The Mumpsimus

  You know the story: once upon a time, the world was full of magic, then the Enlightenment and Darwin banished superstition, and though there was much scientific progress, the world no longer had a sense of wonder and mystery — the world had become modern and disenchanted. A moment’s reflection on history and culture will poke holes in this story, but it continues to hold power as a belief (particularly for people in North America and Europe) about who we are and how we got to here and now. Every idea of Modernity as a social and historical concept relies on the idea of the disenchanted modern against the enchanted primitive. (My own book on modernism explores the idea of crisis , and certainly enchantment/disenchantment fits into that topic.) Arguments about disenchantment tend to be about its extent and its positive and/or negative effects. The idea of disenchantment holds appeal because it fits so easily alongside other ideas that structure stories of where we are going and whe...

At the end of an interesting episode of the Hermitix podcast, Jesuit priest and professor of theology Ryan Duns says that he has been thinking about how to write his next book, one built partly from his course at Marquette University on “Evil, Horror, and Theology”, and that he has struggled with a focus for it as well as a title. His original idea for a title was The Dark Transcendent: The Metaphysics and Theology of Horror , but because that makes the topic so large, he is now inclined to call the book Horror: A Theology . I would eagerly read a book with that title, especially one written by someone with as deep an understanding of theology as Duns, because most of what I’ve read on the topic of how horror intersects with theology feels superficial or reductive. Yet horror is the mode of storytelling most reliant on systems of belief and unbelief, both as subject of its stories and as tool for its effects — thus horror is the mode most inclined to exploration of how belief matter...