We Are Starved for Wonder: A Call to Arms
What is the mission of Dappled Things?
We’ll be publishing our twentieth anniversary edition next year, so you would think by now we’d have that nailed down and distilled into a pithy “elevator pitch.” And, well, to some extent, we do. I’ve talked and written often about beauty, meaning, and cultural renewal, about both raiding the treasures of Church’s tradition and adding to them. Still, I found myself recently thinking about our mission again, and how it shapes our journal.
What do the stories, the poems, the essays, the visual art we publish all share? Yes, an interest in matters of faith, especially from a Catholic perspective. Yes, a hard-nosed engagement with the fallen world as it is, a high bar for quality of craftsmanship, a confidence in the faith’s capacity to engage the modern world. That all seemed right, yet I sensed there a common thread I still hadn’t grasped.
And then it came to me: it’s the experience of wonder.
Quietly, implicitly, I believe this is what we have been chasing after in all our work as editors and publishers. The stories, the poems, and the art that we publish all share this common attribute: they awaken our sense of wonder. Contemplation of God’s creation fills us with awe, and we want that awe to spread.
This mission now seems to me more crucial than ever.
In the four centuries since the death of Francis Bacon, our world has been aggressively disenchanted in a quest for power by technological mastery. The project has succeeded so wildly that we are now able to outsource our thinking and creating to machines. Yet as our modern Tower of Babel rises to the heavens, we look up and find a night sky that is dull and empty of stars. Possessing the power to do almost anything, our civilization finds itself increasingly paralyzed by a crisis of meaning, in which nothing much seems worth doing. Terms like “deaths of despair” enter the cultural lexicon.
Let’s Reenchant the World
Yet, for all this, as Hopkins tells us, “nature is never spent. / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Even now, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” To point to that grandeur, to shout it from the rooftops: that’s what Dappled Things is here for.
If you understand why this is worth doing, we need your help.
We don’t have big-pocketed donors, just everyday people who see, with Chesterton, that “the world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
Help us spread the wonder. Can you support us with a gift of $100, $50, $25, or even just $5? Or are you in a position to contribute $1,000, $500, or $250? We need donors at all these levels to reach our goal of $15,000, without which we cannot continue our work. Please consider how much you can give and make your donation today.
