"Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, & now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice."

"science, capitalism, and the welfare state … have led us away from that regular, shared experience of the sacred upon which flourishing communities and flourishing individual lives depend."

"ebbing also reflects the spread of a pernicious intellectual error … the romantic heresy: the idea that human beings are naturally good and that all constraints imposed by society are oppressive and stultifying."

"we become distinctive individuals, not by diving inwards in search of a nonexistent pure and authentic self, but rather by extending ourselves outwards and making connections with others and the larger world."

"organized religion’s decline … as loss of trust — of confidence, of attachment, of belonging. … degraded … connections to one’s family, to all the major secular institutions, to the land of one’s birth, … shared sense of the sacred … sense of alienation, or homelessness"