One of the odd gifts of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the way that it enchants the world for the reader . . . only to see that enchantment end as the story draws to a close.  A compounded sense of loss, indeed.  In the vein of Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith argues that modernity has “flattened” and “disenchanted” the world.  His argumentation in You Are What You Love is a kind of response to that . . . a suggestion of how Christians might go about “re-enchanting” the world.

. . . now that the whole world has been disenchanted and we have been encased in a flattened “nature,” I expect it will be forms of reenchanted Christianity that will actually have a future. Protestant excoriation has basically ceded its business to others: if you are looking for a message, an inspirational idea, some top-up fuel for your intellectual receptacle— well, there are entire cultural industries happy to provide that . . .

But what might stop people short— what might truly haunt them— will be encounters with religious communities who have punched skylights in our brass heaven. It will be “ancient” Christian communities— drawing on the wells of historic, “incarnate” Christian worship with its smells and bells and all its Gothic peculiarity, embodying a spirituality that carries whiffs of transcendence— that will be strange and therefore all the more enticing . . . Because when the thin gruel of do-it-yourself spirituality turns out to be isolating, lonely, and unable to endure crises, the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd might find itself surprisingly open to something entirely different. In ways that they never could have anticipated, some will begin to wonder if “renunciation” isn’t the way to wholeness, if freedom might be found in the gift of constraint, and if the strange rituals of Christian worship are the answer to their most human aspirations. What Christian communities need to cultivate in our “secular age” is faithful patience, even receiving a secular age as a gift through which to renew and cultivate an incarnational, embodied, robustly orthodox Christianity that alone will look like a genuine alternative to “the spiritual.”

(image from theonering.net)