Beeson Podcast, Episode #707
Rod Dreher
Date

>>Announcer: 

Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. 


>>Doug Sweeney:

Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney. I’m joined today by well known author, Rod Dreher, who is in Birmingham launching a book entitled “Living In Wonder” and speaking at Beeson, Samford, and elsewhere at the behest of Tactical Faith an apologetics ministry led by Beeson alumni Reverend Dr. Matt Burford, a friend, who was on the show just a few years back.

We’ll learn all about Dreher and his new book as we go, but for now, welcome, Rod, to the program.


>>Dreher:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be back in the South. I live in Budapest, Hungary. When I landed here in Birmingham my friends took me to Miss Myra’s BBQ. I had brisket, ribs, and I had a double helping of greens with corn bread and I thought maybe this was a presentiment of paradise. 


>>Sweeney:

Wonderful. That’s hard to get in Budapest. (laughter)


>>Dreher: 

No turnip greens in Budapest. Pray for us, brother.


>>Sweeney:

All right. Well, thanks for being here. We’re thrilled to have you. Most people who listen to this will have heard of you before, will have read something you’ve written before. But for those who don’t know much about you, let’s just briefly introduce you to them. Can you tell us just a little bit about how you grew up and how you became a Christian?


>>Dreher:

Sure. I was born in 1967 and I was raised in a small town on the Mississippi River in South Louisiana. And my family was Methodist but we were Easter and Christmas Methodists. We didn’t go very often. By the time I got to be a teenager I was done with church. I thought it was nothing more than therapy for the southern White middle class and I wanted nothing to do with it. And then when I was 17 my mother won a guided trip to Europe in a church raffle. She didn’t want to go. So, she sent me. And I was the only young person on a bus full of elderly American tourists. But I didn’t care. I wanted to go to France to see the art museums. 

We stopped on the way to Paris, the bus did, at an old church. I thought, “Ugh, do I have to go see an old church? Well, I don’t want to sit on a bus for an hour, I might as well go in.” This was the Cathedral at Chartres. I had no idea growing up in late 20th century American small town South what the Cathedral at Chartres even was. As I now know and as our listeners will know it’s one of the great treasures of western civilization. Medieval gothic cathedral. I walked in that church, Doug, and I stood there in the labyrinth looked around at the stones and the glass, and the glory of God just overwhelmed me. It overwhelmed all of my teenage agnosticism. I just knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was real and that he wanted me. 

Now, I didn’t walk out of that church as a reconverted Christian but I did go out of there on a search. And after a lot of hemming and hawing and twisting and turning in college, learning how to die to myself, I finally surrendered to Christ and did so as a Roman Catholic in my mid twenties. This was around 1993. I became a real culture warrior type. I worked in Washington in journalism and I was a very conservative Catholic. Very proud to be Catholic. Even triumphalist. And then I started writing about the abuse scandal. I began my writing about it when I was a columnist at the New York Post in 2001. Then when it blew up big all over America I was at National Review. 

Now, I always thought that if I had all the arguments in my head for the Catholic faith my faith would be impregnable. This was a citadel of reason. No matter what evil I saw in writing about the scandal – and I felt a mission to write about it, to take care of the evil doers, to purify the church, and also I was a new father then. I wanted my son to grow up in a church where he could be safe. But, Doug, I had no idea what I was going into. A wise Catholic priest who had taken very many risks to stand up for victims warned me at the beginning of this journey, “You are going to go into a place more evil than you can imagine, you better be ready.” I thought I was! Because the arguments were clear in my head. It turns out not to be true. 

Three or four years past. It got to the point where the arguments didn’t matter. It was like trying to hold onto an iron skillet over a flame and finally you just can’t hold onto it anymore. By God’s grace I didn’t lose my faith entirely, but from a Catholic point of view the Eastern Orthodox have valid sacraments, so my wife and I started going with our kids to an Eastern Orthodox Church. We knew we couldn’t receive communion there, but we just wanted to be in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist where the worship was transcendent, where we didn’t have to be so filled with anger. 

