Tähenduse teejuhid (TT) is a monthly supplement to Estonia's largest daily newspaper, Postimees. The interview with Martin Shaw appeared in the 64th issue of the paper (May 2026). Here are six highlights from the interview: the first comes from my introduction, while the remaining five are direct quotations.
1. In his book "Liturgies of the Wild", published earlier this year, Shaw writes that Christianity is a dream — yet Christians themselves have forgotten this. “From time to time, some of us experience a radical dream,” he explains in today’s interview. “We wake up alarmed, feeling that we must change something significant in our lives. It seems to me that modern Christianity has lost this unsettling visionary quality; it has become too domesticated and combed over,” he says, speaking from experience.
2. In "The Pilgrim’s Regress", C. S. Lewis writes that every few hundred years the Church seems almost deliberately to collapse in order to awaken its believers. As the Church collapses, the Landlord — Lewis’s name for God — begins to feed what he calls “the big pictures” back into people. I would call them big dreams. As recently as three years ago, it seemed to me that we were witnessing the final phase of the Church’s long decline. Then, quite suddenly, at that very moment of peril, something changed, and God began revealing his hand in unexpected places and to unexpected people — people like myself, Paul Kingsnorth, and Nick Cave.
3. As Christians, we have a very strange God — one who is born a refugee, dies an outlaw, and has the audacity to return from death. It is at once an immensely compelling and profoundly strange story. It would be strange enough even as myth, but when that same myth descends into a specific time and place, it becomes something even more unfathomable. The story of Jesus’ resurrection is so bewildering and transformative that, even two thousand years later, we still cannot fully agree on what actually happened. That is why we have 35,000 slightly different versions of Christianity. The story is simply too vast to be contained within a single interpretation.
4. As a Christian, I have of course drifted even further from Hillman’s outlook on life and the gods. Although he could hardly be considered a conventional atheist, he certainly was no Christian theologian. That fact did, however, allow him at times to critique Christianity in ways that are valuable for all of us. There is a small and wonderful book by Hillman called "Inter Views" that contains a chapter we should all read: “A Running Engagement with Christianity.” Some may find it a rather shocking read, but it is remarkably insightful all the same.
5. I never wanted to worship a mountain, a tree, or a river, but I have always loved them. Long before I read the Gospels, I encountered God through His creation. Now that I have become the member of the Orthodox Church, I can encounter God direclty through the Divine Liturgy together with other people. Yet there is also something of that same encounter in standing alone in the middle of a woodland at night, with a hundred thousand stars overhead, much like an early Christian hermit. It is not that I have completely lost my sense of animism, but rather that it has become far subtler and more expansive through a panentheistic understanding of God.
6. Our present situation bears a striking resemblance to the fairy tale “Ivan and the Grey Wolf.” Things are moving faster than ever before. Deranged people hold political power almost everywhere, and we can no longer rely on the things we once took for granted. That is why, oddly enough, we need the wolfishness of Christ. In my view, there is quite a bit of that in him. Christ is, in some sense, a wolf-like figure. He is often solitary, difficult to define, enigmatic, strange, vulnerable, withdrawn, and immensely powerful. There is something wild about Jesus that, somehow, I think we have largely failed to notice.
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