Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1090 ｜ Demon Possession, Occult Obsession & the Real JD Vance ｜ Guest： Rod Dreher

00:00:00.800 Why are so many young people today fleeing to the occult? Well, Raj Ware, the author of The

00:00:06.740 Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, has the answer in his new book, Living in Wonder,

00:00:13.600 Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. Today, so many Christians only look to the physical, 1.00

00:00:22.580 the visible, the provable as an explanation for what happens and why. Sometimes even we Christians

00:00:31.300 forget about the spiritual reality all around us. We forget about the enchantment that is intrinsic

00:00:38.040 in Christianity. This book reminds us of that with some really powerful testimonies.

00:00:44.880 Raj and I will also get into this election. He has good personal friends with J.D. Vance. He's got

00:00:50.280 some thoughts on what is at stake this election and the spiritual reality surrounding it.

00:00:56.880 This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com,

00:01:00.900 code Allie. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.

00:01:13.240 Rod, thanks so much for joining me again. It's good to have you back on the show.

00:01:17.320 Let's start by talking about your new book. It just came out on Tuesday, Living in Wonder. What is

00:01:26.580 this? Why'd you write it?

00:01:28.040 It's a book about the Christian experience of wonder, of awe, as the foundation for our Christian

00:01:35.220 faith. I wrote it, I didn't conceive of it as part of the trilogy that began with Benedict Option,

00:01:41.120 then Live Not by Lies, but it turns out to have been that. The thing that concerns me most of all as

00:01:45.920 a believer and as one who's engaged in the public square is whether or not the Christian church will

00:01:51.720 be able to make it through these post-Christian times. And the Benedict Option was more about

00:01:57.500 local church, families, homeschool, things like that. Live Not by Lies is more about persecution.

00:02:02.720 This is about recovering the core of religious Christian experience, which is the experience of

00:02:08.820 the living God. And I talk in the book about how we in the West lost that idea that God is everywhere

00:02:15.860 present and fills all things and how we can get it back and why we need to get it back. I end the book

00:02:22.620 by talking about the occult and how so many young people are moving into the occult and into psychedelic

00:02:29.600 drugs, which is adjacent to the occult, seeking that experience of transcendence, of wonder that they

00:02:35.740 don't think they can get in the church. We in the church have to do our very best to recover that

00:02:42.520 sense of enchantment. And by enchantment, I don't mean, Allie Beth, the idea of sprinkling fairy dust

00:02:48.020 and everything looks magical. No, enchantment, in the way I use it, is simply the feeling that God is

00:02:54.580 present and that everything has meaning, that there is ultimate transcendent meaning that we can know and

00:03:01.040 relate to. You set up the context that we're living in right now as the church, and you describe

00:03:08.520 Christianity as a faith that's in crisis. As you just described, people are looking for something

00:03:14.380 bigger, something deeper, something transcendent. And even if they're going to church and they're

00:03:20.240 reading their Bible, you talk about some encounters with some young Christians where they're telling you,

00:03:25.540 it just feels like something's missing and I just need something more. So set that up for us. What

00:03:32.960 does it look like right now in the church? Sure. I was approached in Hungary where I live in Europe by

00:03:38.140 an American exchange student who said, look, I'm a committed evangelical. I believe it all. I know my

00:03:42.920 Bible, but I'm craving something more. It feels like I'm living in a spiritual desert. Can you help me?

00:03:49.460 And it's not hard to understand why that is for so many of us Christians, especially those of my

00:03:54.560 generation and older. The Christian experience has been mostly about learning the Bible, learning your

00:04:01.220 catechism, going to church, being involved in public life, fighting abortion or whatever. And all of that

00:04:06.880 is good. But if we miss the ultimate, what should be at the center of it, an experience of the living

00:04:13.980 God, then all the rest of it can feel very dry. And I think that's what a lot of Christians are feeling

00:04:19.460 today. The young generation, Generation Z and some of the younger millennials are falling away from the faith

00:04:25.880 in huge numbers. But they're not saying they're becoming atheists. That's really interesting. They're

00:04:31.400 spiritual but not religious. And as I said earlier, we find that they're going towards the occult to some

00:04:36.940 degree or the other. And this is a crisis for the church because these young people are not wrong to want to

00:04:42.820 sink some sort of numinous. That's a great theological word. It just means mysterious and

00:04:47.800 transcendent experience of God because that is at the core of all true religious experience, that

00:04:53.960 connection with Almighty God and experience of God. They can go into the wrong way easily, and that's

00:05:01.100 happening. But that's why we in the church have to go back to our roots. If you go back to the book of

00:05:06.640 Acts, for example, I was in Ephesus a couple years ago on a trip to the sites of the seven churches of

00:05:13.020 Revelation. And I was standing there in Ephesus reading Acts 19 right there at the theater where

00:05:18.800 it all happened, where the Ephesians said, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. And I noticed that when

00:05:25.620 Paul and the others went there, the evangelists, to try to convert the city, they were converting people

00:05:31.280 by casting out demons, by doing miraculous healings, things like that. I really do believe

00:05:36.980 that we, today, the church is in a situation much more like the early church than at any time

00:05:42.460 since the West went over to the Christian faith. And we're going to have to get back in touch with that. 0.95

00:05:48.780 So by living in wonder and seeing the enchantment that is in the Christian faith, do you mean

00:05:54.680 signs and miracles and healing? Or what does that look like?

00:05:58.180 I do mean signs and miracles and healing and being open to that. But I also mean everyday

00:06:03.880 enchantment, the idea that God is with us, that nothing is without meaning. Nihilism is the great

00:06:12.420 curse of our time, the idea that nothing has meaning at all. And it's so easy to fall into when you live

00:06:19.680 in this culture, this post-Christian, in fact, anti-Christian culture. But not everybody is going

00:06:25.640 to have an experience of a miracle, of a sign. I tell some great stories in that book about people

00:06:31.200 who do. My favorite story, by the way, if I can tell it, is came from a young Italian I met. He lives

00:06:38.720 in Spain now, but 32 years old, teaches in a high school. He was raised in an atheist family in Rome,

00:06:44.640 hardcore communist. And he, in fact, he said he was a champion blasphemer when he was in high school.

00:06:52.040 Then he gets to college, meets some Christians, and begins thinking maybe they know something. But he 0.89

00:06:56.260 resisted. He told me that he had started seeing around the city of Rome some guy who would look

00:07:03.360 at him through a crowd, and he said, something's going on. One night, just before Christmas, he and

00:07:08.280 his cousin got out of a car. They parked their car. They were going to a party. They saw a homeless

00:07:14.400 man on the other side of the street. He looked at them. The homeless man looked at them, rose up,

00:07:19.860 walked over, and said to him, Stefano, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.

