C.S. Lewis’ Miracles – Another Prescient Masterpiece

Somehow I have never read ‘Miracles’ until now. I listened to it, narrated by a very good narrator, and really enjoyed it. Lewis’ prose is so striking and memorable – but why? It is a strange mixture of dense rational arguments, conversational tone, and colourful illustrations. There is a strong undercurrent of wit and humour spread throughout the whole thing. This kind of writing is a pleasure to take in, even when you don’t agree with it. Chesterton is the same way, though perhaps more effortlessly funny.

Lewis here is writing in the mid-20th century in an intellectual climate that is modernist and naturalistic. He is concerned about making a robust defense of miracles, but really miracles is just an entryway into a far more expansive discussion that centrally takes aim at the hubris of modernist metaphysics (naturalism) and, having disarmed it, makes a strong case for the reasonableness of the Christian faith which includes the central Christian miracles of the incarnation and resurrection.

It’s worth noting that he presents the incarnation as the central Christian miracle in a way that evangelical apologists have typically presented the resurrection. Lewis is in line with the early church here more than contemporary evangelical apologists, I believe, and my hunch is that this difference is not disconnected from the relative weakness of evangelical anthropology – our understanding of the human person and human nature. Which is not to take anything away from the importance of the bodily resurrection, of course.

This book is also a prime example of what makes Lewis so rewarding to read: his writing has aged so well. In fact, his analysis and prognosis of Western culture was so perceptive and ahead of its time that some of the books that were largely ignored in his lifetime have surged in popularity only in the last couple of decades, such as The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. To a lesser degree, this is true of Miracles as well.

One of the most perceptive writers of recent years has been Dr. Iain McGilchrist, a psychologist and cultural critic who specializes in the way the brain hemispheres affect our modes of thinking. His work is fairly popular now, as one can see by the flowering of discussion about the left vs right brain kinds of thinking. He argues that the left hemisphere, which specializes in a narrow focus of attention for manipulating and controlling elements of our environment, has become dominant in the modern era. But the left hemisphere was always meant to be subservient to the broader-scoped, more intuitive and open right hemisphere. He argues that many of our modern psychological and social ills are related to this left-brain dominated mode of thinking.

Here again Lewis seems to have anticipated this state of affairs, this modern crisis. He was himself a man of unusual gifts in this exact regard, as John Piper helpfully explored in his conference and subsequent collaborative book called ‘The Romantic Rationalist’. In short, Lewis’s mind was a remarkable marriage between the left-brained hardnosed rationalism that he imbibed from his beloved tutor William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, and the right-brained imaginative intuition and romanticism. How many other authors have managed to write works of fiction (imaginative) and non-fiction (rational) that have endured so well?

These two passages here illustrate how prescient Lewis was in his diagnosis of the modern mental malady. The first passage traces the process of increasingly “truncated thought.”

“There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious fact of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of men have been increasingly turned outward, to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialised inquiries for which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the ‘scientific’ habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. But no other source was at hand, for during the same period men of science were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated.” (Chapter 6).

In this second passage, Lewis argues that Christianity is uniquely equipped to bridge the “unbridgeable chasm” that has grown between the two different ways of thinking.

“There is thus in the history of human thought, as elsewhere, a pattern of death and re-birth. The old, richly imaginative thought which still survives in Plato has to submit to the deathlike, but indispensable, process of logical analysis: nature and spirit, matter and mind, fact and myth, the literal and the metaphorical, have to be more and more sharply separated, till at last a purely mathematical universe and a purely subjective mind confront one another across an unbridgeable chasm. But from this descent also, if thought itself is to survive, there must be re-ascent and the Christian conception provides for it. Those who attain the glorious resurrection will see the dry bones clothed again with flesh, the fact and the myth remarried, the literal and the metaphorical rushing together.” (Chapter 16).

As you can see, the book is brilliant and worthy of close scrutiny.

Another element that stood out to me was the way Lewis based his central argument against naturalism in the mystery of human consciousness and the mystery of human thought. I don’t know if consciousness studies were in vogue in the mid-20th century, but I know they have exploded in popularity in recent years. And somehow everything Lewis said about cognition and consciousness aligned with what I understand (as a layman) to be the best ‘theory of mind’ out there.

For a book that is nearly 80 years old, that is remarkable.

The Everlasting People: A Second Reading

Back in 2022, I read an interesting little book called The Everlasting People. I wrote up a brief review on Goodreads and then went on with my life. And then I got a reply from the author, gently pushing back on some of my comments. It was a strange experience, which I wrote about here.

I thought about what the author – Dr. Matthew Milliner – wrote back to me and I decided I needed to re-read the book. Fast forward to 2024, and it became time for me to keep my promise. So a few weeks ago I cracked it open again and gave it a second reading.

I tried to have a more open and positive posture towards the book this time around. It really is a remarkable project, trying to adopt the general approach and insights of the inimitable G.K. Chesterton, and applying them to the Native peoples of the Americas (or Turtle Island), especially their art and mythology. Having just re-read Chesterton’s great book, The Everlasting Man, I was all set.

The book, derived from a set of lectures that were delivered, is made up of three chapters, followed by three ‘responses’. The first thing to say is that I learned so much from the book (in both readings). I learned a ton about First Nations history, a lot about Chesterton himself, and much about the surprising degree to which those early indigenous people accepted Christianity. The fact that I – along with most North Americans – do not know this history well is a sad testament to our particular blindness when it comes to these matters.

