1. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand: And Other Essays (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 21.
2. The phrase “the shape of our ultimate concern” is lifted from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 427.
3. The phrase was used in a private conversation between Cameron and Os in 2014. For a full exploration of Guinness’s thoughts on culture, see Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 13-30, 73-89.
4. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 13, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day.
5. James K. A. Smith has helpfully compiled these terms into a glossary in his excellent primer How (Not) to Be Secular. For those intimidated by Taylor’s tome, we’d recommend beginning with Smith’s book How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014). For the glossary, see 140-43.
6. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis, IA: Hackett Publishing, 1989).
7. Taylor, Secular Age, 140.
8. Taylor, Secular Age, 38.
9. For an insightful exploration of this issue, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
10. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 206-7.
11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.
12. Taylor, Secular Age, 35.
13. Taylor, Secular Age, 35-43.
14. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner (London: Penguin Books, 1953), 51.
15. Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 21. Interestingly, Boersma also draws on Hopkins to illustrate the point, quoting from “God’s Grandeur.”
16. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Fontana Lions, 1980), 159.
17. It’s revealing that so many of our illustrations turn on technology. Our constellation of modern conveniences has completely changed the way we view personhood.
18. Roger Lundin, Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 112.
19. Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, quoted in Lundin, Beginning with the Word, 98.
20. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Lundin, Beginning with the Word, 105.
21. Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Crown, 2018), 419.
22. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 97-98.
23. Walt Disney, quoted in Molly McCormack, “The Big Problem with Disney’s Tomorrowland,” AllEars.net, March 20, 2019, http://allears.net/2019/03/20/the-big-problem-with-disneys-tomorrowland.
24. Lest you think this a straw man, one of our celebrities recently tweeted: “I love God. I believe in God. But I don’t believe my personal beliefs of which we can’t confirm should override scientific facts and what we can confirm.”
25. Stanley Hauerwas, Ware and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 18.
26. Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 48-49.
27. Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, Everyman’s Library (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 179.
28. For a haunting meditation on the link between poetry and survival, see Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven (New York: Vintage, 2014).
29. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 123.
30. Delbanco, Real American Dream, 114.
31. Lundin, Beginning with the Word, 223.
1. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 125.
2. Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (New York: Currency, 2017), 26-27.
3. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Bad Ideas and Good Intentions Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 53-77.
4. Chaucer, quoted in Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 166. Shattuck calls this tendency “the Wife of Bath Effect.”
1. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4.
2. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 144. Given Wallace’s considerable gifts as a writer, some readers may see his remarks here as slightly disingenuous. He may not have Austin’s skills on the tennis court, but, unlike him, most of us will never know what it feels like to be the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
3. Wallace, Consider the Lobster, 152.
4. Patrick Radden Keefe, “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast,” New Yorker, February 13, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/anthony-bourdains-moveable-feast.
5. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 53; emphasis added.
6. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 26.
7. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), 154.
8. Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined and Explained (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 232. For a vivid illustration of the distinction between savoir and connaître drawn from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, see Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 2-8.
9. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 32-33.
1. Harold L. Senkbeil, The Care of Souls: Cultivating A Pastor’s Heart (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), xvii.
2. Senkbeil, Care of Souls, 115.
3. Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 21.
4. Gregory of Nyssa, quoted in Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 27.
5. Peter Kreeft, Making Sense Out of Suffering (Cincinnati, OH: Servant Books, 1986), 51.
6. For an illuminating and hilarious takedown of the self-help cottage industry, see Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Picador, 2000).
7. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), 236.
1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 ), 216.
2. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216.
3. Batman, directed by Tim Burton (Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 1989).
4. Blaise Pascal, quoted in Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées, Edited, Outlined and Explained (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 28; emphasis added.
1. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013).
2. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 54.
3. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Touchstone, 1998).
4. John Milton, quoted in Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2018), 15.
5. Milton, quoted in Prior, On Reading Well, 14-15.
6. Os Guinness, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1996), 23.
1. Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 3.
2. C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012), 26.
3. Dallas Willard, The Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2012), 30.
4. John Stott, The Radical Disciple: Some Neglected Aspects of Our Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 19.
5. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 28.
6. James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 14-15.
1. Hans Boersma, “Fear of the Word,” First Things, August 2019, www.firstthings.com/article/2019/08/fear-of-the-word.
2. Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God’s Purpose For Your Life (Nashville: W Publishing, 2018), 5.
1. For a fulsome exposition of the term expressive individualism, see Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 32-35, 333-34.
2. Carcass, “This Is Your Life,” Heartwork, Earache Records, 1993.
3. For a journalistic account of the real-life mayhem behind the scenes, see Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, The Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground New Edition (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003).
4. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 322-76. For those intimidated by Taylor’s tome, I highly recommend James K. A. Smith’s primer How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014).
5. Adapted from Cameron McAllister, “Seeing is Bewildering: On the Condition of Cultural Oblivion,” RZIM, www.rzim.org/read/rzim-global/seeing-is-bewildering-on-the-condition-of-cultural-oblivion. Used by permission of RZIM.
6. McAllister, “Seeing is Bewildering.”
7. Philip Larkin, “Church Going,” The Top 500 Poems, ed. William Harmon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1,069.
8. See Philip Salim Francis, When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017). It is my contention that this abiding influence shows that the United States is not post-Christian.
9. Fair warning to adventurous Googlers: this band’s visuals are as obscene as they are blasphemous.
10. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 171-76.
11. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 12.
12. Charles Taylor, quoted in Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 173.
13. For a crash course, visit Dave Stopera, “What You Think You Look Like Vs. What You Actually Look Like,” BuzzFeed, May 31, 2012, www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/what-you-think-you-look-like-vs-what-you-actually.
14. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1967), 67.
1. Mark O’Connell, “Death Watch,” New Yorker, December 3, 2013, www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/deathwatch.
2. Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 2.
3. Spike Jonze’s Her is a particularly striking example.
4. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 134.
5. “Practical atheism” is Craig M. Gay’s phrase. For an incisive exploration of the topic, see his The Way of the (Modern) World.
6. Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 134-35.
7. In a delightfully snarky comment, Mary Midgley points out that Skinner can be counted among that esteemed group of shy, socially awkward men who attempted to enshrine their temperament as scientific law: “[Skinner’s Utopia] is not a scientific dream. It is merely the dream of a shy, unsocial scientist.” Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Strange Fears (London: Routledge, 2002), 41.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Roger Lundin, Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 105.
9. John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 126-27.
10. Kara Powell and Steven Argue, Growing With: Every Parent’s Guide to Helping Teenagers Thrive in Their Faith, Family, and Future (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2019), 28.
11. Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 29.
12. Leticia Miranda, “An Ivy League Professor Shared a CV of Failures Because You’re Not the Only One Who Screws Up,” BuzzFeed, April 29, 2016, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/acad-epic-fail.
13. American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes (Glendale, CA: Dreamworks, 1999).
14. “Discernment,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed May 5, 2019, www.etymonline.com/search?q=discernment.
15. See the Gemological Institute’s website: https://4cs.gia.edu/en-us/4cs-diamond-quality.
16. “Diamond Cut,” Gemological Institute of America, accessed June 2, 2020, https://4cs.gia.edu/en-us/diamond-cut.
17. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 92.
18. Richard Bauckham, quoted in Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 92.
19. For the full transcript, see David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” FS (blog), 2005, https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water.
20. See Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017).
21. Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Picador, 2000), 164.
22. Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (New York: HarperOne, 1991), 74.
23. Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, 70.
24. Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, 32.
25. Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, 71.
26. Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, 72.
1. The notion that the cross mitigates divine violence only serves to underscore the deep biblical ignorance of our time. Since the cross is the ultimate site of divine violence, repairing to its bloody precincts whenever we’re confronted by God’s wrath amounts to little more than begging the question.
2. Opening epigraph to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (New York, Vintage International, 1998).
3. Percy, Moviegoer, 11.
4. Percy, Moviegoer, 13.
5. Percy, Moviegoer, 10.
6. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York: HarperOne, 1997), 416.
7. Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 415-16.
8. David Foster Wallace, Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 59.
9. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 107.
10. For an exploration of Wallace’s Augustinian overtones, see James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 22-27.
11. Wallace, quoted in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 24.
12. “He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally.” Augustine, St. Augustine on Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21.
13. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 107.
14. William Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 155.
15. David Foster Wallace, quoted in Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), 286.
16. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 347.
17. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 369.
18. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 7.
19. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 349.
20. Thomas Hopko, “55 Maxims of the Christian Life,” Holy Cross Orthodox Church, accessed June 3, 2020, https://holycrossoca.org/newslet/0907.html.
21. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 350.
22. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 349.
23. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 26.
24. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 2.
25. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Old Tappan, NJ: Spire Books, 1971), 46.
26. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 52.
27. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 53.
28. John Bunyan, quoted in William Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 161.
29. Adapted from Cameron McAllister, “Worthy to See,” previously printed in Just Thinking: The Quarterly Magazine of RZIM 21.3, www.rzim.org/read/just-thinking-magazine/worthy-to-see. Used by permission of RZIM.
30. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 2003). Paradiso XXXIII, 33, 99, my emphasis.
31. Alighieri, Paradiso XXXIII, 116.
32. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 39.
33. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 29-30, 40-41.
34. Alighieri, Paradiso XXXIII, 109-114, my emphasis.
35. C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (Glasgow, United Kingdom: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1951), 124.
1. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25.
2. Griffin Paul Jackson, “The Top Reasons Young People Drop Out of Church,” Christianity Today, January 15, 2019, www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/january/church-drop-out-college-young-adults-hiatus-lifeway-survey.html.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), 98.
4. Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, 95.
5. Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, 110.
6. Roger Lundin, “Modern Literature,” YouTube, December 16, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdmQw8FlG_o.
7. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York: HarperOne, 1998), 283; emphasis added.
8. Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (New York: HarperOne, 1991), 5.
9. Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, 86.
10. James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 16.
11. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 53-77.
12. Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survivor’s Guide for a World at Odds (New York: Currency, 2017), 82-83.
13. Some of the titles here include Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017); Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2017); and Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World (New York: Henry Holt, 2017).
14. Smith, Awaiting the King.
15. David Gooding, True to the Faith: The Acts of the Apostles: Defining and Defending the Faith (Coleraine, Northern Ireland: Myrtlefield House, 2013), 42.
1. Roger Lundin, “Modern Literature,” YouTube, December 16, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdmQw8FlG_o.