00:07:24.220 I want to tell you that from this day forward, you will follow the Lord Jesus Christ. He sent me to

00:07:29.760 tell you that you have nothing to fear. And then this homeless man started telling Stefano all of his

00:07:35.260 sins and inner struggles. Stefano told me I started crying. And I said, are you an angel? And he just

00:07:41.420 smiled at me. I said, well, what can I call you? He said, you can call me Felice Natale, Merry Christmas.

00:07:48.060 Remember, this was just before Christmas. Then Felice Natale fell on his knees, raised his hands,

00:07:53.220 and began to say the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer. After each line of the Lord's Prayer, he added these

00:08:00.020 incredibly elaborate praises of the Holy Trinity. Then when he finished, he rose, bowed, and

00:08:06.280 disappeared. Well, Stefano converted. And not only did he convert, but he brought his entire family,

00:08:11.680 even his hardcore communist father, to the faith, to Christ. Now, that sort of thing is not going to

00:08:17.520 happen to most people. But if we can meet people to whom it has happened and trust them, then it can

00:08:24.540 strengthen our faith, our walk with Christ. But to us, to most ordinary people, we can't make

00:08:30.700 enchantment happen. But what we can do is form ourselves from day-to-day spiritual discipline

00:08:37.760 to be open and receptive to the Lord appearing in our lives in more ordinary ways.

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00:09:44.560 code relate. You know, within Protestantism, there is the debate between cessationism and

00:09:54.180 continuationism. Cessationism generally meaning that you believe that speaking in tongues and the laying

00:10:00.580 on of hands and the miracles, that that work as something that was common is past. And continuationism,

00:10:11.260 of course, more charismatic Christians believe that all of those signs and wonders and miracles still

00:10:18.780 and do happen today and can actually be a confirmation of someone's true Christianity and true faith. And so

00:10:25.600 there's some debate in that. I am of the Reformed Protestant subdivision of Christianity, and something

00:10:35.000 we care about a lot is good doctrine and understanding Scripture forward and backward, and I'm very

00:10:41.260 appreciative of that. But I do find myself, even as someone who knows Ephesians 6, that tells us that

00:10:48.240 the principalities are, the spiritual principalities are at play, that this is a fight, a battle between

00:10:56.740 good and evil. I find myself negating spiritual reality sometimes when it comes to spiritual warfare

00:11:04.080 or a spiritual explanation for things. I find myself always looking for the more practical reason for

00:11:11.980 something, and my more maybe charismatic-leaning friends, I'll be talking to them about something,

00:11:17.240 and they'll send me attacks, and be like, well, you know, that's probably a spiritual attack, because

00:11:21.180 you've got this going on, and this is what you're trying to do, and Satan doesn't want that, or

00:11:26.540 Satan hates the family, he hates marriage, and God loves these things. And so I have to be reminded

00:11:32.700 of that. Is that part of what you're talking about, just recognizing the spiritual eternal reality that

00:11:39.780 is always at play underneath the ordinary and seen world?

00:11:44.180 You got it. That's exactly right. I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian. We don't believe in speaking 0.90

00:11:50.040 in tongues and the things that our Pentecostal brothers and sisters do, but we do believe that

00:11:56.000 there is no necessary opposition between good doctrine and these experiences. But these experiences

00:12:04.580 have to be understood and grounded in good doctrine and in the things we know to be true doctrinally.

00:12:11.600 That helps us discern whether or not they are real or a hallucination or of Satan. But, you know,

00:12:17.740 I tell a story in the book about these good friends of mine. I used to live in New York City,

00:12:22.140 and I knew this couple. I call them Nathan and Emma in the book. And they were solid Catholics,

00:12:28.040 very conservative, involved in the pro-life movement, fancy Upper East Side people. Well,

00:12:32.700 it turns out I had lost touch when I moved from New York. A few years ago, Nathan called me,

00:12:37.220 and he said, listen, I've got something strange to tell you. You're going to find this hard to

00:12:41.880 believe, but hear me out. My wife is possessed. Like, what? It's a long story, but basically, 0.84

00:12:49.680 it turns out her grandfather back in Italy had been a high-level occultist and had brought

00:12:54.140 a curse onto the family, a deep curse. And it had manifested through her after she tried to kill

00:13:00.540 herself. And she went to a healing prayer service, and the demons manifested through her.

00:13:06.120 I ended up going to New York.

00:13:08.100 I don't even know what that means. Manifest through her because of a curse of her grandfather.

00:13:13.440 Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? And they had never thought about this. You know,

00:13:17.280 they were very doctrinal Catholics, but her grandfather back in Italy had offered his

00:13:24.120 descendants to the devil for money and power, which he got, but it destroyed the rest of the family.

00:13:31.020 Wow.

00:13:31.640 In any case, in the story I tell, I went to see them once. I was in New York. I went to

00:13:36.060 visit them, and she manifested in front of me sitting in their apartment on the priest's side. 0.85

00:13:39.940 And what does that mean?

00:13:40.660 At one point, her husband had told me in my ear, he said, I'm going to go get lemonade at one point.

00:13:47.980 I'm going to put in my pocket a relic of the true cross that a priest had given me,

00:13:52.040 you know, for protection in these times. And I know you're reformed, but just hang with me.

00:13:55.700 I know. I'm trying to hang with you.

00:13:57.760 I'm trying to hang with you.

00:13:58.840 This priest was an exorcist. And when the guy, the husband, brought the lemonade out and set it on the

00:14:03.820 table, the wife, Emma, was in mid-conversation with me. She dropped her head like this. When she 0.89

00:14:10.420 looked up, her face was not her own. She looked at her husband and cursed him and said, get that 0.82

00:14:15.700 blankety-blank thing away from me. I told you, don't bring it. You couldn't see it. It was hidden.

00:14:20.700 She dropped her head back and looked at me. She was herself again and said, I'm so sorry. That is

00:14:25.980 not me. I said, I know.

00:14:27.080 Well, I never get the chills and I do have the chills right now.

00:14:31.280 Well, Allie Beth, that night when her husband was walking me back to my hotel, I said, man,

00:14:37.020 how has this changed you? You know, again, Upper East Side stockbroker, you know, they don't know

00:14:42.760 funny business. He said, now when I walk up and down the streets of Manhattan, I realize that there

00:14:48.180 is a great spiritual battle going on all around us that we can't see, but it's there. I saw how it

00:14:54.320 caught my wife. The good news is she was delivered, but you know how she was delivered?