So the first reaction is a genuine lament for the way in which human persons, indeed entire communities and peoples, were mistreated, cheated, and wiped out by bloodthirsty men who too often claimed the name of Christ. Milliner is to be commended for the evenhanded way he did not ignore the sins and atrocities of First Nations people (a common enough manipulation of the story in our day of cultural self-hatred). The third respondent came closest to this particular malady of the mind, but we can just leave that to the side since it was written in 2020; one can still catch the aroma of the peak wokeness and racial angst convulsing our educated classes at the time.

One concern I had in my initial review, the usage of terms like whiteness, is still worthy of comment. Having read the book more carefully, I don’t really see any compromise here. And yet the cultural turmoil of recent years is necessarily the context into which this book must be understood, and everyone knows that a term like ‘whiteness’ is strongly coded as leftwing-progressive. Here at the end of 2024, it feels like the winds have shifted and the reactionary populism of the normies has rejected the progressive left’s project of anti-Western critical theories. So while I am happy to gloss over the term in my reading of the book, it’s inescapable that it will signal certain political and cultural alignments whether the author intends it to or not.

The meat of the book, however, is far more interesting that culture wars. The Mishipeshu (underwater panther) and Thunderbird (Animiki), two mythical creatures found within indigenous mythology, are explored for their evocative imagery and the way in which these figures were adapted by Native Christians. It is powerful to consider the Native Christian, sorrowful after so much suffering, persevering in Christ and expressing that faith in ways that are genuine to the best aspects of their culture. That is good missiology, and a good example of the kind of thing Chesterton loved.

The last chapter, which reflects on Chesterton’s poem about the Virgin Mary (The Queen of Seven Swords) as well as the medieval Virgin of the Passion (a suffering Virgin Mary, later renamed Our Lady of Perpetual Help), and how devotion to her permeated through the region where the Lenape people had once lived, was the hardest for me to wrap my head around.

But that’s okay. Gotta leave something for the third reading, I guess.

‘They Flew’ by Carlos Eire – A Review Essay

I listened to this book a few weeks after reading Rod Dreher’s thought-provoking new book, Living in Wonder. Both books present some challenges to Protestant readers as they take aim at various aspects of modern metaphysical assumptions which, of the three major branches of Christianity, are most embedded within the children of the Reformation. Carlos Eire takes as his subject the levitation of medieval Catholic monks and nuns, prodigiously attested to by copious historical records. I was not aware of this phenomenon before. The book is a serious intellectual and historical treatment of a subject that would be treated as ridiculous by many.

The book traces the historical records of levitation from antiquity to the modern age. It shows up consistently throughout those many centuries in a number of different religious and pagan contexts, though it reaches its apogee in the medieval period within certain Catholic circles.

The book focuses in on three specific people for whom levitations and other similar miracles were common and widely attested: St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and the Venerable María de Ágreda. The overall picture that emerges is one where, despite budgeting for exaggeration and embellishment by hagiographers and admirers, it’s hard to deny that something truly remarkable happened with these people. The volume and variety of witnesses makes it very difficult to explain away.

The strangeness of the topic and the solidity of the evidence offers a direct challenge to our absorbed habits of skepticism and our confidence in the stable laws of nature. We come away with nagging questions. Just what happened, exactly? And how does it make sense within our understanding of reality? The book navigates this challenge carefully, letting the weight of the evidence land on the reader gradually, leaving the uncomfortable questions to nag at our modern minds.

The book includes a substantial and helpful treatment of medieval and early-modern views about the devil, witchcraft, and demons.

I was fascinated to learn that the topic of miraculous levitations became a proxy for the battle between the Roman Catholic church and the new fledgling but energetic Protestant churches, with both treating the phenomenon as real but Protestants largely attributing it to the power of the devil. Thus the rather fascinating phenomenon was reduced to one facet of a high-stakes battle between entrenched religious groups; a battle that not infrequently resulted in torture and death.

The fact that Protestant denunciations of Catholic miracles occurred in this fraught context gives me pause. I don’t think I agree with the esteemed Reformers in this matter, but I can understand how there was a strong impulse to circle the wagons. For their part, Catholic apologists argued forcefully that these miracles were nothing less than a divine seal of approval and approbation on the entire Roman Catholic institution; God’s ‘amen’ to their claim to be the One True Church. Thus there was a powerful partisan incentive, aside from the normal human proclivity, for Catholic chroniclers to exaggerate and inflate the accounts of the miraculous in their midst. This helps me understand why the debate about these kinds of preternatural or supernatural events played out the way they did in the wake of the Reformation.

With a bit of historical distance, and a warming of relations between good-faith members of Catholicism and Protestantism, it seems like a good time to revisit this issue. Here is a sketch of my own still-forming view of this. Levitations can be faked rather easily, especially if they occur indoors, but this cannot explain most of the historical record. The phenomenon is, at least part of the time, real. The physical body somehow is able to suspend the force of gravity, or to be unaffected by it, during a state of spiritual ecstasy. This porous barrier between the physical and the spiritual was the default worldview within medieval Catholicism, though it was considerably hardened within Protestantism, in part as a reaction against Catholic fixation on these and similar topics, and then fully cemented by the time of the enlightenment (which was really the enshrining of the new dogma of mechanistic, reductive materialism).

