Somalian-born author and erstwhile New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali caused quite a flutter in several dovecotes the other day when she published an essay announcing that she had given up atheism and converted to Christianity. The Christian writers I’ve read who discussed her essay were of course pleased by it, while most of the others…
Tag: disenchantment
Science as Enchantment
All things considered, this may seem like an odd time to start talking again about the nature, history, and future of enchantment. That was one of the core themes I explored in posts during the first half of the year, granted, and I had much more to say about it when the pressures of a…
Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason
Over the last month, in the course of these biweekly essays, I’ve been exploring the fear of the metaphysical realm well expressed by Naomi Wolf in one of her recent Substack posts. A more recent post by her on the same theme takes the same discussion further, in a way that deserves respect. She took…
Beyond Thaumatophobia 2: The Night Forest
Two weeks ago we explored an intriguing essay by Naomi Wolf, which pointed out that it’s no longer possible to discuss our current collective situation without saying something about metaphysical issues. That’s a gutsy thing to say these days; it’s also true. These two points are closely related. In an era where the most important…
Beyond Thaumatophobia, Part One: A Door Into Springtime
Naomi Wolf, one of the few journalists who responded to the Covid-19 phenomenon by doing what journalists are theoretically supposed to do and asking hard questions about the party line pushed by government and corporate flacks, has continued to follow that shocking act of independent thought into wider territories. It’s been quite something to watch. …
The Myth of Modernity
A few weeks ago I took the time to reread the book that launched my current sequence of posts about enchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm’s intriguing study The Myth of Disenchantment. One test of a book’s value is whether it can handle being read more than once. Josephson-Storm’s book stands up well to that test. Each time…
When Nature Gazes Back
It’s been a month since I last posted on the theme of disenchantment, and a lively month at that. The cracks in America’s global empire have become increasingly visible around the world. Here at home the mentally challenged resident of the White House continues to blunder through a vague approximation of his constitutional duties while…
The Reign of Quantity
English princes should not take American brides. The experiment has been tried twice now and the results are in: the princes become whiny and petulant, while the brides become arrogant and shrill. Since the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Sussex had very little in common before their respective marriages, and their duchesses had…
The Destiny of Disenchantment
The last three posts in our ongoing discussion of the history of enchantment have examined the work of three influential writers on the history of consciousness—Ken Wilber, Owen Barfield, and Jean Gebser. All three of them, as we’ve seen, discuss the state of consciousness summed up in the word “enchantment,” the condition in which the…
Against Enchantment 3: Jean Gebser
In the months just passed I’ve pursued an exploration of the myth of disenchantment—the notion that our civilization, for the first time in human history, has shaken off the comforting daydreams of myth and magic in order to see the universe in all its cold and uncaring reality. So far, in the course of that…