Finally, we became Orthodox. This was 2006. But I have to emphasize it wasn’t because I thought the Orthodox church is somehow free of this kind of sin. I don’t think any church is. But for me, Orthodoxy was an approach to Christianity, it was rooted in the ancient church, but it was also not intellectual. Now it can be very intellectual. Orthodox theology is profound. But the Orthodox say that you have to lead with the heart. To have thoughts about God in your head is one thing, but Jesus wants a conversion of the heart above all and that’s what I’d been missing as a Catholic. A lot of that, I don’t want to blame the Catholic church for that. A lot of that was my own intellectual arrogance. But the Lord gave me a severe mercy by smashing me and my triumphalism and I came into the Orthodox Church on my knees and I’ve been there since 2006.


>>Sweeney:

We have a decent number of students and prospective students who tune into the podcast and as you can imagine some of them are trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to go to divinity school, all kinds of things going through their heads. For them a lot of them have heard of you, a lot of them have read you. What do they need to know about your educational background and the role that your education played in the kind of person God has made you to be? Was there a significant relationship between what you studied in college and what you become? Or did you just sort of grow in lots of ways in college and you can’t really draw a straight line from what you studied to what you’re doing?


>>Dreher:

It’s more the second, Doug. But I will say that reading Kierkegaard as an undergraduate really opened my mind to Christ in ways that it hadn’t been before. Suddenly Christianity began to make intellectual sense to me. Precisely because Kierkegaard talks about the limits of the intellect. And he oriented me in a certain way towards a more experiential Christianity even though he was a profound philosopher. But for me mostly my education came ... I’m self taught in terms of growing spiritually by the things I would read. 

And I remember many years later around 2012, 2013 when I was in the depths of a profound personal and spiritual crisis, I found my way to Dante, to the Divine Comedy. I was 45, 46 then. I thought, oh, I missed it in college, I couldn’t possibly understand this but boy I wish I had read it. I took it off the shelf anyway at the bookstore, opened it up to the first three lines which say, “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for I have lost the straight path.” And it hit me like a bolt of lightning. This is me! 

I can’t possibly understand this big medieval poem. But I tried it anyway and I got so many books by Dante scholars to read as I read the poem. And I read it prayerfully. But not as a literary exercise. But I thought this could be a map the Lord has sent me to get out of the dark wood. And it was. God changed me through that poem. The reason I bring it up here is because I want people to know that classroom education is great. I wish I had taken my classes more seriously as an undergraduate. If I won the lottery I would go back to grad school and study more in-depth. But people shouldn’t make the mistake I made in thinking that once you’ve walked off of campus your education ends. 

We have so many amazing resources now. Especially the age of the internet. For taking classes, for self education. And people need to have the confidence to know that if you can find your way to books by reputable scholars whom you trust morally and spiritually and intellectually, you should never have to stop learning.


>>>Sweeney:

All right. So, as a young man you become well known, largely, is it fair to say, as a journalist/commentator on current events. 


>>Dreher:

Journalist, early on. 


>>Sweeney:

Then you moved into writing books. How did that go for you? Why did you decide to start writing books? And how have you decided over the years what to write about and how to spend your time?


>>Dreher:

I fell into writing books around 2006. I wrote my first book, “Crunchy Cons” and it was about a certain kind of Conservative. Political and social conservative that didn’t quite track with the Republican party stereotype. Not because we were secretly liberals but because of the kind of conservatives we were. The kind of people who bought the book tended to be religious conservatives that had chickens in their backyard. 

I thought that might be the only book I’d write. It took a lot out of me to write a book. It’s like climbing a mountain. I was so intimidated. But then some years later my younger sister, Louisiana, died of cancer at an early age. And I’d been blogging. I started a blog back in 2006 and had built a really big audience. I had been blogging through her struggle with cancer. With her permission of course. But about the extraordinary graces that we saw. She was down in Louisiana. I was living in Philadelphia then. But it culminated in my wife and I making a decision to move to Louisiana after her death to try to embrace family. 

David Brooks wrote a beautiful column about my blogging and about small town grace and community. I got a big book deal out of it. So, I wrote that book. And it was an extremely difficult experience down there because it turns out that family had a lot of dark secrets and that ended up breaking me. And I also wrote, though my blog at the American Conservative magazine where I was, I wrote about how Dante was speaking to me, or how the Lord was speaking to me through Dante ... and healing me.