Within premodern cultures and in certain spiritualist and occult traditions even today, this separation does not exist in the same way, and testimonies of such “impossible” feats regularly trickle out, though hard evidence that would be amenable to scientific analysis is almost never produced. The fact that the real phenomenon was mostly located within certain Catholic institutions like monasteries and convents does not, for me, serve to underwrite the whole of Catholicism. Far from it. But neither do I dismiss it as merely a trick of the devil to deceive the masses. We should leave room for demonic trickery and preternatural manipulations, such as the testimony of one tortured soul in the book who eventually confessed to making a pact with two demons, resulting in her ability to manifest, among other things, inexplicable levitations—I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible. But if it’s not all demonic, and if I don’t buy what the pro-Roman Catholic apologists were selling, then we need some other framework to fit this into.

And so for me the conclusion is that these weird things did and do happen. They happened for a variety of reasons, perhaps divine and angelic, or demonic and devilish, or maybe even some other source besides that remains mysterious to us. God, in his perpetual purpose to confound the proud and the worldly-wise, perhaps scattered such manifestations among the Catholics in such a way as to frustrate the excesses of the Protestants. The injunction to “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) applies to individuals. For Catholics to dismiss Protestants because of their lack of miracles (something which is not true today, if it ever was) is just as misguided as Protestants lumping all Catholic miracles together and denouncing them as demonic. In both of these approaches I see an all-too-human pride in one’s institution, one’s group. “You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans?” (1 Cor. 3:3:).

If I have taken anything away from my reading of church history, it’s that God does not play favourites with his children. There is enough shameful wreckage in each and every human grouping of Christians to keep us humble, and enough goodness and grace to rightly celebrate. We do well to keep this in mind even as we hold our Biblical, theological, and historical convictions firmly.

Carlos Eire has produced a book that feels very much suited to our moment of metaphysical re-evaluation. Although I struggled and skimmed through some parts of it—the accounts of levitations all blur together after a while—I enjoyed this book and the way it made me wrestle through this fascinating historical thread running from the medieval world well into our modern age.

The central question—they flew?—rests uneasily on the modern mind. Can we really believe they flew without losing all the goods modernity has bequeathed on us? Can we believe it without reverting to a medieval worldview that, if enchanted, also tended to be marked by ignorance and superstition? Can we really believe they flew and still remain well equipped to live and lead in the twenty-first century? My answer to all these questions is yes.

We must let go of reductive materialism and the hold it has on our minds. By this I mean broadening our view of reality in order for it to accord with the way the world really is. In fact, I’ve become convinced that letting go of reductive materialism is going to be a necessary step if we are to hold on to the goods of the modern age; if we are to avoid the ditch of scientism and the ditch of superstition; if we are to have the perceptual tools and the wisdom to navigate the challenges of the twenty-first century—an age when, if my intuition is right, we will see the return of the old gods and every strange being and phenomenon we so eagerly ignored during the age of reason.

In other words, we may well need categories for things even stranger than floating nuns and flying friars.

My Review of Rod Dreher’s ‘Living in Wonder’

I am happy to share with you that my review of Rod Dreher’s newest book, Living in Wonder, was released this week over at Mere Orthodoxy. I hope you’ll check it out. I really enjoyed Dreher’s book but also concluded that it presented some stumbling blocks to widespread appreciation by Protestant evangelicals. I tried to get both of those elements across in my review. I was a bit surprised to see that TGC’s review of it was so thoroughly critical, without recognizing that there are imbalances and weaknesses within Reformed evangelicalism that Dreher’s book actually helps us to address.

That was the direction I wanted to take my review. After noting my criticisms, I focused in what evangelicals can take away from the ideas in the book. This dovetails with my larger project in recent years to think through the nature of evangelicalism and Protestantism, the state of the culture with regard to spiritual matters (re-enchantment and the demise of modernity), and gleaning the best insights from the sharpest minds wherever I can find them.

While I’m a thorough-going Protestant, or rather because I am settled in my rejection of key, fundamental historical claims made by both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic authorities, I feel free to read and engage with them without fear of being drawn in. I do not feel threatened by them, and I think it inevitable that each branch of Christendom, especially to the degree that they are shaped by sharp polemics aimed against other branches, will be imbalanced and in need of continual course correction. This is necessarily an endless process of discernement, reformation, and renewal. The end goal is always spiritual renewal, walking with the Spirit, and having the mind of Christ.

I also believe deeply in true small-c catholicity, the Biblical principle of affirming wherever possible, without dishonesty or sentimentality, the true spiritual unity we share with genuine believers which are scattered in many different institutions. It was a bit of a dodge when Billy Graham resolutely refused to pronounce who was in and who was out when it came to salvation, but there is something good about being slow and hesitant to pronounce on such matters when we take into account the incredible human capacity for inconsistency, and the mystery of genuine Spirit-wrought faith. I also recognize that for many people with busy lives and a simple faith, it’s not possible to navigate, assess, and discern all these things and they need trustworthy authority figures in their lives who can do a lot of that work for them.

These things shape my vocation as a writer and thinker for the church. I want to hold my convictions firmly and deeply, and yet be able to converse fruitfully with people from a wide range of perspectives. I want to offer helpful insights into culture, literature, and arts, and yet always make sure to remain in touch and appreciative of simple, hard-working, hands-on people. I want to continually hone my ability to write clearly and creatively, saying what I have to say with a dash of style that makes it enjoyable to read. I have a long way to go in each of these respects, but that is the direction I am aiming towards.

I have been mulling over once again the idea of moving this sleepy little blog of mine over to Substack, the it-place for writers. If I do, I would keep it free and try to move my previous articles and my subscribers over.

