I just re-read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” I felt like the Lord told me to read it. I’m not a scholar or an expert, but a few things struck me.

Huxley, toward the latter part of his life, was interested in “enchantment” and “transcendence.”

He took psychedelic drugs to have “mystical” experiences.

He is literally a man before his time. He wrote a book, was initially excoriated for it, and lived to see much of it come true.

The Savage’s exit from their insipid, oversexualized, drug-induced peaceful “Brave New World” was Shakespeare.

This is how exits from secularity happen. They actually happen through the humanities. We need the arts more than ever. They carry within them “greetings from beyond.”

CS Lewis, the great Oxford don, shed his atheism at least in part due to finding George MacDonald, the mythopoeic writer. George M is an interesting fellow. “Phantastes” and “Lilith” are worth reading (warning: they’re uneven).

“Science” and “facts” construct this “Brave New World” and it’s completely denuded of suffering. Therefore, there is no imagination.

Our greatest artists are not strangers to suffering. George MacDonald himself had a large family, was kicked out of the church he pastored, suffered the deaths of many around him, including his eldest, Lila.

GK Chesterton claimed his life was changed by George MacDonald.

George MacDonald discipled me and helped me debrief from seminary. And this was through two books of oddly conceived fable-telling.

Fiction made me more a follower of Jesus than any tome of theology.

1. Perelandra.
2. Brothers K.
3. Lilith.
4. Steinbeck (you pick).
5. LOTR.

I’ll invoke one more name: @andysquyres. His songs are sad, but gosh, they’re beautiful. There is no way he would write the way he did if he lived in Huxley’s sanitized world.