Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder traces his 1993 conversion from Methodist agnosticism to Catholicism after Chartres Cathedral’s mysticism, then to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006 post-abuse scandal. Rejecting Western secularism’s "disenchantment," he argues for reclaiming the numinous—like Stefano’s supernatural encounter with a homeless man or Dreher’s own exorcism-like prayer breaking lifelong shame—while critiquing Gen Z’s occult/psychedelic detours as flawed substitutes for divine truth. His 2021 move to Budapest reflects Eastern Europe’s resistance to "wokeness," offering lessons in cultural resilience, though he insists God’s wonder is found in faith, not chemical trips. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Rod Dreyer, who has a new book out, Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
And Rod obviously is the author of the best-selling The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, which I've also read.
And I really enjoy reading Rod's work because he does something that I consider to be very brave, which is that he searches in public, which means that sometimes you change your mind, sometimes you say something at one point that you want to amend later on.
And we live in a weird, weird moment when that is looked upon as being a bad thing.
I mean, I gave this new book, Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
I gave it a blurb, and I received personal attacks because Rod did not always follow the path that the person attacking me felt he should follow.
But I think that that is one of the wonderful things actually about examining the infinite.
It's infinite, so you're never going to get to the end of your search.
And that is why I like reading these books because I find them incredibly vital and alive.
Rod, it's great to see you again.
And thank you for coming on.
How are you doing?
Andrew, I'm doing well.
Thanks for your kind words.
And you know, I'm the sort of guy who would much rather be with an honest liberal who admits they don't know everything and who's interested in life and curious about life than with someone who shared all of my convictions, but who did so in a lockstep way that seemed to convey fear of the unknown and fear of mystery.
We have forgotten the great wisdom of Socrates, who knew that he knew nothing and was that alone made him the wisest man in Athens.
Well, let's talk a little bit about your personal journey before we get into the book.
When I read the Benedict Option, you were a Catholic, you had been raised a Methodist, but you had become a Catholic.
And then after that, you became Eastern Orthodox.
I mean, make up your damn mind, Rod.
No, actually, I became an Orthodox in 2006.
Okay.
Long time ago, but you're right.
I was Catholic for 13 years.
I was raised Methodist, but we weren't really churchgoers and I wasn't really involved in the church.
First encountered God at age 17 in the cathedral at Chatre in France.
Now, my mom had won a trip and a church raffle, didn't want to go to Europe, but she knew her son was crazy about Hemingway and wanted to go to Paris.
So I was the only young person on a coach full of elderly Americans.
I didn't care.
I was going to Paris.
Bus stopped about 40 minutes outside of Paris to go look at an old church.
And I didn't even want to get off the bus, but I did because I didn't want to sit there for an hour.
And I walked into this cathedral, Chatre.
And look, I grew up in small town Louisiana in the late 20th century.
Nothing prepared me for the glory of God made manifest in the stone and the glass of that Gothic cathedral.
I stood there in the labyrinth, Andrew, and I looked around and I knew that God existed.
All my callow teenage agnosticism was blown away by the beauty.
And I walked out of there, not as a Christian, but on a search.
And it culminated with me becoming a Catholic in 1993.
Catholic for 13 years, very political Catholic, very right-wing, and had all my ducks in a row.
And then came the abuse scandal.
I started writing about it in 2001 before it broke really big.
I was a columnist at the New York Post at the time.
And then I was at National Review in 2002 when everything blew up.
And I never imagined that I could lose my Catholic faith.
I thought that as long as I had all the arguments for it clear in my head, that my faith would be inside a citadel.
It wasn't true.
A really good Catholic priest had warned me as I started all this.
He said, Look, if you keep going down this path of investigation, you are going to go to places darker than you can imagine.
I said, Well, Father, thank you, but I feel like I have to do it as a Catholic, as a journalist, and as a new father.
He said, Well, I'll help you every step of the way, but just be prepared.
This is dark.
I wasn't prepared for it.
Three years later, the only emotion, strong emotion I had about my faith was rage, followed only by fear for the church, for children.
And I ended up, I just couldn't believe anymore, but God didn't let me go.
I ended up becoming Eastern Orthodox, but I was a very different kind of Orthodox Christian than I was as a Catholic.
As a Catholic, I was extremely arrogant.
And this is not the Catholic Church's fault.
This is me.