In coming days I should have a piece coming out at TGC Canada that I have been working on for quite a few months called Why We Need Beautiful Churches. It’s an attempt to piece together a whole bunch of reading and thinking on aesthetics, beauty, architecture, and the evangelical church. As always, I’m grateful for readers who take time out of their busy lives to consider my words. I don’t take that lightly, and I hope it’s a blessing and benefit to you. And if you do enjoy my writing or glean some benefit from it, I hope you’ll pass it on to others, share widely, and maybe even let me know.

The Long Way Home – A Review of Ashley Lande’s ‘The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever’

Here is a book that tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. And yet, there is a lot of darkness to get through before the dawn breaks. The raw honesty of Lande’s story, the power of her effervescent prose, and the drastic nature of her conversion are just some of the elements that make this book difficult to put down and impossible to forget.

For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it’s that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I’ve ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.

There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.

The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one’s embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.

We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book ‘The Everlasting Man’.

For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.

Imminent: Thoughts on Luis Elizondo’s Book and the UFO/UAP Topic

Among my many interests are a number of fringe topics, those weird subjects that exist on the edges of respectable discussion. One such topic is psychedelics, which I’ve written about quite a bit. Another one, which I have not written about much, is the whole topic of UFOs, now rebranded as UAPs (Unidentified Aerial/Anomalous Phenomenon). I’ve been quietly studying the subject for a number of years, pondering just what is going on with it, and seeing a real change in the public consciousness with regard to it. The topic has steadily been emerging from the shadows of ridiculous TV shows and late night talk radio to Senate hearings, highly decorated and credible whistleblowers from inside the military, and serious engagement by eminent scientific figures.

One of the people at the center of this shift has been Luis Elizondo, a former counter-intelligence officer who went public in December 2017 and helped release three now-infamous videos from the Pentagon that were featured in a controversial and viral New York Times front-page story. Now, seven years after that story was released and ushered in a new era of public conversation about this topic, Elizondo has just published his highly anticipated memoir called Imminent, which I listened to on audiobook. The book was standard memoir fare, competently written, and fast-paced. I won’t summarize the book’s narrative here, you’ll be able to find that elsewhere easily enough. What I’d like to do in this post is reflect on how this topic interfaces with other areas of interest, such as the metaphysical shift taking place in the West.

Imminent traces both Elizondo’s life and his efforts to bring the UFO and UAP topic to the public, out of the confines of Pentagon halls. Much of the material was familiar to me from following this topic, but there were a few surprises, such as Elizondo’s direct involvement and study of ‘Remote Viewing’—a phenomenon I have read about in David Morehouse’s book, ‘Psychic Warrior‘ and in other places. The connection between the UAP topic and Remote Viewing is the notion that reality is not reducible to material, as well as both containing within their orbits various phenomena and behaviors that is usually considered occult.

Elizondo holds the view that UAPs pose a potential threat to national security. I grant that from an intelligence and military point of view, this is the inescapable assessment. And yet Elizondo seems to dismiss out of hand those Christians within the upper levels of our intelligence and security agencies who think that there are some malevolent entities behind much of this. Those people can be ignored, in the view of Elizondo and many others, since they are only “closed-minded fundamentalists.” Maybe. Or maybe they are right—or partially right. The knee-jerk response of dismissing such convictions is interesting to me.

Christians have an intellectual inheritance, a deposit of knowledge handed down across generations that is based on the Bible, yes, but also on the collective wisdom and experience of many of the best thinkers in the past. (If your reaction to that statement is to regurgitate some New Atheist blather about superstition, dark ages, and anti-scientific religious dogma, I don’t know what to say except you haven’t done the reading and you’ve bought into a convenient narrative that ignores the actual history).

Jacques Vallée, one of the foremost experts on UFOs, understood early on that the number of parallels between UAP experiences in the modern age and demonological experiences in the medieval age—before our epistemology was artificially restrained by the enlightenment assumptions—was more than could be explained by mere coincidence. His groundbreaking book ‘Passport to Magonia‘ made this argument all the way back in 1969. He saw that there was some undeniable continuity between those strange and mystifying stories from before the scientific revolution (that the modern mind collectively relegated to the proverbial closet, out of sight) and the similarly strange, mystifying, and sometimes hellish experiences endured by members of the public and the military in the modern era.

One way of seeing the disclosure movement is as the inability of our modern culture, with its strictly materialist metaphysics, to explain or deny these paradigm-busting testimonies any longer. If you spend any time looking into this topic, you’ll find that everyone deeply steeped in it has some other worldview than reductive physicalism. It is usually some variation of Eastern mysticism, New Age, occult, panpsychism, or a ‘materialism’ that is so expansive as to be unrecognizable to someone like Dawkins.

From my perspective, the unwillingness of folks like Elizondo to take seriously the concerns of Christians who have this historically-informed perspective is a blind spot. Whether the Christians he encountered expressed their views intelligently and respectfully is impossible to know—though from his telling it doesn’t seem so. This highlights the reality that within the labyrinth of the US government are numerous factions, including at least one that has been directly involved in trying to study and weaponize occult abilities and the powers of non-human entities (the claim is that our adversaries are doing the same, which I suppose is likely true).

This may not be widely known but the evidence is frankly superabundant. The pragmatic utilitarian “if it works” argument is hard to refute within such circles where results are all that matter and where a “flexible moral framework” (read: willing to do evil that good may come) is a career asset. Another faction clearly has deep moral and spiritual misgivings about all such involvement, as can be seen in the work of Ray Boeche and Nick Redfern about the so-called ‘Collins Elite’. (You can find a lengthy critical interaction with that topic by the late Dr. Michael Heiser here.) What the public sees in the media are the faint contours of a mostly-hidden struggle between such factions, and perhaps others.

