A vision like no other: Rethinking what we consider “life”

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 09, 2025

I’ve just finished reading a remarkable book which explodes our habitual conception of the world in which we live. Its title sets the stage: Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview. Written by Fr. William J. Slattery, a priest, retreat master, and professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, the book is an astonishing glimpse into how we should view ourselves, our lives, the world in which we live, and eternity if we are willing to take the fullness of both human nature and Divine Revelation into account.

But doesn’t a son or daughter of the Church already see reality in this way? I believe the answer is that most of us seldom actually do think and know and see and wonder in this way, because our culture as a whole has lost its spiritual eyesight. Most of us tend to be locked into a flattened materialist vision of reality, a vision (or lack of vision) thrust upon us by centuries of dominance by the modern Western “scientific” worldview, which is generally focused on only one aspect of reality: How do material things work, and what can we gain from that knowledge before we die?

We are mostly not enchanted by reality for the simple reason that we lock ourselves into one measurable aspect of it, and fail to see the whole. In contrast, Fr. Slattery reminds us forcefully of what the current world, our lives, and the new heaven and the new earth are really like.

With a measure of speculation

When it comes to both the analysis of an existing worldview and the interpretation of the Christian view of an eternity of blessedness, a certain degree of speculation is required since we can envision our eschatological future only in the broadest of religious strokes. But from his first chapter Fr. Slattery insists that “Catholicism is about reality, not religion”, a vital point that pervades the entire book. In contrast, when in the fourth chapter he explores “The face of modernity’s God”, he demonstrates that our culture is so preoccupied with the question of God’s existence (or non-existence) that we typically ignore the most important things. That is, we ignore the deepest questions about both Who God is and our own future with God in favor of a partial, flattened and ultimately dull and hopeless vision of reality.

The remaining thirteen chapters go on to express the fullness of the Catholic worldview. And the point is that this ought to change our entire attitude toward daily life, progress, regression, goals, worry…and happiness. Some portions of the book loosely resemble the tremendous work done by Fr. Robert Spitzer, who has written so widely and deeply on the evidence for creation and the supernatural that we so often overlook today in our preoccupation with what we are pleased to call human progress.* Chapter 6 (“A Designer-Made Universe”), chapter 7 (“Quantum Physics and the ‘Big Bang’ God”), and chapter 8 (“New Math and Restored Wonder”) are all of this type, though of course Fr. Slattery has his own distinctive style.

New heaven, new earth

But, even for those already familiar with many of these arguments, it is the second half of the book which awakens a fresh sense of wonder and Christian joy, beginning with Chapter 9, “Which Story Do I Inhabit?” I’m not a big fan of calling worldviews “stories”, but one does get the point. There is a terrific need to revisit, as Fr. Slattery does masterfully in chapters ten through sixteen, what we know of God’s actual plan for the consummation of all things in Christ—including this natural world. Consider the chapter titles:

10. Breaking the Code to Understand the Divine Strategy
11. Deeper Magic
12. You Are a Shadow of Your Future Self
13. The Heavenized Planet Earth
14. Your Forever Home
15. The Vision of the Future Civilization in Which Humans Thrive
16. Your deepest Longings

Chapter eleven’s “Deeper Magic” is clearly an allusion to C. S. Lewis’ Christic character, Aslan, and the astonishing power of Christ’s redemption. Indeed, these chapters are really about the new heaven and the new earth, something that (it seems to me) we do not think about as often as we did a generation or two ago. This is likely one more sign of the flattening of our horizons in our modern materialistic (though not necessarily truly scientific) view of the world, and these chapters explode that limited vision so that we can once again glimpse our Christian destiny.

For me, this “exercise” has always raised questions (which I know by faith will be properly answered). Count me as the one who, when told as a young man by a priest-professor that we will have everything we desire in heaven, immediately asked, “But what about the sheer joy of facing a challenge?” Perhaps it is obvious that the vision of God must somehow be challenging in the most delightful of ways, but how can there be the full joy and even exhilaration of a challenge without the possibility of failure?

The reader may well snort, but why shouldn’t inquiring minds want to know? Still, my point is that some questions cannot be answered here and now. If they could, the experience would hardly be beyond our wildest dreams. But what Fr. Slattery does so well in the second half of this book is reawaken us to a vision of our immortal future which makes us eager to recommit ourselves to the task of cooperating with Christ to bring it about.

Not all in a day’s work

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that our cooperation with—and, indeed, participation in—the genesis of the new heaven and the new earth is precisely what it means to be a Christian. Fr. Slattery is right that the extraordinarily flat and featureless worldview of what we are pleased to call modernity (or even post-modernity) pushes that destiny beyond our range of vision, and that this is precisely because even most Catholics do not have a truly Christian worldview. In general, we settle for less than what is supernaturally available to us; and we do this so habitually that we even forget what we are missing.

It is precisely this that constitutes the great beauty and motive power of Fr. Slattery’s new book. Christians really are supposed to be “enchanted by eternity” (and far less enchanted by modernity, which by its very nature is momentary, fleeting…and ultimately unsatisfying). What some have called “the permanent things” may be elusively both now and not yet, but they alone are in fact unbreakably real, and they alone bring both glory and joy.

If you share my human limitations, you have forgotten this more often that not, or at least too often, and so have we all. In Enchanted by Eternity, Fr. William Slattery not only tells the truth about the meaning of our lives, but offers a renewed vision of the riveting glory of our human destiny. Fr. Slattery expresses this in a great many concrete ways, all of which both fire our imaginations and reconnect us with that destiny. And yet it remains for the moment just beyond our grasp—that time when, as Fr. Slattery himself points out in quoting from Habakkuk (2:14), “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.”

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William J. Slattery, Ph.D., Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview. Our Sunday Visitor 2025. 280 pp. Paper, $24.95.

* In other articles, I’ve reviewed some of Fr. Spitzer’s remarkable books. See, for example, Proving God, and Extrapolating God from Science, and Spitzer in One: Scripture, History, Science, Reason, Faith. I’ve also noted the work of some others in this field.