriguing ideas to me in the book, and one I am thinking about as I look at the changing colors of the leaves this autumn.

He then moves to signs and wonders, giving several contemporary Orthodox and Roman Catholic examples that might make evangelical and Reformed readers a bit uncomfortable. But he is absolutely right about miracles continuing to happen. Craig Keener has documented many using medical records and other impartial sources in his book Miracles Today.

Dreher then gives brief sketches of Martin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth, and Jonathan Pageau, three laymen, all Orthodox, that he sees as exemplars pointing the way to reenchantment. He ends with an urgent appeal to us to rediscover enchantment and a very personal account of how it happened for him.

This is only a sampling of what’s contained in Living in Wonder. As befits a journalist, Dreher fills his book with anecdotes and interviews that make his points for him. He also draws from extensive reading in psychologists, theologians, and other relevant subject experts to lay out the intellectual framework for his argument.

Dreher has given us a marvelous book, a real gift to the church. It explains what we’re facing in the culture today and shows us a way forward. Not only will his suggestions enrich our personal lives, but they will help equip the church to minister more effectively in our current cultural climate.

Living in Wonder is exactly the book that the church needs today.