Book Review: Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 288 pp, ISBN: 9780310369127

Dreher’s book is important in itself: it is also significant for what it says about this cultural moment. Our lives may be more dominated than ever by technology and a narrowly instrumental rationality, but this only underscores the inability of either to satisfy our hunger for a sense of mystery, meaning, and purpose. By making reality seem plastic and rendering the self more porous to outside influence, the digital realm stimulates a generalised irrationalism seemingly at odds with the mindset embodied in its technological foundations. The overt apocalypticism of large parts of the climate movement; the quasi-religious symbolism that accompanied the demonstrations following the death of George Floyd; the elevation of Donald Trump to (delete as appropriate) folk devil/God-appointed saviour of America – the emotional tenor of the present often resembles that of the fourteenth century, with its contagious ecstasies and terrors, more than the sober bourgeois rationalism of the industrial age. Occult and Satanic symbolism has become mainstream in pop culture, while the US Congress is holding hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the polite term for UFOs). People are seeking meaning and enchantment and sometimes finding it in unexpected places, and Dreher is one among a number of contemporary writers who can be viewed as resuscitating traditional spiritual, symbolic and mythological paths to meaning and making them accessible to contemporary readers, while avoiding the pitfalls of New Age self-indulgence and pic-n-mix spirituality.