Now, this is where my writing began to take a more explicitly religious turn. I still wrote about political issues, cultural issues, but as I became more dependent on Christ to save me, to keep my head above water as my family was breaking apart, as my marriage was breaking apart under all this pressure, and I got chronically ill. I became more acutely aware of what my faith meant to me. And I also, at the same time, began to become more acutely aware of how dangerous this moment is for our civilization in its history. To be specific, I think we are in a time like the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. 

In fact, there’s a great book you might have read, or your listeners might know of it, called, “The Final Pagan Generation.” And it’s by a historian named Edward Watts. He writes about the fourth century in Rome, the century that Rome moved over from being officially pagan to becoming Christian. And he writes about how the pagan elites of Rome in that century, they didn’t see it coming. They didn’t see that they were on their last legs because throughout that entire century as the masses began Christianizing they looked around and saw that the temples were still open, the pagan festivals were still happening, they thought that Rome has been pagan for 800 years or more, it will always be pagan. They were wrong. That was the end for them and then of course the Roman civilization which by then was officially Christian ended up collapsing. 

I think we’re in a time like that now here in the West and so many leaders in the church and followers in the church don’t see it. This is what led to me making the survival of Christianity, “not making American great again” or any political thing, but the survival of authentic Christianity my main driving passion. This led to me writing the book, “The Benedict Option” in 2017, “Live Not By Lies” in 2020, and now “Living in Wonder.” 


>>Sweeney:

Now that we’re up to the present, let’s dive in. Tell our readers a little bit about Living In Wonder. Why did you decide that was something you wanted to write about? And for those who haven’t read it yet, but are going to get asked to go read it by me at the end of this interview, what are they going to get? What are you doing in there and why?


>>Dreher:

It’s a book about Christian re-enchantment. That word “enchantment” scares people. It sounds kind of magic-y. It’s not that. What do I mean by re-enchantment? I mean that in the first 1,000 years of the Church, and maybe even the first 1,500 years ... people believed that matter and spirit interpenetrated. And what it means to say the world is enchanted is to see God everywhere present and filling all things. To be enchanted, and this is Charles Taylor saying this, the great contemporary philosopher of religion, is to believe somehow that there is deep meaning in everything we do. That there is an unseen hierarchy of spirit that effects everything we do. It is to live with a sense of meaning. When people hear “enchantment” they think about dancing around and sprinkling Disney fairy dust everywhere. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about learning to live with a palpable, visceral experience of God and basing our faith more on what Marshall McLewan, the media theorist, called “the percept” than the concept. He said there are two ways of knowing. Percept is knowing by direct experience. Concept is knowing abstractly in your mind with abstract cogitation. McLewan, who was a faithful, daily mass going Catholic, said that all true religion begins in percept. We have to move it to concept in order to talk about it, to establish it in our lives. Because you can’t live in this constant experience. But, said McLewan, when religion becomes primarily concept, primarily something that we keep in our heads, then it becomes radically weak. McLewan said that everybody he knew who left the faith did so by ceasing to stop prayer. Because it by prayer above all that we maintain this relationship with the living God.

So, what I want to do with this book is talk about how we have gotten to this place in the West in the churches where we have become demoralized. We have tended to replace the experience of the living God with moralism. I’m all for morals, I’m very conservative. But that’s not the heart of the faith. Or replacing it with political action. I believe the Lord calls us to be active in the world. But that’s not the faith. Things like that. And we need to get back to that radical direct perception of the Holy Spirit and allow it to change us. I talk about ways we can do that. I talk in the first part of the book about how we lost that in the West and I talk about the ways we can get it back. You can’t make it happen but you can prepare yourself to receive God’s revelation. And I also talk about false forms of enchantment that are so popular today. Including the occult. It’s shocked me to learn, as I was working on this, how many young people – age 30 and under ... they don’t want to have anything to do with new atheism. New atheism is dead. But they’re turning to the occult. Various forms of the occult. This is something the church has got to wake up to.


>>Sweeney:

You had me thinking about listeners to this podcast who are very bright people, but they’re lay people, maybe they’re business people, Monday thru Friday, that kind of thing. They’re very serious about their faith. Some of them take lay classes at Beeson Divinity School. I don’t think they need you, probably, to convince them anymore than you’ve done that there’s been what you’re calling a “disenchantment” of the world in the modern age. But I bet a few of them are wondering about, so, practically speaking in my daily life, what am I supposed to think about differently or do differently that will help me to kind of regain a sense of wonder about the world, live in the way that you’re commending in this book? What would you say to those folks?