00:14:59.020 The exorcist thought at one point, wait a minute, you were baptized in Italy in 1970. There was a lot

00:15:05.340 of funny liberal stuff going on in the Catholic church then. Let's just re-baptize you in case

00:15:10.280 you weren't baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. They did that. Boom. 90% of it 0.87

00:15:15.900 went away and she was delivered of the rest of it. Now, I tell you that story, but not only because

00:15:20.380 it's true, but because it testifies to how the spiritual world really does barge into our normal,

00:15:27.480 settled lives in ways that we aren't expecting. Again, I wouldn't have expected this family. They

00:15:33.120 are so conservative and faithful, went to church every week, and yet this touched them.

00:15:39.180 What are generational curses? Our charismatic and Pentecostal friends know a lot about it,

00:15:44.220 and some of the Catholic exorcists who work are dealing with this all the time. But this is just

00:15:49.620 part of our reality, and Alibeth is going to become a greater part of our reality as more and more people

00:15:55.780 in Western civilization fall away from the Christian faith and embrace evil. 0.94

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00:17:15.620 Let's talk about what you've already mentioned, young people going toward the occult. When we see

00:17:23.380 those statistics that you've already cited that young people are becoming spiritual, not irreligious

00:17:30.700 necessarily, not atheist, but also not Christian, how much of that is accounted for by the occult

00:17:40.180 and even cult-like practices?

00:17:43.200 Yeah, this is something I really learned. I'm in my mid-50s, and a man approached me in Oxford

00:17:49.140 a couple years ago, a guy named Daniel Kim. He is an Anglican seminarian from the evangelical

00:17:55.300 tradition, 27 years old, and he said to me, I need to let you know that the new atheism is not

00:18:01.880 the enemy you think it is. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, your generation thinks that's the

00:18:06.520 problem. It was the problem 10, 20 years ago, not anymore. He said, in my generation, the problem is

00:18:12.820 the occult. Nobody, he knows, he said, has anything, any interest in new atheism, but they're all engaged

00:18:20.120 in some degree or another with the occult. He told me that before he went to seminary, he worked in

00:18:25.040 advertising in London. He said, I was the only Christian in my office. Well, that's no surprise,

00:18:30.280 it's advertising, it's London. But he said, every other person there was an occultist. There were

00:18:36.200 even two open Satanists who defined Satanism as learning to live your most fully human life.

00:18:43.020 And he went on to say to me, Daniel Kim, the seminarian, he said, I know that I'm going to be

00:18:48.140 dealing with this for the rest of my ministry. And I'm telling you, he said, pointing to me,

00:18:53.740 you have got to let the church know that this is where the battle is right now, not the battles of

00:18:58.660 20, 30, 40 years ago, but right here on the front lines. And when I tell, I've told that story as I've

00:19:05.900 met younger people, Gen Z folks over my travels, they all shake their head, oh yeah. And then they'll 1.00

00:19:11.680 tell stories of the people in their high school or their college, things they're doing. I just came here

00:19:16.460 from Birmingham, Alabama. I talked to a young Baptist undergraduate who said he knows so many

00:19:23.180 young women who are taking the Greek gods as their sort of, I don't know, sort of like what a Catholic 0.96

00:19:30.020 would call a patron saint. Like, are you serious? He said, oh yeah, it's not just a symbolic thing,

00:19:35.140 they really are trying to relate to the Greek gods. Birmingham, Alabama.

00:19:39.840 Yeah, that doesn't, it doesn't really surprise me. I mean, we were raised in a time, you know, I was,

00:19:47.600 I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. And even some of this was alive and well then at such an

00:19:54.900 early age, reading the magazines that tell you your astrological sign, the little power beads that were

00:20:04.620 supposed to signify some kind of superpower that you could have if you were wearing a certain kind of

00:20:10.260 color, even the mood rings that were supposed to tell you what mood you're in and what activities you

00:20:15.700 should be doing based on how you're feeling that day. And of course, with the rise of social media, all of the

00:20:22.160 personality quizzes that told you who you really were and what you should be doing in your life. There's a lot of

00:20:30.100 God of self that we, I mean, you could say that that's been alive and well since the garden,

00:20:37.200 but certainly this trendy narcissism that has manifested itself in a kind of spiritualism

00:20:43.180 and witchcraft and Satanism, all of these kind of religious practices that tell you,

00:20:49.460 you can be your own God. There is something bigger and better that you can tap into, but it's not out

00:20:56.980 there. It's inside you and I can help you unlock that and unleash that. And once you unleash your

00:21:03.920 inner goddess, then you will get everything you want. That's what I see. And you even see it through

00:21:09.320 self-help and self-empowerment books. It's not blatantly satanic, or at least doesn't look like

00:21:15.920 that. It's usually in pink and sparkly. That's just it. It's not blatantly satanic, but that's what it is.

00:21:22.120 I have a long interview in Living in Wonder with a young man I call Jonah, who's an academic,

00:21:28.220 highly trained in religious studies. He started out as a dissatisfied high school evangelical. He said

00:21:34.540 that his pastor couldn't answer the questions he had. So he went out on a quest on his own,

00:21:40.620 started reading a lot of esoteric books, and ended up as a full-blown occultist,

00:21:45.100 worshiping the devil. He didn't think it was a devil. He thought these were the ancient gods who would

00:21:49.920 help him. Deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, which are a huge thing now in our culture.

00:21:56.240 While he was a professor, you said?

00:21:57.880 Yeah. I don't know if he's working as a professor now, but he has got a PhD.

00:22:03.360 But he said it was only when he realized, oh my God, I'm worshiping demons, that he turned from it,

00:22:10.800 left, and became a Christian. And he gives advice in the book for pastors and families,

00:22:16.120 things you need to know. He said, not once when I was in the occult did we see the Christian church

00:22:21.920 as an enemy. They were totally clueless as to what was really going on. And he said, we can't

00:22:27.860 be that way anymore. You've got to wake up. He knows it from the other side. And that's one of

00:22:33.180 the things I hope to do with this book. This book is mostly hopeful and on the positive side. It's not

00:22:38.320 all about the occult, but the occult is such a big part of it because it is false enchantment.

00:22:43.420 I talked to someone in Birmingham the other day who lives in the South. She and her husband live

00:22:50.900 in an area where there are a lot of academics and scientists. And she told me that this is

00:22:55.940 everywhere there among the scientists. The scientists are turning to the occult. They don't call it that,

00:23:00.980 but that's what it is. She said now in our cul-de-sac, in the old days, used to go out and sit there

00:23:07.340 and have a fire and people would drink beer or wine and fellowship. Now they're doing that,

00:23:12.980 but smoking marijuana and doing psychedelics. And these are scientists. She came to see me in

00:23:20.720 Birmingham. She said, I want you to know that you're onto something. This is happening. This

00:23:25.340 is happening among the elites. They're being dragged into this worship of the self. And they're doing it

00:23:30.500 not only through psychedelics and drug use, but through technology. One of the crazy things I

00:23:35.860 learned working on this book is how a lot of people in the top of the U.S. government and national

00:23:41.820 security and defense, as well as in Silicon Valley, believe that UFOs are real. I laughed at this. I've

00:23:48.280 laughed at this all my life, but they're like, no, no, no. You need to pay attention. They don't

00:23:52.280 believe that they are people from or creatures from other planets. They believe these are

00:23:56.860 extradimensional beings who are trying to contact us. And, you know, listening to all this in their

00:24:03.020 language, their non-religious language, I'm like, they're talking about demons. And it's, I don't 1.00

00:24:08.820 want to be like a tabloid guy talking about seeing a demon behind everything, but it was crazy to learn

00:24:15.600 that there are people in Silicon Valley, I've confirmed this with several people who know,

00:24:20.640 who believe that, oh yes, the higher, the aliens are really higher entities who are leading us to

00:24:25.520 enlightenment. And they do seances to communicate with them. The Christian church used to know what

00:24:31.760 this was, and some of us still do. We have got to be aware of this. This is not just a fringe freak

00:24:37.580 phenomenon. This is happening right now, and we're not ready to defend ourselves.

00:24:42.680 Yes. You know, we recently had an ex-psychic on, and we had an ex-occultist on. It was this young

00:24:50.060 woman who believed her whole life that she was in conversation with aliens. And she was kind of a

00:24:57.400 lonely, troubled child, and she believed that these aliens really understood her and knew her.

00:25:02.340 And she followed these aliens her whole life into the occult and into this demonic satanic

00:25:08.960 practice. And to the point you were making earlier, she believed that she could basically

00:25:14.520 syncretize this with Christianity. She didn't really see a difference in it because they used 0.97

00:25:20.180 some Christian language like baptism and sanctification and things like that, but of course

00:25:25.440 used a perverse meaning. But eventually she was just so oppressed by these demonic forces. She was on a

00:25:33.840 ton of drugs. She was doing sex sacrifice rituals. I mean, this young woman so sad. And then finally, 0.69

00:25:41.980 one day she called out Jesus, and he saved her in a very dramatic way. And that is something that I

00:25:50.780 know in a lot of these testimonies is that it always involves a name, like involving the testimony

00:25:58.320 that you told me from the guy in Italy. You said that he told him a name that was his new name. And I've

00:26:05.240 noticed that very often the drastic testimonies involve either the person saying Jesus's name

00:26:11.480 and being delivered or someone that they didn't know somehow knowing their name. And this is, you know,

00:26:18.720 I'm coming from the Reformed evangelical perspective. And that is a key point that I see in so many of these

00:26:26.000 testimonies of people who were completely lost. Someone, some random interaction, someone locked eyes with

00:26:32.920 them and said, this is your name. What are you doing?

00:26:35.880 And it is incredible how God seems to work in that fashion.

00:26:42.560 You know, you talking about doctrine earlier, this is one of the things that got in the way of my

00:26:50.000 full conversion. I'm not doctrine personally, but intellectualism. When I was younger, a teenager in

00:26:56.760 the 80s, I grew up in South Louisiana. We were Eastern Christmas Methodists. We didn't take the

00:27:01.960 faith that seriously. You don't really have the Louisiana twang. I've got family from Louisiana, too.

00:27:08.340 Maybe you've grown out of it over time.

00:27:10.040 I've lived away from there for a lot of time, a lot of the years. But if I go back there, give me a couple of days.

00:27:16.600 I'm code switching. But anyway, by the time I got to be 15 or so, I thought that the church wasn't for me.

00:27:23.380 I thought that Christianity was either like the white middle class at prayer, being very quiet, 1.00

00:27:29.180 don't get too excited about this, or Jimmy Swaggart, who was a big deal back then, TV evangelism.

00:27:34.740 And then when I was 17, my mother won a trip to Europe in a church raffle, a guided tour. She

00:27:40.740 didn't want to go, so she sent me because I just wanted to go to Paris and see where Hemingway lived,

00:27:45.340 see the museums. I was the only young person on a bus full of elderly American tourists. I didn't care. 1.00

00:27:50.560 Bus pulls over on the way to Paris, about an hour outside the city, to go look at an old church.

00:27:56.440 I didn't even want to get off the bus and go see this old church, but I also didn't want to just

00:28:00.040 sit there for an hour. I followed the old people in. I was overwhelmed. This was the cathedral at

00:28:05.520 Chartres, which I didn't know then, growing up late 20th century, small town south, was one of the

00:28:10.700 great treasures of Christendom. It was a medieval Gothic cathedral. I stood there, Ali Beth, and looked

00:28:16.100 around at the stones and the stained glass, and I just knew that God was real and that He wanted me.

00:28:25.100 And it was just something to do with the presence of God in this temple built to His glory. 800 years

00:28:31.360 ago, my men whose names we have lost told me that the Lord spoke to me through that and tore down all

00:28:37.520 of my objections, intellectual objections. Now, I'd love to tell you that I walked out of that church

00:28:42.740 and became a Christian. I didn't, but I walked out of there on a search. I had a lot of dying

00:28:47.060 to self to do. The end of the search came six or seven years later when, as a young journalist in

00:28:52.220 Louisiana, I was sent to interview an elderly Catholic priest who had been born in the 1890s.

00:28:57.760 He was very old then, living in a home, to talk to him about his life before he became a Catholic

00:29:04.240 priest at age 50. He had been an artist and a famous art professor. I sat down there with that old man

00:29:09.660 who was just exuding peace. It was like light coming off of him. He was almost like Yoda,

00:29:14.680 a little short man. And I just asked him about his life. He told me about two miracles, actual

00:29:21.120 miracles he had seen that brought him out of his atheism and eventually convinced him to become

00:29:27.660 a priest. I sat there and listened to that. As a journalist, that old man started crying,

00:29:33.040 telling me about these events that happened over 50 years ago. And I left that interview thinking,

00:29:38.420 Lord, I have a decision to make. I want to believe. But for me, I was telling myself it was a matter of

00:29:45.100 intellectualism. But in fact, it was a matter of the heart. I didn't have the will to make the final

00:29:50.860 sacrifice to make Jesus my Lord. But seeing that old man and knowing that he was a witness and the

00:29:58.840 witness of his life, his changed life, convinced me that I've got to change too. And that was when I

00:30:04.640 got serious about God. But it took the experience of God in beauty and shatra, and then in the

00:30:12.200 embodied, the incarnate experience of God and this believer who had changed his life radically for

00:30:17.900 Christ. It took those things to open the door to propositional doctrinal truth.

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00:31:37.140 I was thinking as you were speaking about the miracles that were performed through the apostles in the

00:31:42.420 book of Acts, and I was just reading this the other day in my morning reading, and what miracles are for.

00:31:49.340 And you could see in the response of the people that witnessed the miracles, it's to confirm the

00:31:54.180 power of God, validate the truth of the gospel, to bring people not only to a place of worship, but

00:31:59.820 a place of wonder. And then also, it opened the door for the apostles to say,

00:32:05.800 yeah, the only reason we can do this is because of this guy, Jesus of Nazareth, that you killed,

00:32:11.260 by the way. And this is how we are able to perform these miracles. And then in the next chapter,

00:32:16.720 we see that the Sadducees were so angry about these miracles because they didn't believe that

00:32:22.040 anyone could raise from the dead. And they're talking about Jesus being raised from the dead.

00:32:25.680 And they try to exactly what you're saying, posit this intellectual rebuttal to the miracles. But

00:32:32.840 that's the thing about a miracle is that there's not really an intellectual rebuttal. It really is

00:32:38.420 a matter of faith, a matter of the heart, which of course, Jesus knew that it was a matter of the

00:32:43.220 heart for everyone, but including the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

00:32:46.620 You know, this is so true about all of us. You know, a lot of times we don't want to receive

00:32:51.260 the miracle or recognize a sign, an authentic sign, because it would cause us to change our life if

00:32:56.720 it was real. Jesus dealt with this. One of my favorite stories from the gospel is when he cast

00:33:01.540 the demons out of the demoniac in the graveyard, in Gerasene, and he cast them into the swine, 0.57

00:33:08.860 right? I would have thought that the people who live there would have seen this man who had been

00:33:15.360 enslaved to demons all of his life, restored to himself. They would have welcomed Jesus. But no,

00:33:20.680 they told him, get out of here. Because what did he do? He upset the settled order of things.

00:33:26.000 That is something so deep in human nature. I tell a story in the book about a man named Tobias Wolfe.

00:33:31.420 He's a famous American novelist who related a story of when he was in his 20s, he had been raised

00:33:37.340 Catholic and was kind of still enough Catholic to want to go volunteer at Lourdes one summer

00:33:42.620 to help people who could not get into the water seeking a cure to take the waters. And he tells a story,

00:33:49.300 I won't go into the whole thing now, but how he helped a two-year-old paralyzed girl. And he was

00:33:53.380 just so overwhelmed by the suffering she had and that she bore so faithfully that he sobbed over

00:34:00.920 her. Well, on the bus back from dropping her at the airport, he realized, oh my gosh, I can see.

00:34:07.160 Now, he had really bad vision, but he was too vain to wear glasses. He was a young man.

00:34:11.160 But his vision had been healed miraculously by God over the prayers he shed out of pity and love for

00:34:18.840 this little girl he was serving. Well, he said, I felt this overwhelming need to go to the grotto

00:34:23.500 at Lourdes and pray. And just to thank God for what happened. Gets back to the dorm where he was

00:34:28.820 staying. He ran into a friend, started to tell him about it. They didn't go to the grotto to pray.

00:34:33.560 Next morning, he woke up and his vision had been restored to it where he couldn't see again.

00:34:38.040 And he said, reflecting on this years later, the truth was, I didn't want the miracle. Of course,

00:34:43.360 I wanted to see. It was a great thing. But if I had thanked God and accepted the miracle,

00:34:48.360 then I would have had to repent and change my life in ways I didn't want to do. So I denied it.

00:34:53.500 And I thought, that is so human. In my own case, on my own journey to Christ, I had seen a couple of

00:34:59.960 things that I couldn't really explain that were testimonies to God's existence. But I rationalized it

00:35:06.540 away because I didn't want to sacrifice and make Christ my Lord. I wanted to approach God on my

00:35:12.760 own terms, but it never works that way. What is the difference between believing that God can do

00:35:19.740 anything? He can work how he want to. He can perform any miracle. And the mysticism that is

00:35:25.260 constantly thinking like, okay, when I was little, I would get so paranoid. And when you're little,

00:35:30.000 the worst thing that could possibly happen, your worst fear of something happening to your parents.

00:35:34.200 And I like had this, I think I was probably six years old. I had this paranoid idea in my mind

00:35:40.440 that if I like, I don't even remember what it was. It was something completely paranoid. Like if I

00:35:45.460 moved to this, then something's going to happen to my mom and dad. And thinking that their fate

00:35:51.220 somehow depends on me and being confused about what God is telling me, what real obedience looks like

00:35:57.220 versus legalism? How do we have faith that miracles can happen without thinking, well, all of it, God's

00:36:05.740 working, God's miracle working depends on every little thing I say or do? Because I would think

00:36:11.980 that that would negate grace and would probably create a lot of paranoia and legalism.

00:36:17.860 Sure. No, that is a fantastic question. I interviewed an exorcist in Rome at the Vatican who

00:36:24.620 told me, who drew this distinction. He said, we can't make God do what we want him to do. God is

00:36:31.240 not magic. It's all grace. God will come to us and reveal himself to us in his own time for his own

00:36:37.120 reasons. In the demonic, by contrast, they will come. Every time you call them, they will come.

00:36:42.740 They're going to enslave you, but they will come. As Christians, we have to live by faith and knowing

00:36:49.600 that God can and will do these things if he wants to. But if he doesn't do it, that doesn't mean he's

00:36:55.000 not there. I remember when my younger sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer back in 2010,

00:37:00.860 I flew down from Philadelphia on the day of her diagnosis and I was lying in bed at her house that

00:37:06.240 night praying and crying for her. I felt above me a presence. I think it was an angel that conveyed to

00:37:12.400 me, she's not going to make it, but don't be afraid. This is part of God's plan. I only told

00:37:17.900 my wife that. I didn't tell anybody else. I didn't want to discourage my sister. And she, in fact,

00:37:21.780 didn't make it. But knowing that God allowed this, was allowing her suffering for some mysterious way

00:37:29.640 for his greater glory, we can only know by faith, that gave me so much peace. And I have had small

00:37:36.180 miracles in my life. I've seen things happen that exorcists have done, manifestations of the enemy,

00:37:42.840 as I mentioned earlier. But if none of that had happened, I would still believe. And that's

00:37:48.100 important to know because these miracles, these signs, whether they're signs of God's presence or

00:37:53.700 signs of the demonic, they only mean something if they lead us to Jesus Christ. There are people who

00:38:00.680 go around searching for miracles, they get caught up in speaking in tongues, or if you're Catholic,

00:38:06.520 Marian apparitions, if you're Orthodox, weeping icons. These things are great, but that's not the

00:38:11.460 core of the faith. They only mean something if they lead you to Christ.

00:38:17.620 What do you hope people get out of the book when they're done?

00:38:21.660 I want people to know that the world is not what we think it is. The world is so much darker than many

00:38:28.900 of us think, but also filled with so much more light. I want people to understand spiritual

00:38:34.800 warfare is real, but I want them also to understand that we have hope, that this world is not all there

00:38:41.280 is, that there is deep meaning, and that it is accessible to us. You know, I quote early in the

00:38:48.040 book a Harvard professor named Elaine Scarry who says, true education is not imparting information

00:38:54.340 from teacher to student. True education, rather, is preparing the students to be staring at the

00:39:00.140 right corner of the sky when a comet blazes past. Well, that's Christian enchantment. You know, I can't 0.95

00:39:06.160 tell you this is how you become enchanted. What I can do is say, here are some practices, some spiritual

00:39:12.020 disciplines, some prayer rules, things you can do to open yourself up for when the Lord manifests

00:39:18.440 himself to you and you can act on it. I just hope people, all Christians, my brothers and sisters

00:39:23.220 in Christ who are Protestant, Catholic, and my fellow Orthodox, can learn to live more authentically,

00:39:28.840 more deeply, keeping our eyes open for the comet going past, which is to say the manifestations of

00:39:34.960 our Lord. So that transcendence that we're longing for, that we're looking for, we don't have to go

00:39:42.040 outside of the Christian faith for it. It's right there. Absolutely. And, you know, that's one of the 0.95

00:39:47.180 things that I hope also comes from this book. There'll be a lot of readers who feel like their

00:39:51.780 faith is really dry and they're looking for something more. And maybe they might go to see

00:39:56.580 some New Age thing as an adjunct to their Christian walk. A, that's dangerous, and B, you don't have to 0.99

00:40:03.020 do that. I'm coming from the Eastern Christian tradition, the Orthodox tradition, where mysticism has

00:40:10.260 always been more of a central part of our faith than in the Christian West. I hope that in

00:40:17.160 my book, insofar as I bring some Eastern Christian teachings and practices, like praying the Jesus

00:40:23.680 prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me as sinner, that it can help our Western

00:40:28.960 Christians in their Christian walk so that they can learn to be stronger in the faith, learn to have

00:40:35.600 an eye open for the comet, so to speak, and also understand how to combat the spiritual darkness

00:40:42.680 that is present now and is becoming ever more present. Because we're all in this together.

00:40:49.340 I'm upfront about my Orthodox convictions, but this book is not a book of Orthodox apologetics.

00:40:55.780 It's a book, a handbook, I hope, to help open the eyes of all my fellow Christians to the mystical

00:41:02.160 reality that is in our faith.

00:41:05.620 Yes. Well, thank you so much for writing that, because I think, you know, I agree, and I share

00:41:12.600 your concerns about the prevalence of witchcraft and the occult and even the syncretism that we see,

00:41:19.300 and I think a lot of people are, which is why every time we talk about witchcraft or something,

00:41:23.760 the episode just seems to blow up, because people are seeing this in their lives, and it's counterfeit.

00:41:29.760 It's counterfeit.

00:41:30.380 I knew, and I do know, of an Orthodox priest in my own confession who had confronted the demonic,

00:41:37.780 believed that demons were real, but got scared of it and turned away from it, even though there

00:41:42.380 was a man who needed help. And this priest was ordained to help this man and had the knowledge

00:41:49.440 and the faith to help the man, but it scared the priest because he had never encountered it.

00:41:54.260 It was only theoretical for him. We have got to get over that, all of us. It is real,

00:41:58.680 but we are children of the light. We are children of God, and we've got to know it when we see it.

00:42:03.980 Last point I want to make, when I was a Catholic for 13 years, I came to Christ first as a Catholic,

00:42:09.140 but then writing as a journalist about the abuse scandal, I lost my Catholic faith.

00:42:13.720 I had made a fundamental mistake, Allie Beth, that I think a lot of intellectual Christians would make. 0.86

00:42:18.520 I thought that as long as I had all the doctrines and the propositions straight in my head,

00:42:23.140 my faith was unassailable. Nothing could happen.

00:42:25.340 But the evil I had to confront as a journalist talking to abuse victims and going deep into that

00:42:31.500 story, it made it impossible for me to hold on to the doctrines. It was almost like holding

00:42:37.940 an iron skillet over an open fire with your bare hand. Finally, I just couldn't hold on to it anymore.

00:42:45.200 By God's grace, when I no longer could believe as a Catholic, I went to the Orthodox Church,

00:42:49.760 but I became a very different kind of Christian. I had been so triumphalist in my Catholicism and

00:42:55.180 intellectual. That was not the Catholic Church's fault. That was me. But I thought that reason was

00:43:00.660 the whole ballgame. In fact, I saw the limits of reason, and I knew that reason's important,

00:43:07.120 but ultimately, there's no substitute for a life of prayer, fasting, and repentance to draw us into

00:43:13.840 this sense of real unity with the Lord. I've been Orthodox now for almost 20 years, and I needed

00:43:21.320 that humbling. I needed to be smashed intellectually in order to open myself up to the fullness of life

00:43:27.160 in Christ.

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00:44:28.920 You know, you mentioned how there are government leaders who believe in aliens, the extraterrestrial,

00:44:35.200 supernatural, or taking psychedelics. And my wheels were turning as you were saying that about all of

00:44:41.120 the top academics and politicians in this country who believe the superstitious nonsense that it's

00:44:48.240 possible to be born in the wrong body. And when you break down that idea, it is very spiritual and

00:44:54.400 religious to say that basically your inner self, your inner spirit, your inner soul is who you truly

00:45:02.840 are, that this body is kind of arbitrary, it's subjective, and your true identity can be determined

00:45:10.400 by some inner god or inner goddess. Even this idea that babies are not given their rights or they

00:45:19.480 don't become human until they go through the birth canal. That's a very superstitious,

00:45:24.960 kind of supernatural idea. Progressivism, I would say, is a form of a religion, even though progressives

00:45:33.340 would say it's just secular neutrality. No, it's not. There is no neutrality.

00:45:38.880 And so we're seeing the spiritual battle manifest itself very clearly in the political realm. How are

00:45:46.160 you thinking about that battle specifically in terms of this election?

00:45:50.680 Wow. You know, I'm a conservative. I used to write for the American conservative, now write for the

00:45:55.420 European conservative. I did not vote for Trump in 2016. I didn't vote. I'm not going to vote for a

00:46:01.680 pro-choicer, but I just didn't like Trump. He surprised me by his court appointments during

00:46:08.120 his presidential term. And now I'll crawl over glass to vote for Trump, not because I have any

00:46:14.480 more respect for Trump, but because what the Democrats have done and what the never-Trumper

00:46:20.340 neocons have done are so frightening to me. You know, Trump, I was very disappointed that he's backing

00:46:27.340 away from a hard line on abortion. But I also see that post-Dobbs, the American people are not with 0.83

00:46:35.560 us pro-lifers. We have a lot of work to do of education and of conversion to do. So it doesn't

00:46:41.740 offend me that Trump is, as a politician, he's not a pastor, he's a politician, is responding to that

00:46:47.220 reality. But all I have to do to stiffen my spine on the question of abortion is look to what Kamala

00:46:52.620 Harris is going to do. She is promising to codify Roe in national law. She will force 1.00

00:46:58.780 hospitals to give abortions and so on and so forth. And that's the Equality Act. That's not just

00:47:04.540 something you're making up. That's part of the Equality Act, forcing even Catholic hospitals to

00:47:09.140 perform abortions. And we cannot, we pro-life conservatives, cannot let the perfect be the 0.98

00:47:14.620 enemy of the possible, of the good enough for now. J.D. Vance is a personal friend of mine. I was there

00:47:21.400 when he came into the Catholic Church. He invited me up for that. I believe he's a sincere pro-lifer.

00:47:27.220 But when he was selected by Donald Trump to be the vice president, I texted him and give him

00:47:33.080 congratulations. And he texted me back to say that he's never going to contradict the big guy,

00:47:38.580 Trump, which just makes sense. He's the number two. So when J.D. came out and waffled on abortion

00:47:44.880 and abortion pill and all that, I didn't like hearing that. But I also know what he's doing,

00:47:50.880 that he can't stand in opposition to his boss. So I'm not that worried about it. I know. I see

00:47:58.460 you wincing. I winced too.

00:48:00.100 I know. You would just think that you would be able to say, look, I'm so honored that you would

00:48:06.720 choose me. When you, at first, when I thought that you said, I'm not going to contradict the

00:48:10.640 big guy, I thought you meant God. But he meant Donald Trump, which I think that we can see through

00:48:15.860 his rhetoric. And I'm not doubting that he is personally pro-life. And I really like J.D.

00:48:20.960 Vance. I've liked J.D. Vance even before he was in political office. And I think he sincerely

00:48:25.540 holds those, you know, pro-life views. But for him to basically equivocate on that and to say in a

00:48:33.360 debate, oh, on the abortion issue, Republicans just need women to trust us. What the heck does that even 0.81

00:48:38.380 mean? I don't know. It just seems like he'd be able to say, I don't want this position

00:48:42.860 enough to compromise on this life and death issue. And if that's what you're asking me to do,

00:48:48.820 I can't do it. I don't know.

00:48:52.280 Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. And I've not talked to him personally since, other than just a couple

00:48:58.740 of texts since he was selected. But I trust that should he make it through, should he make it to

00:49:06.160 the vice presidency, that'll set him up for 2028. I believe, I have faith. I may be disappointed,

00:49:12.280 but I have faith that we'll see a stronger pro-life position. The Republicans return to that.

00:49:18.080 But I also think in Donald Trump's case, I never believed he was a real pro-lifer. That's one of

00:49:23.420 the reasons I didn't vote for him. I thought he would sell us out. But whether he's fake about

00:49:28.420 pro-life or not, he gave us pro-life justices. We cannot forget that Dobbs happened. Roe was gone

00:49:35.080 because of justices that Donald Trump appointed. So I think that when Trump gets into office,

00:49:41.960 I think we're going to see, I continue to see pro-life justices appointed that come out of

00:49:46.320 the Federalist Society. And that's the thing I'm keeping my eye on, not the rhetoric, but the deeds.

00:49:52.320 Yep. And I mean, I do think that J.D. Vance was a really good pick. I think he actually is a better

00:49:57.980 representative of Trump's policies than Trump is. He's better at arguing them. He's better

00:50:03.620 at articulating them. And I think that he has done a really good job in that regard. It's not an easy

00:50:09.040 job either to be Donald Trump's running mate. No, no. You know, I read something the other day on

00:50:16.200 the Free Press, Barry Weiss's publication, where it was written by a guy named Martin Gurry,

00:50:21.140 a former CIA analyst. He's now retired. He said he had never voted for Trump, but he's doing it this

00:50:26.580 time without apology. Because in his mind, this is an election between the party that wants control

00:50:32.140 and the party that represents people who do not wish to be controlled. And he brings COVID into

00:50:37.960 this and surveillance, debanking all of it. That is what it comes down to. And I live in Europe,

00:50:44.040 right? And I see this happening in Europe. I live in Hungary, which is beaten up all the time by the

00:50:48.880 European Union because they will not open their borders for mass migration. The government of Hungary

00:50:55.520 does not support the war in Ukraine. And most recently, or most vociferously from the point

00:51:02.520 of view of the Europeans, the government of Hungary passed a law forbidding LGBT propaganda for minors,

00:51:09.000 you know, but they will not compromise on that. They're Christians. And I see this playing out in

00:51:14.340 Europe in a very intense way, but the same thing's happening in America. And I don't believe that

00:51:19.600 politics are going to save us. You know, people who look to politics to get us out of this crisis,

00:51:25.240 they're wrong. But politics does have a role to play, if only protecting the liberty of churches,

00:51:33.040 schools, and religious institutions to proclaim the gospel and to proclaim meaning. The prime

00:51:39.260 minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who's close to Trump, he said something really important a few

00:51:43.480 years ago. He said, look, as a politician, I can't give you meaning, but I can give you things.

00:51:48.620 What he meant by that was just what I said, you know, passing laws that protect religious liberty

00:51:53.980 and so on. He said, but if the institutions that I protect do not step up and do the work that

00:52:01.260 they're meant to do to bring meaning and show meaning to people, then anything I do politically

00:52:06.680 is not going to work. That's the message I hope that Christians and other conservatives take from

00:52:11.960 this election. When I wrote the Benedict Option in 2017, it was pretty despairing about politics,

00:52:18.240 and I did not say in the book, despite what you might have heard, that people should withdraw from

00:52:22.540 politics. I said in the book that we have to stay involved if only to protect religious liberty.

00:52:27.640 Since then, I've become more convinced as the woke wokeness has taken over and it's become very

00:52:33.600 militant, especially in the U.S. military. I have become less hands-off about politics.

00:52:41.980 Yeah. Right. There was a little bit of a shift, or maybe you could say whether there was a shift

00:52:47.580 from the Benedict Option to live not by lies. Like you said, the Benedict Option wasn't saying we

00:52:53.680 should just be completely disengaged, but in live not by lies, I mean, that book did so well because

00:52:59.420 it was really just a call to arms for those who believe in the truth. And if there's anything that

00:53:05.980 we can do, it is at least not lie, at least don't say that a man can become a woman. And that just

00:53:14.780 resonated with people at just the right time when it felt like, especially in 2020, that we were all

00:53:21.600 being asked to lie about, whether it was about social justice assertions that they were making,

00:53:28.720 or whether it was about gender, whether it was about abortion, whether it was about Biden's

00:53:34.380 competence. And I think your book, even the title alone kind of girded people's loins to be like,

00:53:40.540 okay, I can do that. I can at least not lie.

00:53:43.280 Yeah. You know, I served in that book as a messenger for people who had come to the U.S.

00:53:47.740 from the Soviet bloc, Soviet communism, escaping communism, and who were starting to see here

00:53:53.180 in America and throughout the West more broadly, a rebirth of something that felt like communism to

00:53:59.560 them. But it was confusing to them because there are no gulags. There are no secret police.

00:54:03.460 Nevertheless, they felt that when you live in a world when you can't say what you really think

00:54:08.920 without losing your job, losing your business, losing your friends, and so forth, that is a

00:54:14.120 warning sign. And in the book, I explained what they meant by what I call soft totalitarianism.

00:54:20.620 And the second half of the book, I went throughout the former Soviet bloc talking to Christians who had

00:54:25.640 stayed behind and resisted communism, seeking their advice for what can we do today? What should we do

00:54:31.640 today? The message of utmost importance that I got from them is we have to prepare to suffer as a

00:54:39.600 church. I remember standing just off of Red Square in Moscow in the soft snow early November, talking to

00:54:45.680 a Baptist pastor, a Russian Baptist pastor. Now, the Baptists have it rough in Russia. Even for my own

00:54:51.220 people, the Orthodox persecute them, sadly. But this old man told me, you go back to America and you tell the

00:54:56.860 church that if they're not prepared to suffer, they're not going to make it through what's coming.

00:55:01.180 And that is the ultimate meaning, I think, of that book. And also, this book, the new one,

00:55:08.040 Living in Wonder, is a continuation of that because in order to have the courage to suffer,

00:55:14.200 we not only need the doctrinal convictions and the scriptural convictions, but we also need to have a firm

00:55:19.800 awareness and faith that there is something more, that God is present objectively and around us,

00:55:27.640 and he sees our suffering. There's a story I tell in Live Not By Lies that I recall in Living in Wonder

00:55:33.520 about a Russian dissident who became a Christian in the early 1970s. He came from a prominent communist

00:55:40.380 family, Alexander Ogorodnikov, and of course, the Soviets threw him in prison. And he got there into

00:55:46.500 prison, and he began converting people, witnessing to people on death row. He didn't have a death

00:55:51.400 sentence, but they wanted to make an example of him because he came from a communist family,

00:55:55.380 so they put him among the worst of the worst. He began bringing so many to Christ that they put him

00:56:01.160 in solitary confinement. They beat him. They would flood his cell with sewage at night just to torture

00:56:06.980 him. He began to lose his faith that God had a plan for him. And then he told me this story in

00:56:13.760 Moscow with tears coming down his face. He said, one night, I was awakened by an angel who showed

00:56:19.540 me a vision of an inmate from behind with his arms, his wrists cuffed, being led to his execution.

00:56:27.300 Remember, this was death row. I didn't know why this was happening. This kept happening night after

00:56:32.060 night with different inmates. And finally, he realized the Lord was showing me all of these men,

00:56:36.720 condemned murderers, were executed, but they were in paradise with the Lord because he,

00:56:41.780 Alexander, had been there to lead them to Christ. Now, this restored his faith, this mystical

00:56:47.860 experience. God didn't have to send him that, and God still would have had a reason for him to be

00:56:53.040 there. But in his mercy, the Lord sent him these angels to show that to him, and that revived him

00:56:59.480 and helped him to endure more years of prison before he was finally free.

00:57:02.900 Hmm. I think that we need those reminders from the Lord, especially in a time like now when we are

00:57:11.140 worried, understandably, about the future, about the future of the country that our children and

00:57:15.860 our grandchildren are going to live in. And I think seeking the Lord at a time when he may be found,

00:57:23.220 but also allowing ourselves to be refreshed by him and refreshing our own belief that he can work how he

00:57:31.920 wants to work and he can show us things that maybe we can't see with our, you know, with our physical

00:57:38.940 eyes and our physical sight in this temporal realm. I think that's a really beautiful reminder for now.

00:57:44.340 And we have to get out of the left brains, out of our left brains. I talk in the book about the

00:57:49.700 teachings or the research of this man, Ian McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist, who talks about how in a

00:57:55.680 healthy brain, the left brain, which is more analytical and abstract, and the right brain,

00:58:00.360 which is more intuitive and emotional, work together in tandem. But we in Western culture,

00:58:06.880 he says, have gotten so stranded in our left brain, we've come to think that the only thing

00:58:11.740 that really counts is what can be scientifically or mathematically proven, what is material.

00:58:17.040 But that is a lie. To be trapped in the left brain is a lie.

00:58:20.200 But we become so afraid of giving up control. We feel like we have to bound everything with

00:58:25.700 reason and to control it because loss of control scares us. In fact, though, if we are going to

00:58:32.160 experience God in the mystical realm, we have to give up some of that control, that desire for

00:58:37.660 control. Enchantment, in a Christian sense, can only happen when we surrender control and the idea we 0.94

00:58:44.660 have to put God in a box and just allow Him to be fully present in our lives.

00:58:50.040 Yes. Amen. Well, thank you so much, Rod. I really appreciate it. Living in Wonder is available,

00:58:54.840 I'm guessing, wherever books are sold, correct?

00:58:56.800 Wherever books are sold. Absolutely. Amazon, everywhere. And Eighth Day Books,

00:59:01.600 my favorite Christian bookstore in Wichita, Kansas. You can go online to 8daybooks.com and you can get a

00:59:07.360 signed copy exclusively through them. Please support your local Christian bookstore if you can.

00:59:12.040 Yes. Thank you so much.

00:59:13.580 My pleasure.

00:59:14.660 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - October 28, 2024

Ep 1090 ｜ Demon Possession, Occult Obsession & the Real JD Vance ｜ Guest： Rod Dreher

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