Our culture shapes us with each bit of content we consume. The emerging generations face unprecedented challenges related to identity, purpose, and worship. A dark enchantment grips our society.

How can we break free?

In the summer of 1941, C. S. Lewis preached a sermon at St. Mary the Virgin Cathedral in downtown Oxford, England. Students packed the chapel to hear the always dynamic Lewis give his address, which we now know as “The Weight of Glory.”

Lewis’s rhetoric soared as he exhorted the undergraduate audience to beware of the magical charm that had subtly bewitched society—the “evil enchantment of worldliness.”

Considering the desecration of the beautiful and holy, the isolation embraced by the modern West, a loss of the spiritual shape of life, and a vision of the world that dims and reduces, Lewis’s words come to us now as prophetic of our own time.

Indeed, who will stand up and show the world a new way to live?

G.K. Chesterton said it is the great paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it the most.

Chesterton believed that when a generation becomes too worldly, it is up to the saint to rebuke it.

He says that each generation chooses its saint by instinct. The saint is not what the world wants but what it needs.

A saint, writes Chesterton, is someone who runs incongruously with the modern world.

A saint is a disciple of Jesus.