>>Dreher:

Well, I would say from the start that there are some people who have come to me and said, “Tell me what I need to do.” I would say that first of all there’s no formula. There’s not a five point plan, bad-a-bing: enchantment. That’s not how it works. There’s a philosopher at Harvard who says that education is not about imparting information from teacher to student. True education is training the student to be staring at the correct corner of the sky when a comet blazes past. That’s true about enchantment, too.

The Lord is going to show up when he’s going to show up. The best we can do is to prepare ourselves - body, mind, and soul – to see him and respond to him. So, I would say in order to prepare ourselves we of course need to do the things we ought to be doing anyway – being faithful to scripture, faithful in prayer, faithful in church-going, but also get ourselves out of our heads as much as possible. The great Ian McGilchrest, he is a neuroscientist who is a hero of my book, and he’s written most of his work in the last 20 years. It’s been about the connection between brain hemispheres and culture. I don’t need to too deep into that but he said frankly we’re stranded in our left hemisphere in the analytical abstract side. Ian says we need to learn to live more in our right hemisphere which is how we come to know the world through things like religion, worship, art, music, dance. That can take us out of our head and it is not something on the side to help us enjoy the world, it is also a way of knowing. And I would say that the more we put ourselves into the beauty that comes out of God’s creation and out of the art that comes out of the church experience, as well as reading the lives of the Saints and engaging in serving others – anything that gets us out of our head can prepare us for enchantment.

But again, it’s not something you can force to happen because one of the things I learned from exorcists, by the way, about the dangers of the occult is if you call on the demonic they will come without fail. And they will enslave you. But God doesn’t work that way. God hears our prayers. We can have faith that he does. But he’s going to answer in his own time and we need to prepare ourselves for that.


>>Sweeney:

I was teaching a class last week here at Beeson on Jonathan Edwards. And one of the things the students wanted to talk about in that class last week was the degree to which the exceptional, the impressive, the captivating degree to which Edwards talks about the beauty of God and places beauty in the center of his theology. And has ... I’m going to use an academic term here, but explain it ... has what in schools we talk about as a typological vision of the world around him. 

He believed that to say God created the world out of nothing is to say God created out of nothing but himself. But since God created out of the goodness and truth and beauty of his own eternal inter Trinitarian way of life, Edwards thought, the world around us, though fallen, still to a degree is meant by God to remind us of Him; to help us think about Him; to put us in mind of diving things. 

So, are you saying something like that? Or would you want to put it differently than that?


>>Dreher:

No, I would say something like that, but not exactly that. And this is the difference between Orthodoxy and Protestantism, I would say. I would say that God certainly appears to us in the material world. That’s what the incarnation was about. Our God is not a series of abstract concepts and propositions. The truth that saves was the incarnate God man Jesus Christ and our relationship with him. 

But for Orthodox Christians, we believe that the connection between spirit and matter is actually more direct and more real, not just analogical, or allegorical. We believe that in some mysterious sense, that we don’t have to define, we can’t define fully, the material world is an icon of God to which the Lord who is separate from creation, nevertheless shines. And you know, I live this myself. As I told at the beginning of the podcast, I came to Christ initially by being overwhelmed by the beauty of the Chartres Cathedral. I remember standing there as a 17 year old who thought he knew everything, that will shock you I’m sure that a 17 year old thinks he knows everything ... and I thought I want to know the God that inspired men whose names are lost to history to build such a temple to His glory. 

The desire to know the God that inspired them to create such beauty drew me along out of my own sin. It took a while because there was a lot of sin there. But it was that beauty and the last thing that happened before I fully surrendered to Christ was I was sent as a young journalist to my first job to interview and an elderly Catholic priest who had been born in the 1890’s, he was living in Baton Rouge, and he had been an art professor, and an artist himself of some renown before he surrendered it all and became a priest at the age of 50. I was sent to interview him about his art career. In just asking him about his life he told me about two profound miracles of the Lord that had caused him to surrender his life to Christ and to surrender his life later in priestly service. 