What do I think about all this? Well, it’s complex. My working thesis is that we are seeing at least two separate things. First, there are deep-black projects and technologies that are tested, witnessed, and interpreted as non-human but are just exotic and advanced. Second, there is a whole other side which is irreducibly spiritual / occult. And then there is some blurry crossover between the two that doesn’t fit neatly into either category.

One thing is for sure, this strange topic is not going away. Too much of the cat is already out of the bag, and our civilizational moment of tumult and crisis has many people re-examining their most basic assumptions about reality. That, combined with historically-low levels of trust in government and other institutions, means we are primed for momentous revelations and paradigm shifts. And perhaps, as Diana Pasulka has argued in her books ‘American Cosmic‘ and ‘Encounters‘, we are seeing the contours of an emerging religious belief system.

Speaking on Justin Brierley’s Podcast & More

I wrote in June that I’d done an interview with Justin Brierley for his documentary-style podcast, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. There is a book by the same name which I discussed here. Well, the podcast episode ‘dropped’ (as the cool kids say) yesterday and (okay one more) it is a ‘banger’. I can feel my kids cringing with embarrassment at my attempts to use dope slang, so I’ll stop. Here is the link to the episode:

EPISODE 26 – Psychedelics and the Search for God: Ashley Lande’s surprising journey to faith

What a privilege to be featured in this series – I honestly don’t know how it happened. Justin reached out on Twitter so I guess he saw my original article at Mere Orthodoxy and he just happened to be planning to deal with this topic. I found the episode informative and moving as it incorporated the testimony of Ashley Lande, who was formerly heavily into psychedelics. I hope you’ll check it out if you’re not already familiar with the series. The content and production quality are really top notch.

One of the themes that I touched on in my responses to Justin’s questions was the organized effort by various individuals and organizations to synthesize psychedelic use with mainstream religion, including Christianity. This evidently fell outside the scope of the episode’s focus, so all of that was edited out (which is totally fine). But it’s one of the things that most struck me and worried me as I researched the topic. On the more moderate and progressive side of mainline Protestantism and evangelicalism, I already see activists advocating for the spiritual benefits of psychedelics for Christians.

And one more comment before moving on from this topic. I do wish I had been a bit more clear and blunt in my conclusion of the dangers of psychedelics. So lest there be any confusion, I’ll do it now: Yes, some of the entities people encounter and engage with while on psychedelics are definitely demonic. And no, they don’t present themselves that way. I believe that using psychedelics puts you in great spiritual danger regardless of the other benefits that may be had. Thankfully not everyone who uses them encounters dark spiritual entities, and not everyone who encounters a demonic being while tripping finds themselves harassed and afflicted by that being subsequently, but these things most definitely happen. So, as encouraged as I am when I see a significant number of people being redeemed by Christ out of psychedelics use, I have no illusions about the scope of spiritual danger represented by widespread psychedelics use in our culture.

Staying on the theme of podcasts, I had the opportunity to join Jeremy Pryor and some other guests for a couple of Family Teams Podcast episodes. These were not about psychedelics. Rather, we discussed fatherhood, masculinity, family vision, the LGBT revolution, identity formation, Jordan Peterson, and Elon Musk. It was a good time, even though I was not able to be home in my office at recording time, so my audio quality is not great. You can find those here:

East of Eden by John Steinbeck- Outside the Garden, Far from the Cross

In the Salinas Valley of California, a novel was born. John Steinbeck wove together strands from his own life, the character of the land, and the first few chapters of Genesis to form a story that is epic, loaded with meaning. The book is both broad and narrow in scope; broad in its tracing of multiple generations of the two main families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and narrow in the way it focuses its gaze into the lives of its main characters.

The book was criticized by some as being too heavy-handed in its message. It’s true that the author does not try too hard to hide what he really believes about human nature, good and evil, and the purpose of life. And yet, Steinbeck is an excellent prose writer, and aside from a few bits of dialogue that I felt were clunky, the book holds together, flows easily, and stands as a massive achievement. I found the clarity of the message to be a positive, not a negative, and the clear allusions to Scripture gave it added depth for me.

While some might complain that the self-conscious patterning of the narrative after the Cain and Abel story betrays a lack of imagination or creativity, this objection is a characteristically modern stupidity. In previous eras, it was expected that great art would be patterned after earlier works. Authors were less originators of novel ideas and more stewards of literary traditions. As they retold the same stories, they modified and added to the tradition, making it their own to some extent, leaving their imprint upon it. Although I love creativity and originality, I think there is a particular kind of literary genius in the older kind of storytelling. And what we think of as original work is often drawing on traditions and stories we simply don’t know, so it feels fresh and new to us even though it isn’t. In fact, there is a special joy in discovering the sources that one’s favourite authors have drawn from: “Oh, that’s where she got that from.”

Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his magnum opus. It has that kind of feel, both in its length (300,000+ words, 600 pages) and in its gravitas. There is not much levity in the book. It takes hold of the heaviest themes that trouble humanity and wrestles with them page after page. It took eleven years of gestation and one year of uninterrupted writing to complete it. Steinbeck said of it, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” And also: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

One of the ways this shows up is in the little bits of wisdom Steinbeck seems to have wanted to include in the book. They adorn the narrative but are not in any way necessary to it. For example: “You can boast about anything if it’s all you have have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.” Or, describing how some years were rich and others were lean in the Salinas Valley, “it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

The book certainly deals with adult themes—prostitution and murder—but not in a prurient way. I much prefer this handling of such themes to what I encountered in Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth, or what sounds like a similar pornographic quality to the Game of Thrones books by George R. R. Martin. Art should be able to depict sin without tempting the reader to it; great art depicts sin in utterly realistic ways and yet manages to encourage virtue in the reader. The divorcing of art from virtue is one of modernity’s great achievements, to our profound detriment. The modern novel is often a kind of literary nihilism, depicting with indifference the beauty and filth and goodness and evil of the world, as if they were all interchangeable and, after all, who can really tell the difference?