I was very intellectual.
My faith was very intellectual.
And I realized that that is insufficient.
There's nothing wrong with being an intellectual, but if your faith is not first grounded in the heart and the seat of the will, then it's more fragile than you think.
And I also, as an Orthodox Christian, I had to resolve, don't get so caught up in the institution and the clergy.
I put the Catholic institution on a pedestal, whereas my Catholic friends, who were just as angry as I was about the scandal, they didn't do that and they held on to their faith.
So it served me a good stead.
I've been Orthodox for 18 years.
And I wrote this book for all Christians, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, who are my brothers and sisters in Christ, and with whom I'm also on a search for God.
You know, your story hits on two themes that I think are just really important.
First is the incredible beauty of Christian culture at its height, which I don't think has ever been matched.
I don't think there was anything like those cathedrals like Bach, like, you know, Mozart and Shakespeare, who I consider to be a Christian writer.
And it's an amazing thing.
You only have to hear that music to think, well, where did that go?
You know, why did that not exist before?
And why does it not exist now?
And it is incredibly, certainly evidence of the truth of Christianity.
And the other thing is there's so much in the epistles about that people interpret as demands of morality, where really what Paul especially is saying is don't behave this way because it makes God look bad.
And I think that the Catholic Church is just guilty of that.
They were guilty in that scandal of making God look bad.
I don't really know anything about Eastern Orthodoxy.
What do you find to be the difference after the Catholic faith?
Yeah, well, I mean, ecclesiologically, it's different.
It's a lot like the Catholic faith.
We have the liturgy and it's very traditional, but we don't have a pope.
So that is one basic difference.
But more generally, it is a much more mystical approach to Christianity than Catholicism.
Remember, we were all one church until 1054.
There was a schism between East and West.
But the Eastern Church has maintained a much more mystical approach to Christianity, where it's much less about dogma and doctrine, though there are dogmas and doctrines, and it's much more about a personal encounter with God in the sacraments, in beauty, and all of that.
But ultimately, the Orthodox will tell you this is the way to live to find unity, ultimate unity with Jesus Christ.
And that is what I think we're all looking for, but the Orthodox have a very specific way.
And for me, it has worked primarily because it has gotten me out of my own head, where I tend to live imprisoned far too often.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the book, again, Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, begins with a really simple statement, the world is not what we think it is.
Can you unpack that?
Yeah, that is a line that was given to me by a lawyer, Catholic lawyer in the U.S., early 30s, who reached out to me because as a teenager in New England, he had seen a UFO.
He was driving his truck out in the country, saw a UFO.
stared at it for a while and said, I can't make sense of this, told nobody about it.
Seven years later, he's sitting in his apartment studying for law school in the city and a portal opens up on his wall in his kitchen.
And through this portal come two shimmering beings made of light, humanoid beings.
And they began communicating with him telepathically.
When they left, it freaked him out.
He went straight to the hospital, demanded brain scans, demanded blood tests.
He said, I'm losing my mind.
Well, they kept coming back and they kept coming back.
And when he got married, his wife saw them too.
This guy was a very faithful, conservative Catholic, and he couldn't make sense of it.
He was afraid to tell his priest.
He thought his priest would laugh at him.
And I said to him, well, did you ever pray?
You're a Christian.
Did you ever pray in the presence of these things?
Well, yeah.
And what happened?
Well, they left.
I said, listen, man, I've been interviewing exorcists for this book, and they have experiences like this with people who've seen UFOs.
You should contact the exorcist in your archdiocese.
The guy did.
I saw him a month later.
I happened to be in his city.
He said, it took care of it.
The priest said, yeah, we've seen this.
He prayed over me.
They've never been back.
And I met him again this past year, a couple of months ago.
I was back in his city.
I asked to meet with him.
He said, thank you so much for how you helped me.
Those things thought they were going to drive me away from Christ.
In fact, they drove me closer to him.
But the guy said, the world is not what we think it is because there was no place in his imagination, even as a Christian, for the idea that I could see a UFO and then these creatures would come to me.
What he discovered, and this is what a number of people are discovering, is that these, what we think of as aliens, is that they're probably demonic creatures.
That's wild.
Now, so when you blow that up, when you take the statement, the world is not what we think it is, which is kind of the theme of Living in Wonder.
What do you make of that?
Is what you're saying is that it is much more like it was once described in the Middle Ages, or it is much more like something never described?
No, no, it's much more like what we once had.
One of the things I talk about in the book is how is it that we went from 500 years ago, most people believed in God and angels and demons in some way, shape or form.
And it was easy to do.
Whereas now, most people find this difficult.
Even people in the church find the numinous, the transcendental, the spiritual hard to take.
One of my closest friends is a very devout evangelical.
He said to me last night, I believe in demons, but when I read these stories, I don't know what to think.
It freaks me out.
Well, I don't think we should be freaked out by it, but I think we do need to understand.
And I try to explain this in the book, how we in the West over the course of the past few centuries have slowly seen the transcendental and the sacred leached out of our material world, where God has become much more of an abstract concept than a being who is everywhere present and fills all things.
But we can get that back if we start at first by recognizing that this is just a take, a psychological and cultural take in the West around most of the world.
They're not burdened with this.
You've probably read, Andrew, the work of Joe Henrik at Harvard, who came up with the concept of weird people, capital W-E-I-R-D.
It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
What he means by that is, he's an anthropologist.
He said psychologists began to discover about 20 years ago that what they thought was the baseline for all human psychology is in fact Western psychology, and that there is something very specific to having grown up in this industrialized, rich, democratic culture that we have that closes us off to certain aspects of experience that people outside the West still have and that we used to have prior to the modern age.
So, what I try to do in the book is convince people who think that this is in the past, in the irrecoverable past, that no, it's still here around us.
The problem is not that God has gone away.
The problem is we have lost the inner capacity to see him, to hear him, to experience him, like people and other parts of the world still do.
You know, I'm really interested in this because I have, I share in this problem, I think.
I believe in all of these things.
I certainly believe in God, and I believe that there are forces of evil and forces of good in the world that we can't see.
I too, when I hear a story like the one you just told me, I kind of reel back and think maybe the guy's off his meds.
I mean, because, you know, because I've never seen anything uncanny ever.
I have experienced the miraculous, meaning things that no one thought could happen happening.
I have experienced in my own life, but I've never seen anything.
And I've always sort of thought, well, maybe the problem is that when you paint an angel, you're just painting an imaginary idea of this kind of invisible force.
But you're actually saying that these things can be seen and we just can't see them.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, look, God decides what we are allowed to see and what we're not.
But my book is full of stories from people who have encountered demons, people who have encountered angels.
There's a great story, I think it's probably my favorite one in the book, about a young man in Rome.
He's in his early 30s now, but when he was a teenager, he was raised in a hardcore communist family, atheist.
He would blaspheme God.
Then he gets to college and starts meeting Catholics.
And he was curious, but it just seemed impossible that he would ever be a Catholic.
One day, just before Christmas, one year, he was 19 years old.
He gets out of his car to go to a party with his cousin in Rome, and he sees a homeless man on the other side of the street.
The homeless man looks at him hard, rises up, walks over and said, Stefano, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.
I'm here to tell you that you don't have to be afraid anymore.
The Lord Jesus Christ says you will follow him from this day on.
And then the homeless man started telling Stefano about his secret sins and fears.
Stefano said, I started crying.
I couldn't believe this was happening.
In fact, if my cousin hadn't been standing next to me, watching and hearing all this, I would have thought it was, I was imagining it.
Then Stefano said to him, Are you an angel?
Why We Left Science00:14:15
And the man just smiled.
He said, What can I call you?
He said, You can call me Felice Natale.
Merry Christmas.
Then Felici Natale fell on his knees, raised his hands to the sky, and began to say the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father.
After each line of the Our Father, he began to praise the Holy Trinity in elaborate language that no homeless man would know.
Then he got up, bowed, walked away, and disappeared.
Well, Stefano converted.
Not only did he convert, but he evangelized and converted every member of his communist atheist family, even his hardcore commie father on his deathbed.
These things happen too.
They don't happen to most of us, but they can happen.
But the sort of enchantment I'm talking about, Andrew, is much more ordinary about people like the Italian guy I talk about in the book, Marco Samarini, the Catholic lawyer and head of the Chesterton Society, G.K. Chesterton Society in Italy.
This is a man who has suffered greatly.
He lost his wife to cancer, but he sees God and the goodness of God in everyday things.
Just to be around Marco is to be uplifted and to want to learn to see the world with the same eyes of enchantment that he has.
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You know, it's an amazing thing.
I'm reading a book now by a Jungian back from the day, one of Jung's disciples.
And I'm shocked.
And I say this knowing that my friend Jordan Peterson is a Jungian, but I'm shocked at, I think it's nonsense.
And the reason I think it's nonsense is it takes every spiritual experience we have and it internalizes it, which was an actual movement of thought.
I mean, Sigmund Freud is also part of that movement of thought, that there is nothing happening that is not generated from within, which is not true of any other aspect of our life.
I mean, I can step up in front of traffic and say, well, that car is not going to hit me.
It's still going to run right over me.
There is an outside world.
And it's somehow we've decided that only these spiritual experiences are internally generated.
And when you see, when you go back and read these books from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and even before that, how silly they sound now, when we know more about human psychology and what it can and can't do.
Talk for a minute about this movement away from the enchanted.
Where do you think this comes from?
Where do you think it is?
What do you think it's generated by?
Well, there are many aspects of it, from the political to the cultural to even the technological in our world today.
But I think the root cause of it goes all the way back to the beginning of modernity.
I use a phrase that comes from a guy who's not one of my favorite thinkers.
Yuval Noah Harari, you know, the atheist thinker who's beloved by Silicon Valley.
He said, and at the beginning of the modern era, Western man decided to exchange meaning for power.
What he meant by that is we made a philosophical decision to cut man off from the natural world in the sense of believing that there is nothing spiritual at all about matter, that it's all just stuff that we can impress our will upon.
And that's how we got the scientific revolution.
good things came out of it, but what we tried to do was gain more power over shaping the world of matter in ways that reflected our will.
Now, again, this led to really good things for us in terms of science and technology.
But without, once you're disconnected from the Christian faith that tells us that there is ultimate transcendent meaning there and that there are lines beyond which you must not pass, then you get things like transhumanism.
You get things like transgenderism for that matter, which is the idea that even the human body has no ultimate meaning, has no deep logos, deep purpose, other than that which we decide to impress on it using our individual will.
It's madness.
And it all ultimately goes back, Andrew, to the garden of Eden, you could even say, when Adam and Eve decided that they can be as gods.
They listened to the serpent who said, don't listen to God, listen to yourself.
You can be like him.
Now, whether you believe Adam and Eve really exist or they're just mythological, the fact is that right there is the source of the problem when you think that you were the ultimate authority over your own life and over all of creation.
The book again by Rod Rayer is Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, a very insightful book, I think.
It's like all your books and very interesting and dynamic in that you're always moving.
You're actually searching.
As I say, the infinite is infinite.
There's always something more to know and something that's going to wrong foot you along the way.
You mentioned something that I've always thought was important, that the scientific age, for a moment there, it was easy to extrapolate from the scientific age that all things would be explained through matter.
If you thought it through, it wasn't true, but it was easy to extrapolate from what you were seeing that the Bible had been disproved and the way things worked was totally different and all this.
Do you think that was a necessary step?
I mean, I often feel that people get angry about these advances and these movements, but in fact, mankind, just like individual people, has to work out these ideas.
I mean, these ideas have to go through a journey to get to the other end.
Was this a necessary phase in the development of humankind?
You know, it's hard for me to say, but it also is hard to see a certain point at which we could have decided to turn.
We as a culture, as a civilization, could have decided to turn the other way because the benefits of throwing ourselves into science and the scientific and enlightenment way of seeing the world were so great.
The problem is, said Ian McGilgris, he's one of the heroes of the book.
He's a contemporary British psychiatrist who's written a lot about the way the divided brain, the left hemisphere and right hemisphere, have shaped culture.
Ian says that we as a civilization lean so heavily into the left hemisphere, that is the analytical, mathematical, scientific side, that we have starved the knowledge of truth that comes to us through the right hemisphere and those ways of knowing, that is through religion, through poetry, art, music, that sort of thing, that we have now made ourselves utterly miserable and lost.
The answer to this is not to throw off the rational and embrace the intuitive and the emotional wholeheartedly.
The answer is to achieve balance, because that is how a healthy brain works.
But what we have to do is stop seeing poetry, art, religion, that sort of thing as mere add-ons to reality, which is scientific and mathematical.
There's actually so much more going on in reality than the hardcore rationalist and materialists want us to think.
And to be honest, man, you know, the thing that concerns me more than anything, more than even the survival of my country's democracy, is the survival of the Christian church in this era of de-Christianization.
One of the things I've learned in working on this book is that the younger generation, Gen Z, they're done with new atheism.
That shocked me.
But a young man approached me in Oxford, an Anglican seminarian, 27 years old from London.
He said, the thing I want you to know as you're working on this book is that the new atheism is dead, my generation.
That's for your generation.
I said, so what are they replacing it with?
He told me the occult.
Like, damn it, what do you mean?
Yeah.
And he said that, you know, nobody wants in his generation wants God.
They want the experience of the transcendent, of the numinous.
They want the woo, but they don't think they're going to get it in churches.
And in many churches, they might not, you know, churches that suppress this sort of thing.
But it's also the case that they want this experience without having to sacrifice themselves and surrender to God.
So they end up going to the occult and they end up going to psychedelic drugs to have this experience.
And they're opening up doors that should not be open.
But this young man was trying to convince me that this is both a terrible danger for the young, but also a great opportunity.
Because if you have young people or anybody, but especially young people who are open to the transcendent, to experiencing the transcendent, that allows us to have, we Christians, to have an audience with them and help them to understand that what they're really looking for is there in the Christian faith.
Unfortunately, we Christians make it too hard for them to find it nowadays, but I really do think that that's starting to change.
That's a really, I was thinking they want the woo, but not the who.
Well said.
But it is, you know, it is interesting.
And this connects to something that obviously is very important to me, which is the arts.
One of the things that Yuval Harari says is that all these things that we take to be truths are in fact just fictions.
And I reacted to that immediately by thinking that's not how fiction works.
Fiction is bad when it doesn't refer to something unspeakable that cannot be spoken in any other way, but through painting, but through a novel, but through a story.
I mean, that is what fiction is doing.
It is telling truths.
It can't be spoken directly.
And to just sort of say, well, it's just a fiction, therefore it's not true, is to miss what fiction is.
And it plays into this kind of disregard for the arts that I think has infected our society.
I have to ask you, when we came on before we started recording, I asked you where you were and you said you were in a foreign country.
I don't know how much you want people to know about where you were.
You're in Budapest.
You're in Budapest.
But what made you leave and what are you looking for?
And will you come back?
Well, I fell in love with Hungary when I was over in this part of the world, the former communist countries in 2019 doing research for my book, Live Not By Lies, which is about the message that people who survived communism have for us in the West about how to resist the new coming totalitarianism we're dealing with now.
I found that the people generally in the Eastern Bloc are much more sensible about the dangers we face.
They can see the soft totalitarianism coming out of wokeness.
And I found it really, I wanted to live among these people.
Plus, I'm an admirer of the Hungarian government, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is demonized as a fascist and all these terrible things in the West.
When I actually got here for a fellowship in 2021 and lived here for a short time, I realized this is a great country.
What do they mean fascist?
The streets are safe.
They're not, migrant crime is not a thing and on and on.
And I told our friend Tucker Carlson, he said, you need to come over here.
There's a story here that our media aren't telling.
Tucker came that summer, broadcast him here for a week, and it began to change the narrative about Hungary.
I began to think, as a conservative who's interested in politics, that the experience of the Hungarian government and Victor Orban, they have a lot to teach us American conservatives about how not to get rolled by the left, even when we take power.
But the real reason I came is because in 2022, my wife filed for divorce.
My oldest son needed to get out.
He finished college and just wanted to get out of the U.S.
I had an opportunity to come to Hungary, do work over here, trying to understand this country and how its politics might relate to ours back in America, and also to travel around Europe, building a network of conservative thinkers, especially conservative religious thinkers, for future conferences.
And I thought, why not?
You know, let's see what God has for me in this foreign country.
And it's been great.
It's been a place to heal from divorce.
I do expect to come back to America at some point and maybe live halftime once I can reconnect with my children who are still back in America.
But I tell you, man, I have learned so much about my own country, our country, from living over here.
And one of the most disturbing things I've learned, Andrew, is how rotten our popular culture is and how much we are inflicting on the rest of the world.
Whenever I would travel promoting the foreign language versions of Live Not By Lies, I would travel to the Czech Republic and Poland and so forth.
Inevitably, I would get a question from somebody around my age or older.