That old man was telling me about things that happened 50 years earlier and he was weeping. I tell you, Doug, when I sat with him – I never met an old man like him, he was a tiny little Yoda-like figure from Guatemala who was glowing. There was light coming out of his face. I knew this was a holy man. I’m getting chills just talking about him. When I left Mt. Senior Sanchez that day I knew that I had been in the presence of someone who ws totally filled with the Holy Spirit. And I knew that my life had to change. 

Years later, and that’s when I surrendered to God fully. Years later, when I read Pope Benedict XVI and he said in our post rational time the best apologetics the church has for itself are not the rational propositional arguments, those can work, but the best ones are the art the church produces and the saints the church produces. What did he mean by that? They are incarnational. They can speak beneath the rational mind that says, oh no, you have to prove this. I don’t think you can prove that. But when you’ve had an experience of great beauty, whether it’s in something like the Cathedral at Chartres or the moral beauty of a man/woman who has given themselves to Christ and has become so filled with the Holy Spirit that it’s just coming off of them like sunshine. That goes beneath all of our objections intellectually. 

In my case, it opened my mind up to the propositions. First I had to love. I had to learn to love and desire beauty as a pursuit of God and to learn to love and desire goodness. It came together in Christ.


>>Sweeney:

Well said. One thing I have long admired about the Orthodox ... you see this especially in the Hesychius tradition of Orthodoxy, but you see it generally in Orthodoxy as well. This commitment to learning over the course of a long spiritual life what Paul was commending in the New Testament when he told us to pray without ceasing. And you referred a minute ago to prayer as one of the practices you would commend to people who want to live with the kind of wonder that God designed us to live with. 

How has prayer in particular kind of factored into your own story and into the way in which you think about what living in wonder ought to entail today?


>>Dreher:

I’m so glad you asked that. I’ve always, since I’ve come to Christ initially, I’ve always been someone who prays. And I don’t find it difficult to pray. I got to the point in my life in 2012 when I was so beset with anxiety over the collapse of my family down in Louisiana that I developed chronic mononucleosis, Epstein-Barr virus. I had to spend six hours a day pretty much every day in the middle of the day in bed. It was terrible. 

My priest at the time assigned me to say the Jesus Prayer for about an hour a day. The Jesus Prayer is simple. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” But if you pray it in the Orthodox way you have to get very still. You clear your mind out. You pray it slowly, breathing in, Lord Jesus Christ, breathe out, Son of the Living God, and on like that. But for me, this was so difficult. Even as sick as I was it would have been easier to walk ten miles every day than to be quiet and still in my mind for an hour. But I did it out of obedience. Eventually I noticed a change in my health. I noticed that I was less bothered by the anxieties of the world. And I think in the end that this gave the Holy Spirit the foothold in my heart and in my mind to calm me, to work to calm me.

When I finally healed from the sickness I asked my priest, “How did you know that’s what I needed?” He said, “It was simple. You had to get out of your own head.” And that’s what the Jesus Prayer did for me. Years later, when I’m working on Living in Wonder, the new book, I was really surprised to learn about the role that attention plays in enchantment. That we learn to become what we love. And what we love is what we pay attention to. This goes back to Augustine. The internet in our time, and this is certainly true for me, becomes a great disenchantment machine because it makes it very difficult for us to focus our attention. I’m talking neurologically. There are studies that show this. I think all of our listeners who are older who remember the pre internet age who will think about how hard it is now to focus on a long piece of writing. That’s true for me. And I’m not addicted to my phone like many people are.


>>Sweeney:

Educators talk about this all the time.


>>Dreher:

Exactly. But this plays a role in disenchantment because if we become the sort of men and women who cannot sustain focused thought for a while it will become harder and harder for us to perceive the presence of God around us. I make that argument in the book. This is not the sort of thing I think a lot of people would expect to read in the book about enchantment and disenchantment. In fact, that book is full of miracle stories, too. But this is something really practical we can do. Pray the Jesus Prayer every day. Give yourself over to it and it will help guard your heart, establish this quiet garden in your heart, where you can walk with the Lord. It’s not just a nice idea. It really is true.


>>Sweeney:

Wonderful. All right. We’re about out of time. But I’d love ... I’m sure my listeners want me to ask you what are you working on now? Is there another book underway? What can we look forward to from the pen of Rod Dreher in the years ahead?


>>Dreher:

Oh Lord, the book just released! It’s like having a baby!


>>Sweeney:

We can’t get enough of you! 