In my reading of 20th-century literature, this amorality has often been a prominent feature. Steinbeck himself was known for it. And yet East of Eden concerns itself with good and evil as real categories, and in that sense it feels different from something like Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, or The Stranger by Camus. Steinbeck, who grew up Episcopalian (Anglican) but called himself an agnostic, held on to solid moral categories even as he lost the surest foundation for them. It is said that his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, explores the moral decline of Americans. It was not especially well received, which makes me think I might like it.

Back to East of Eden. I really enjoyed seeing how Steinbeck shaped his story to mirror the Cain and Abel narrative. But more than that, he included in the novel itself an extended reflection on the Cain and Abel story by some of the main characters, including a detailed discussion of the Hebrew translation into English of Genesis 4:7, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him” (KJV). The crux of the matter is the last phrase. The KJV renders is “thou shalt rule over him [sin].” Now I happen to have studied this verse in some detail in Bible College during my ‘Exegetical Methods’ class, with a focus on the word translated desire. But here the focus is the verb shalt rule, transliterated as “timshal” (תִּמְשָׁל). In contrast to the KJV, the ASV rendered it do thou rule over it. In the novel, the wisest and best character, the servant Lee, rejects both of these translations because the KJV seems to promise that Cain will rule over sin, while the ASV seems to merely command it. Lee concludes that it should be rendered thou mayest rule over it. The key, for Steinbeck’s purposes, is that it is conditional, that it comes down to Cain’s choice. The consensus among all the main modern translations is that the verb should be translated as you must. I see why Steinbeck did what he did, making clear the conditional aspect that I think is nevertheless present in all the translations.

This central challenge to overcome sin and evil is what animates the drama of the book. Will the Cain-like characters give into the malicious impulses that course through their veins, or will they choose to master sin? In the novel, this struggle is personified in Cal, who learns that his mother is a sociopath, a deeply wicked and malicious person. He finds in himself a mix of malice and goodness, and this discovery tempts him to believe that he is in some way fated towards evil, or helpless in the face of it. Lee, who raised him and knows him best, discerns this and speaks directly to it:

Cal drifted toward the door, slowly, softly. He shoved his fists deep in his pockets. “It’s like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know—because I’ve got her in me.” His head was down and his voice was heartbroken.

Lee jumped up. “You stop that!” he said sharply. “You hear me? Don’t let me catch you doing that. Of course you may have that in you. Everybody has. But you’ve got the other too. Here—look up! Look at me!”

Cal raised his head and said wearily, “What do you want?”

“You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now—look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it—not your mother.”

The novel intends to leave us with the same challenge.

But for all of its moral force and Biblical pathos, the novel is Christless and devoid of redemption. (This is an observation, not necessarily a criticism.) It manages to capture the essence of life East of Eden, that is, life outside of the garden, life among the thorns. Steinbeck captures as much beauty and goodness as can be found in the created world, and I would argue he borrows heavily from the accumulated capital of Christianity in that effort, but ultimately we are left confronted with a moral law, the imperative to choose between good and evil, and the haunting sense that we have not the power to choose rightly, so powerful is the pull of sin.

Here is where a writer like Tolstoy or Dickens would, after a few hundred pages of wallowing in the deepest human misery, bring in the transformative power of love and of grace to serve as an illustration of the gospel. Steinbeck therefore reflects the exhausted and lifeless character of so much mainline Protestant Christianity in the 20th century. It reminds me of what Alan Jacobs described so movingly in his book, Original Sin, where he traced the views of human sinfulness throughout various times and cultures. He showed how many people have tried to deny the depth and severity of human sin, recasting it or ignoring it. This can be a pleasant sort of delusion. Others accepted the true nature of our depravity but then entered into the joy of salvation in Christ, who alone can solve the problem at its root by generating a new heart, new birth, and new creation within the human person. But the bleakest prospect, and the darkest literature, is produced by those who fully accept the depth of human depravity while, for whatever reason, remaining outside of Christ. These people see and feel the problem rightly but not the solution. East of Eden is firmly in this category.

What we don’t find in East of Eden is any mention of the seed of the woman, the promised one who would crush the head of serpent with bruised heel. But this shadowy figure stands above the entire Genesis narrative and alone gives it cohesion. Why was it important that Abel should live? To produce the promised snake-crusher. And contra Steinbeck’s claim in the novel, we are not the descendants of Cain, but of Seth (see Gen. 5). Yes, we have a little bit of Cain in each of us, but it’s Seth, who Eve says God has given her “in the place of Abel,” who produces both Noah and eventually the Messiah himself, Jesus.

Ultimately, it isn’t our ability to choose good over evil, to resist the sin crouching at our door, which makes the decisive difference. That choice, which we make every day to some extent, is a reflection of what is happening more deeply in our hearts, and what is happening on the vertical, spiritual plane which is all but absent in the novel.

The world-historical event that serves as the great hinge of history occurred on a hill not too terribly far from the land of Cain and Abel, on which a man who was also the Lord bled and died like Abel, murdered by his brothers. Hebrews 12:24 says that Christ’s blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” Jon Bloom explains: “For though Abel’s innocent blood cried out for justice against sin, Jesus’s innocent blood cried out for mercy for sinners. Abel’s blood exposed Cain in his wretchedness. Jesus’s blood covers our wretchedness and cleanses us from all sin.”

This may not have been Steinbeck’s understanding, but as I ponder the meaning of the magnificent work of fiction he wrote, I cannot help thanking God that he did not leave us to our own devices in the arid lands East of Eden. Rather, he made a way, through the blood of the cross, to a place even better than the Salinas Valley in the spring.

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The Stranger by Albert Camus – The Distilled Nectar of Meaninglessness

Here is one of the quintessential 20th-century novels. Often assigned to college students as an introduction to Existentialism, it is the story (quoting from the back of the book now) “an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach.” It is an exploration of, in Camus’ own words, “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

It is well written, draws you in, and certainly has an unusual and distinctive feel. Perhaps more than any other novel I have read, it captured the bleakest essence of the absence of morality and meaning that characterized the post-war era, ending more or less around the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. I was struck by many things as I read it.

The protagonist, Meursault, exists in a moral vacuum. He is utterly passive in almost every situation he finds himself in, even in the face of evil. The 20th-century taught us that passivity in the face of evil is evil. Camus knew this better than you and me—he was a brave man who joined the French resistance under Nazi occupation during WW2, risking his life countless times. But rather than make any moral judgments about anything, Meursault merely finds things ‘interesting’ or not. When a moral pronouncement is made in his presence, he abdicates completely and says, “Who’s to say?” As the narrative picks up momentum, we find him saying “it doesn’t matter” (or variations of it) to all kinds of events that obviously matter very much.

Therefore everything is reduced to the absurd, the amoral meaninglessness of existence in an accidental universe. Death, abuse, lies, oppression, and murder are all meaningless. The only time we see Meursault caring about anything is when it involves his imprisonment and possible execution.

Camus once said that there was only one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. The fundamental question for him then was whether life is worth living or not.

I have read a number of books by these kinds of thinkers now and they all seem very brave and bold, willing to face the cold dark winds of an uncaring universe while the rest of us simpletons huddle stupidly around the warm fires of our comforting delusions. And I get that—there is certainly something seemingly absurd about life. The wise have recognized that for some thousands of years, such as the teacher in Ecclesiastes who said that everything under the sun was meaningless. But ultimately the conclusion of Ecclesiastes is quite different than anything offered by existentialist literature.

The scene where the Christian accosts Meursault is painful to read. The Christian says, “all men believe in God, even those who turn their backs on him.” I hear echoes of Romans 1. Meursault comments: “That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless.” The Christian then shouts “Do you want my life to become meaningless?” It is a good scene, a good rebuke and warning. Faith can have many pathologies, such as the cringing insecurity Camus exposes in this scene. It is right for me to read that and ponder whether my faith is so fragile that it cannot abide the indifference of a Meursault.

But Camus ought to have turned the tables on himself a little. The more I read these folks, the more I am struck by the fleeting vapidity of their lives. Which of them has actually produced anything? Have they raised flourishing families of whole and happy children and grandchildren—legacies of truth flowering into maturity? Have they built lasting institutions of learning that have these great insights as foundation-stones for a growing body of wisdom and knowledge that can guide future generations? Have they taught us how to live in such a way that a society or culture based on these teachings would grow and flourish into a great civilization?

And these comforting delusions they have so confidently thrown aside, are they really without any merit? Is there no baby in that bathwater? Has enlightenment thinking really dealt a death-blow to belief in God? Or has it merely managed to create that illusion with smoke and mirrors and the bleating insistence of our cultural elites for the last two hundred years? Haven’t we witnessed a group of very brilliant people enamored with the idea and possibilities of a godless existence and the resulting emancipation from moral imperatives?

Well, you know what I think.

Camus and others tried to stave off nihilism with existentialism. Life is worth living, despite the pointlessness of everything, because it is nice to eat ice cream on a hot day, and the grass on your feet is nice, and many things are interesting. But this is like treating a 6 inch cannon-ball wound through the chest with a dab of Polysporin and grape-flavored Children’s Advil. It will not hold, and it does not hold, and we today are everywhere seeing and feeling just how badly it has not held. There is no buttress against vice, no strength to deny the self and build strong families, no roots to draw from, no meaning to guide you, and ultimately nothing to satisfy what Augustine rightly described as the restlessness of the soul. If anything, Camus shows us what it looks like to try and make your bed in that restlessness, like that dog who says “this is fine.”

These 80 years later, with the youth of the West mired in ‘The Meaning Crisis,’ and suicide sharply on the rise, and all sorts of troubling trends on the rise, it seems clear that the bed is not very comfortable, or safe. More foreboding still is the sense that the vacuum is quickly collapsing. The nihilists and existentialists are mostly forgotten. The energy now is with a rising tide of what R. R. Reno calls the Strong Gods, which range from faceless ideologies that colonize young minds to a panoply of paganisms, including human sacrifice and contact with spiritual entities. But as I have tried to argue elsewhere, there is a heartening stream of conversions to Christianity among the currents flowing in to fill the yawning void.

I enjoyed the book, but I am so glad I am not a disciple of Camus.

