The Road to Normal Here's the hard part. There's nowhere to start except for where we are; and where we are is profoundly abnormal. For those who chafe at the concept of such a thing as 'Normality', we may as well start with the elephant in the room. You may be one of these people who believes normal is a relative concept; that what is normal in one time and place is not normal in another time and place. With regard to the lower case 'n' normal, I concede the point. What I am driving at with capital 'N' Normal is something different. We might describe it philosophically as man's form; theologically as man's telos . We could make the case that it is what is natural to man, and what is good for man, but these are harder claims to defend against the onslaught of nihilism and relativism we now face. Simply put, I would say the Normal man is the man who becomes what he is intended to be. He is the man who is suited for the No...
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July 10, 2021 On Rod Dreher and ' The Re-Magicking Of The World ' In his latest substack offering, Rod Dreher shares reflections on 're-enchantment' as he prepares for his own effort to write a book on the subject. Among other things, Dreher shares this quote from Jason Crawford's essay in the LA Review of Books ; Right away one notices how eager our contemporary writers are to identify all the things we are not asking for when we ask for re-enchantment. Look again at James K. A. Smith’s call for “an account of the world that is enchanted but not magical,” or Joshua Landy and Michael Saler’s call for an enchantment “that does not come at the cost of naïveté, irrationalism, or hypocrisy.” These sorts of exclusions abound in the literature; we’ll have our enchantment without the magic, please, and without too much atavistic instinct or childlike innocence. Indeed, writing about re-enchantment is a great challenge for the modern secularist and the modern Christian...