>>Dreher:

This is my sixth book and it’s just like having a baby each time. You just need to breathe. But I have to say, Doug, that I really do think this book is going to be a turn in my writing. I hadn’t set out to write a trilogy that started with the Benedict Option and went to Live Not By Les and now Living in Wonder, but it turns out they are. As I mentioned earlier, my overwhelming passion is to help the church today – not just Orthodox Christians but fellow believers in Protestant traditions and Catholic traditions to help us understand the world we’re in now and to navigate it. And to hold onto the faith through the challenges that are here now and are only going to intensify.

The Benedict Option, I wrote about how we need to develop deeper spiritual disciplines and build communities as sort of arks to ride out liquid modernity as I call it. And Live Not By Lies, I went to the people, the Christians who stayed behind under Soviet Communism and resisted it, I went to them for advice about what should we see about the gradual totalitarianism that many of them who live in the West see rising in the West. 

Now with Living in Wonder, it’s the cap on this becsaue in the end the kind of Christianity that is going to survive what we’re dealing with now and what is fast coming on us is going to be a Christianity that establishes in the hearts and minds of each believer and in each congregation and in each family a living relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ. 

So, I think though the next book I’m going to write, this is an intuition I have, is going to be more purely spiritual. I write about the culture war all the time on my Substack. RodDreher.Substack.com. And I love doing that. It’s important to fight for religious liberty. To fight for the unborn and all the things that we Christians care about. But in the end I think I’ve reached a point in my own life, in my own Christian walk where I’d like to focus more on things that give people pure hope. This book Living in Wonder, it has stories of miracles that turn people’s lives around. There’s a story in the first chapter about a man I met in Jerusalem behind a counter in a store in the old city. An Englishman who looked kind of rough. I talked to him. He had a cockney accent, working class London. I said, “How did you get over here?” “I’ve been here 29 years, I came here looking for drugs.” And he had a miraculous healing on the banks of the River Jordan when a mysterious cloud came across the river and enveloped him in pure love. He gave his testimony to me. Right there in the old city Jerusalem. He said, “That’s what this city will do to you. It’s a very thin place.” 

It’s stories like that, Doug, that we need to hold onto more than ever in this time of darkness and anxiety. And if the Lord gives me time and opens doors, I want to keep writing them.


>>Sweeney:

Fantastic. All right. Last question. Beeson is a praying community. Faculty, staff, students, friends, podcast listeners – we talk with them every week about praying, about how we’re praying for them, and I ask them to pray for us. So, how can we pray for you? How should our listeners be praying for Rod Dreher in days ahead?


>>Dreher:

I thank you so much for that question and for the offer, because it’s important. Two things. One, I became aware in working on this book how serious spiritual warfare is. If you’ve spent any time talking to exorcists, to people who deal with this stuff as part of their vocation, you realize it’s true. I tell a story in the book about a friend of mine in New York. These were fancy upper eastside Catholics who dealt with this. The wife became possessed and it was a horrible thing. The demon manifested in front of me when I visited them. It was terrifying. But I asked her husband on the way back to the hotel ... he’s like a stock broker ... “How has this changed you, this horrible experience?” He said, “It has taught me that whenever I walk down the street in New York there is a tremendous battle with principalities and powers going on all around us but we just can’t see it, but it’s real.” 

So, with that in mind, I would ask your listeners to pray for me that the Lord would protect me and shield me from any sort of demonic attack.


>>Sweeney:

We will. Listeners, please pray for Rod Dreher. He is a very influential writer and speaker. It’s a real blessing that he’s with us here in Birmingham these days. He had to come all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to do what he’s doing with us. By the time you hear this, he’ll be done speaking here on campus but he’s speaking again tonight in our own chapel. Rod, we’re really grateful to you for your life and faithfulness and your ministry and your writing. We’re grateful for Living in Wonder. And we encourage all of our listeners to go out and get it. Again, not just to pad your royalty check, but because people really do need to pay attention to these things. Sustained attention to the beauty of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, all around them. And play our part in reflecting it in the lives of those we love.


>>Dreher:

It’s all there. We just need to open our eyes to what the Lord has already given us.


>>Sweeney:

Amen. Listeners, we love you. We say goodbye for now.


>>Mark Gignilliat:

You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mark Gignilliat. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our Producer is Neal Embry. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify.