Hunting Magic Eels

Many people now live in a secular era shaped by science and technology, and belief in God is declining. Miracles seem unlikely, and the fairy tales of earlier generations have been set aside both as a culture and in private life. Five centuries ago, however, people inhabited a world that felt charged with meaning. God was present, the devil was real, angels and demons moved through daily life, and holy wells and magical eels were part of the landscape. Beginning with the Protestant Reformation and continuing through the Enlightenment, Western societies have gradually lost that sense of enchantment.

Richard Beck contends that this decline reflects a failure of attention more than a collapse of faith. God has not disappeared. What has faded is our ability to perceive God. This widespread disenchantment has reshaped how people imagine the religious life and has eroded the expectation that the sacred and the divine might break into ordinary experience.

This book sets out how readers can recover that expectation. Through deliberate, cultivated attention, one can learn to experience God as a living and active presence, and so develop an enchanted faith that endures in a skeptical age.