to hell with re-enchantment? September 2025 braindump
Your monthly timeline purification featuring the new wives of pop music and fools rushing in.
“Modernity is a series of noncollective decisions to cut the brakes.”1
These braindumps are an opportunity for me to pump my personal brakes.
down the disenchanting rabbit hole
The straight line has become a horseshoe, and the growing conversation about the need to re-enchant the world (and/or ourselves) has doubled-back on itself and pointed an accusatory finger. There is nothing quite wrong with the natural world—only something wrong with our perception of it. And also, maybe we’re over-obsessing about re-enchantment anyway. These conversations kept finding their way to me this month.
First, there was Plough’s new edition themed around The Supernatural. Joy Marie Clarkson ☀️, surprisingly, has an essay Against Re-Enchantment which I eagerly read.
By attempting to re-enchant the world, we underscore the sense of distance between ourselves (the ones doing the re-enchanting) and the world (that which will be enchanted). By putting ourselves in the posture of a consumer who demands enchantment from the world as a spiritual solace in draining time, or even a wizard who re-enchants it, we inscribe into the world the alienation we seek to escape.
I’ve been a fan of the Re-Enchantment-Industrial Complex—read my take on (some of) it here. But I’ve also been wary of the idea that we can force it. That there is a Thing or Things we can do to make it so. By trying too hard, are we missing the point?
Then there was this episode of the Mere Fidelity podcast: “Are We Disenchanted? Should We Be Enchanted?” Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, Joseph Minich, and Brad East play around with the idea that, although much of the “Re-enchant or Die” conversation takes place in Christian circles, Christianity itself is quite the culprit in getting us to this disenchanted state. “Disenchantment” is downstream of Christianity. (There’s a follow-up episode, Two Cheers for Modernity, that I’m listening to now and is equally beneficial/insightful.)
I eagerly look forward to getting into new/upcoming books by Paul Kingsnorth (Against the Machine), Malcolm Guite (Merlin’s Isle), and Rod Dreher (Living in Wonder)2—all aimed, in one way or another, at figuring out how to recapture this state of enchantment both for ourselves and the world. But, again, if we aim at it so much, are we missing it altogether?
Re-reading Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl right now, and this passage, long ago highlighted, jumped out as appropriate:
Give me priests. Give me men with feathers in their hair or tall domed hats, female oracles in caves, servants of the python, smoking weed and reading palms. A gypsy fortune-teller with a foot-peddle Ouija board and a gold fishbowl for a crystal ball knows more about the world than many of the great thinkers of the West. Mumbling priests swinging stink cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their place in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it.
Speaking of enchantment though: Don Beck’s review/attempt-to-convince-people-to-read-Piranesi, has me yearning to re-read one of the three copies of the book I’ve somehow come to own.
pop gets spoken for
Wildly shifting gears! This is the kind of culture commentary that I live for. Catherine Shannon observes that four of pop music’s biggest stars—Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa, and Taylor Swift—all in their thirties (and wealthy and successful beyond imagination) have, this year, either gotten engaged or married. (Ditto Selena Gomez, so that makes five.)
Once advocates for possibility, freedom, and the limitless self, they have chosen exclusivity, commitment, constraint, and someone else.
What does this mean for the music? Her piece, Pop Enters Its Wife Era, dispenses with predictable garbage takes from ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum (equally incapable of seeing anything outside their limited scopes), and centers on the themes of the past few decades of pop and how they might be on the verge of change.
We might not get a new breakup anthem, but as an unapologetic romantic, I hope we get something better…
Selfless love and sacrifice are underexplored ideas in today’s artistic landscape. In marriage, you’re bound to experience a lot of both. There is nothing more beautiful or profoundly affecting than witnessing someone pour their heart out for someone else.
Yes and amen.
fools rush in…
I’ve written before about being compelled into silence and into wonder. This past month has made me think that, just as often, we ought to be compelled into silence and into terror. Predictably, following Charlie Kirk’s tragic and public murder, the discourse filled and filled at a volume and scale I don’t think we’ve witnessed the past few years. At least from my insignificant vantage, it seemed like the discourse invaded and persisted in spaces where such affairs barely garner a blip.
Something is happening. What? I don’t know. Political throughlines may align in predictable ways. Other short-term evaluations may fade into insignificance. Time will tell. Or maybe it won’t.
In the meantime, I feel we’d all do well to sit in terror. Silently. Struck by the awfulness of now, the blood-dimmed tide released anew upon the world, and the potential awfulness of the future. (What does it mean?) Some things I read from Andrew Roycroft and Josh Nadeau helped me do that.
Also, William Butler Yeats.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
empty sophistication
I thoroughly enjoyed a piece by Travis Alexander in Liberties journal, Apology for Decadence: Pleasures of Empire at World’s End. His argument, if I dare summarize it, is that “American decadence,” reaching its zenith in the 90s, was essentially a front of sophistication that served as “aesthetic and intellectual discrimination” as well as “collective taste-making.” It enforced a mono-culture, a shared belief system (if one can call it that) with no real, hard beliefs behind it, thus making it unharmful and unsusceptible to authoritarianism. “American decadence” (aka sophistication) might be the harmless good we’re missing, culturally, at the present.
As political theorists and psychoanalysts agree, the human mind might well be hard wired to believe in something, to valorize or heroize some decisive and positively-articulated system of value…
[T]he advantage of sophistication as a placeholder for such a noble lie is that it is at once concrete, coherent, and commanding enough to satisfy that need and still so self-defeatingly ambiguous as to keep that system of belief from metastasizing into a hard cultural authoritarianism.
It’s a fresh, interesting take. But I wonder if the point of such a belief system being the appearance of a sophistication in which everyone participates eventually proves too thin. The scales will fall off and the restless will wriggle out of it.
asides + signal boosts
In Liberties, I also read James Livingston’s piece examining two recent music-centered films, Sinners and A Complete Unknown, that tell political stories.
Time is Always Time: Christopher Nolan, T. S. Eliot, and Creatureliness, by Rhys Laverty in Mere Orthodoxy.
The UK Moot Podcast, brainchild of Katy and produced partly by yours truly, has launched a crowdfunder for season 2. The season aims to continue showcasing British creatives pursuing both their art and their relationship with Jesus. Check out Season 1 here. Support the crowdfunding effort here. There are rewards!
📖 Reading
Finished The Great Gatsby, and I’m honestly kind of drifting between what to pick up next—a re-read or something fresh? I am, unfortunately, not devoid of options. I’ll probably pick something out of left field just to get the gears going again.
🎞️ Watching
The 2013 Great Gatsby film adaptation. It wasn’t bad. Joel Edgerton greatly improved Tom’s character. Overall, the vibe of the film was less classical moodiness and arch faux intellectual passion (as the book is) and more cheap, affected glitz.
Finished Umbrella Academy: Season 4.
HIM: Jordan Peele’s latest production is, stylistically, a feast. Aesthetically earnest—maybe this would not be surprising if I watched more horror—but the obvious, sometimes overwrought, intentionality made me happy. You aren’t drawing the lines quite right because the lines are supposed to be invisible. But somehow seeing the lines is making me happy. It legit had me grinning at times. And it has one of the best training montages ever. Thanks to the main character’s head injury very early on in the story, some weird culty segments blur between what’s real and what he’s imagining. And there’s a weird timeline thing going on that I might need to get straight with a re-watch. It is not the best film. The middle, in places, is uneven and thematic disonnance occurs. But it has a strong ending sequence that pulls out of all that mire into a bold, clarifying vision. Plus, all the evil, scheming, downside-up bastards die in a grotesque blood-fest. Which made me incredibly happy. My soul needed that this week.
🎧 Listening
Hadn’t listened to Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Dunkirk since seeing the movie, but I did last week and it’s gorgeous!
The new Purity Ring album, purity ring—dark nights, dreamscapes, and bright stars. ✨
Derek Minor’s new album, Vigilante. An attempt at (return to?) cinematic music-making. It’s not a collection of singles but an album meant to be listened to beginning-to-end. He talks about that in this episode of the Relevant podcast.
Finishing the third of these in a row with another gorgeous Purity Ring music video!
I’ve been blacking out, but I will come back changed
You recall the soul, and I’ll recall the body
Heard on Mere Fidelity’s “Two Cheers for Modernity” episode.
Mysteriously handed to me by my wife after I’d drafted this.
If you need a book recommendation... how long has it been since you've read Frankenstein? With the del Toro movie coming out soon it's worth a revisit.
Thanks for mentioning my piece! And thanks too for giving me the title for all my future book recommendations: "review/attempt-to-convince-people-to-read." You can't give more clarity than that :)