They would say, sir, when we were in the Cold War under Soviet domination, we looked to you Americans for hope and for light.
And now we're afraid of you.
Why Not Trust God?00:04:56
What happened?
And all I could tell them was: you know, people like me in America, religious conservatives, we're afraid of the people in power too.
And we are in this together.
That, I would tell them, is why I'm coming here and trying to tell your stories to the American people so we can learn from you about what we're dealing with and how to resist it.
Happily, Andrew, Angel Studios is funding a documentary film about Live Not By Lies.
It's almost finished.
And we're going to be able to spread the wisdom that these good men and women, these heroic men and women who stood up when it was when you could get thrown in jail or lose your life for standing up.
I want them to be known to our people.
So maybe they can help us as we once helped them.
Yeah.
No, Doug Murray says we used to be an exporter of good ideas and now we're the exporter of bad ideas.
And I think that's unfortunately, sadly true.
I only got a minute or so left.
I want to ask you a final question because I'm really interested in this.
You talk about the things that people see, the angels that they see, the demons that they see, the reality of the numinous world that can be seen.
Have you ever seen it?
And is there something that you do that you hope will help you see it?
I mean, I'm very much, I reject the idea of this ayahuasca and these drugs.
I mean, you can drug yourself into seeing anything.
And yet it does seem that these things are available to some and not to all.
How do you deal with that?
Well, I believe that ayahuasca and all these psychedelic drugs are dangerous because they work.
I think we don't know how they work, but I think they do open up doors that shouldn't be opened.
But I've had things happen to me, small miracles, things like that, that have brought me closer to God.
But most of my own enchantment is in the everyday and learning to see God and other people and beauty and things like that.
I'm drawn closer to him.
And of course, through prayer.
But I can tell you this, man, this is something that just happened.
It's not in the book.
I have been struggling for all my life with a sense of shame because of the way I was raised.
My dad, I knew I was a disappointment to my dad, and I worked really hard to deal with that.
My dad died 10 years ago.
He was one of the greatest men I've ever known, but this was a legacy of my childhood.
And with the divorce and everything, I've been struggling with depression.
I had this intuition in prayer recently that maybe there's something spiritual here, a form of spiritual oppression.
And when I went back to the U.S. about five weeks ago, my confessor was there, who is also a trained exorcist.
And I said, look, maybe I'm crazy, but would you please pray over me that if there are any dark spirits, a spirit of shame or anything else, that they would depart.
So he prayed for 20 minutes over me.
He said, any spirits, go to the foot of the cross where Christ will deal with you.
I didn't feel anything.
Nothing happened.
Next morning, I woke up in a different world, Andrew.
I'm not kidding.
I'm getting tears even thinking about it.
I felt that the dark cloud that had been over me for all my adult life was gone.
I felt that I had been wearing this heavy, wet woolen blanket.
And I thought it was my skin.
It was gone.
I was so filled with joy and the light of the Lord.
And I can't even believe I'm talking to you like this.
I sound like a Bible thumper, but I cannot deny what God did for me.
I don't know why it took the prayers of a priest like that to set me free when I've been praying all my life for this release, but it happened.
And that was five weeks ago.
Every morning I wake up in the same way, just filled with gratitude for life.
I have not had a single compulsive suicidal thought since this happened.
I was never at real risk for suicide, but I thought about it all the time as a way to escape the pain.
Gone, gone by the grace of God and through the prayers of a priest.
This is the kind of enchantment that sustains me.
I may never see an angel.
I hope I never see a demon, but God has touched me in a miraculous way.
And I hope this book I've written gives him glory and helps other people to know there is hope.
It can happen to you too.
That's a great story.
Absolutely believable and unsurprising at its depth.
Rod Dreyer, the book is Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
I said when I introduced you that I love reading your books because they're full of the vitality of the search.
This conversation has been the same way.
Rod, it's great to see you.
If you're back in the States, look me up.
I'd love to have a drink.
Thanks very much.
Thank you, Andrew.
Really love that conversation.
You can see why people get angry with him.
He's doing something that we just are sort of disallow on social media, which is searching honest approach to something that is ultimately unknowable because it is so vast and our minds are so small.
But he's doing it with all the courage he has.
And I think that just makes him exciting.
The book, again, Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
Great talking to him.
And it would be great to see you again on Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.