Review to follow tomorrow.

“We should know these ways of knowing not simply to tell us about the world but to draw us more intimately into relationship with it. To know the world not as a scholar knows the library but as the lover knows the beloved. This is what it means to live in wonder — to live within enchantment.”

“My argument is that if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experienced being called by the falling snow,” writes Rosa. “If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.”

“We cannot think our way back to enchantment or unity with God. We can only find it in participating in his life.”

“Saint Augustine knew it as far back as the fifth century: what we attend to is what we love, and what we love, we will become.”

“Economic and social liberalism — forms of social organization built around satisfying individual desire — have created a world full of narcissists obsessed with their own needs and desires, who no longer know how to give and experience love. Radically lonely, they try to escape their despair through consumption, especially consumption of sex via promiscuity.”

“The lesson is that humanity can take only so much disenchantment. If the disenchanted materialists will not have God, they or their children will one day accept Allah or some other creed — even a political psuedo-religion such as Communism or fascism — that gives them a sense of purpose and meaning.”

“[Generation Z] has been raised in a culture of radical individualism, therapy, and you-do-you self-fulfillment. What they don’t know, but will one day find out, is that a religion you make up yourself has no power to enchant. A religion designed to serve one’s perceived needs is unavoidably self-worship.”

“Put simply, we really are living in a crucible, as the fourth century was for the pagans of Rome. Either we will recover enchanted Christianity or we will succumb to chaos and cruelty.”

“A jig is a tool that manufacturers use to hold materials in place so they can guarantee the precision and accuracy of the finished product. the traditional liturgical and spiritual practices of the Orthodox Church are an example of a cultural jig — the kind of framework that keeps the individual believer in place and makes it more likely that he will be formed, over time, into a faithful and obedient Christian within the Eastern tradition.”

“To step inside the little church is like entering a dreamworld. There are Biblical stories painted everywhere, in colors so intense you can almost taste them. The figurative style is austerely Byzantine, in the Orthodox tradition, but the strong lines are dams barely holding back surging seas of glowing color, of the energy of life.”

Beatrice tells [Dante] not to forget that any beauty he sees in her is only a reflection of God and is a sign pointing him to God. This is a common mistake we all make: to love created things as if they were God, as opposed to icons through which Gods light shines. A beautiful thing is only seen rightly if it leads the soul’s eye to contemplate God.”

“To live in beatitude in this life is to live within enchantment.t. It is to begin to see things as God sees them, as much as that is possible in our limited mortal state. This is not to say one lives without suffering. But suffering becomes bearable because we know by faith that all things, good and bad, have ultimate meaning. Beauty has the power to pierce the gloom of hopelessness.”

“We humans are like fish dwelling at the bottom of a pond. We perceive the sun’s light filtered imperfectly to the depths. […] The higher we rise, the more clearly we see. The beauty shining through great art — painting, poetry, sculpture, dance, music, architecture, and so forth — calls us out of the depths of our spiritual slumber and up toward the pure light.”