Resisting the Rainbow Mafia (with Philosophy)

The opening illustration is unforgettable. I speak of Vaclav Havel’s essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ which opens with an examination of a typical small shop owner living in communist Romania. He puts a sign in his shop window: “Workers of the world, unite!” But does he really believe this? Does he believe it so much that he feels an urge to inform his customers of this ideal? Or is something else going on? Havel explains: “The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message.” And what is that message? “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” Or in other words:

“I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

Is something similar going on in the West in our own day? It sure feels like it. In my travels through quaint and quiet Ontario towns, it seems like every shop feels the need to advertise its most excellent moral qualities by having a rainbow flag in the window. Some even boast of being “Rainbow Registered,” which refers to the “Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC)” Accreditation program for “2SLGBTQI+ Friendly Spaces,” a program that is generously funded by the Government of Canada.

In our day, there is no shortage of breathless outrage over every aspect of the culture war. I really have no interest in joining the chorus of baying dogs barking at each other incessantly across the fence. If you’re looking for that, the good news is there is plenty to be found — just find yourself some social media influencer who agrees with you and go from there.

I am more interested in digging down beneath the surface in a calm and irenic way to understand what is going on. What is animating this froth on the surface? What really divides us? Is it really the case that “they are evil” as so many on both sides claim? That is too easy, too convenient, and too dangerous a notion to embrace, as Solzhenitsyn taught us:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

So this isn’t about getting worked up in fiery indignation at the latest provocation of the other side. Instead, let’s ask the question: what does it mean to have a flag in one’s window, or flying over one’s house, or — more significantly still — over our municipal or church buildings? To answer that question, we need to back up a bit and consider what a flag signifies.

In the last episode of the Masters of the Air series, documenting the story of the 100th Bomber wing of the American forces, captured airmen in a Nazi POW camp rise up against their captors as the allied forces close in. As the fighting subsides, one of the main characters of the show decides to make a bold and symbolic move. He finds himself a contraband American flag, climbs up a wooden structure, tears down the Nazi swastika that had been flying over the camp and raises the stars and stripes amid triumphant shouts and swelling orchestral music. It’s a moving scene (viewer discretion: Violence).

Flags have always carried symbolic weight, not only in their visual designs but also in their usage. To raise a flag over a place is to claim it, and to declare that place’s submission to the authority to which the flag points. To choose to display a flag is an inherently powerful statement of allegiance.

So what does the rainbow flag signify? That question could be answered in a number of different ways. Some would say it means equality and the freedom to love whomever one wants, and to be whoever one feels he or she (or they?) is inside. Others would say it means sexual perversion and the wholesale rejection of both traditional morality and even more fundamentally the binary of male and female.

But I would like to argue that at a deeper level, the flag really represents a rejection of classical metaphysics, the belief that nature has a given shape and order which must be discovered and honoured. Trying to engage this topic on the level of sexual morality is a dead end. The differences are too fundamental. Instead, I’ve found that tackling the topic from the lens of philosophy is less personal and heated.

This is street-level philosophy to be sure. I’m not qualified to debate academic philosophy, nor do I have any desire to. But philosophy at a more basic level is thinking carefully about the nature of the world, knowledge, and reality. One of the major fault lines we find in philosophy is that between nominalism and realism.

In short, nominalism argues that the material world takes the shape it does rather accidentally, and that the names (nomen in the Latin) we give things are arbitrary. There is therefore no reason why trees shouldn’t be boiled down to green soup and no reason why we cannot take it upon ourselves to reshape and reconfigure ourselves and our world to suit the desires we find within.

Realism, on the other hand, believes that the shape of the world and everything in it is purposeful — has telos. Therefore everything has a nature that informs its shape, function, and proper purpose. In this view, there is a moral imperative attached to the world, which is to honour the design and purpose of the world.

These ways of thinking are rarely discussed but they nevertheless function as deeply-held assumptions about the world that shape our moral intuitions. Returning to the LGBT Rainbow flag discussion, I would argue that to embrace the ideology of that flag is to embrace a radical form of nominalism.

Framing this discussion along the lines of philosophy has at least two positives that I can see. First, it gets away from arguing about morality and religion, which is often a dead end. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking about religion and morality, but when engaging someone on the other side of this issue, it’s been my experience that we get nowhere at all. Second, it draws a distinction that doesn’t run cleanly along religious lines. What I mean is that some Christians are clearly nominalists, like progressive Christians who find ways to embrace the LGBT movement while holding on to some semblance of belief in Christ, while many secular atheists, Muslims, or non-religious types have a deeply held belief in realism which makes it impossible for them to get on board with the idea that a man can become a woman.

So what about those small-shop owners with the Rainbow flags in their windows? Perhaps some of them are true believers in the LGBT revolution, but many of them are probably just trying to run a small business and be left alone. The rainbow mafia, as some have called it, has all kinds of ways to pressure people to get on the ‘right side’ of this issue. Add to that the social dynamics of small towns, where everyone knows everyone, and also the Canadian temperament to be polite and avoid direct conflicts when possible, and you get many people saying, just like the Romanian greengrocers:

“I, the small business owner, live here and I know what I must do. I won’t be any trouble. I behave in the manner expected of me and put up the Rainbow flag. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace to sell my wares to townsfolk and tourists.“

But just like those suffering under communism, choosing to live by lies is a tragic mistake. It weakens and demoralizes the one who does it. It reinforces the power of the totalitarians, or in our case the soft totalitarians. I believe the flag represents a metaphysical lie, an incredibly damaging lie, and that it is good and right to resist the ideology which animates the LGBT movement, for the sake of our society, for the sake of those caught up in that ideology, and for the sake of the Truth. For Christians, that opposition ought to be both courageous and virtuous, which is not an easy balance to find. But hopefully a deeper understanding of the philosophical questions embedded in this front of the culture war can help us find that balance.