Jacksonville Review – June 2025

“God help us, we’re in the hands of engineers.” 

~Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

In Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, journalist Rod Dreher argues that we are living through a profound ‘disenchantment’ of life. Whereas ancient cultures once gazed upward at the nightsky and beheld the realm of the gods, we today in the industrialized, educated West see celestial certainties: red supergiant stars and galaxies, more the realm of the James Webb Space Telescope than the Divine. While humans once stood mystified by the slow march of constellations and planets, the Internet (what Dreher calls a “vast disenchantment machine”) now gives us such a glut of information that it inevitably strips us of the mystery of what we are beholding. In a real sense, we have replaced the drama of the created world with data, beauty with binary code, intimacy with algorithm. Nowadays, many of us only get a sense of transcendence around the second or third glass of wine!

But is transcendence just an old-world fable, or is it woven into reality—part of the ‘hard-wiring,’ so to speak? Or to frame the question differently, is there any way to ‘re-enchant’ our lives? Dreher believes so, and so do I—but it entails “becoming like children,” as it was said. More specifically, I believe we can experience ‘re-enchantment’ right here in our little town, even this very month. It just requires us to leave our disenchantment devices (i.e., our phones) at home for a few hours so that we can hear again roaring dinosaurs and enjoy Jacksonville’s outdoor orchestra.

Back in June of 1993, Jurassic Park hit theaters proving to be one of the truly great summer blockbusters. The movie premiered in the era just prior to the advent of the modern Internet, when engineers successfully transformed the human experience of every man, woman, and child. It was then, on the cusp of the modern ‘Internet age’ that Steven Spielberg gave us the opportunity to use our eyes and ears to imagine the collision of the pre-historic and scientific worlds: a fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica in which the soulless biotech corporation InGen created dinosaurs to be gawked at like animatronics at an amusement park. The movie was an immediate success, earning over a billion dollars worldwide, winning multiple Academy awards, and exposing millions to yet another musical achievement by John Williams.

But as great as John William’s composition was and as groundbreaking as the special effects were, the timeless enchantment of the movie lay in its most basic feature: the ever-enthralling dinosaurs themselves. Dinosaurs, after all, are nothing if not perpetually captivating. Just walk into Happy Alpaca and see how many dinosaur toys are available! Yet children are not the only ones enchanted by dinosaurs. David Randall’s The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World shows, tells the fascinating story of how some of our country’s most influential industrialists were just as enamored with finding dinosaur bones as any third grader is. And their obsession was only outdone by paleontologists like Othniel Marsh and Barnum Brown who toiled for years in the bleak American West to discover the bones of creatures like Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Triceratops. That same fascination which runs through the imagination of children also ran through the likes of JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller, and continues to run through our little town even today.

Case in point, on June 12th and 13th, Jacksonville’s beloved Britt Orchestra will perform John Williams’ score as the audience watches Jurassic Park. So how might this performance help us re-enchant our lives? Here Dreher proves immensely helpful. To re-enchant our lives, Dreher prescribes a simple remedy: find something of interest, establish a relationship with it, and then stop: resist the urge to make it fit our whims or short attention spans. Resist the urge to package it, control it, or manipulate it. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” Dr. Ian Malcolm warns. Instead of making the movie and orchestra serve us and our whims, we can choose to be fully present, enjoy the music, remember nostalgically the 1990’s, and of course—dinosaurs!

As a person of faith, I see all of life as sacramental, meaning that the universe and everything in it points to an actual transcendent reality, a world that is intimately connected to our world and yet more ‘real’ than this world. So, for my act of re-enchantment this month (to remind myself that “if there is magic, then there is a Magician,” as GK Chesterton put it), I plan on walking through our enchanted little town up to the Britt, delighting in my beautiful wife’s company (I imagine she’ll wear one of her lovely summer dresses), and I plan on sitting with her on the lush green grass at the Britt, enjoying cheese and fruit and a bottle of wine, and I plan on ‘establishing a relationship’ with the music of John Williams and the Britt Orchestra—meaning, I plan on enjoying it thoroughly and giving thanks to heaven for it—and I plan on immersing myself in the mystery of dinosaurs, whose bones are sacraments—holy mysteries that remind me of another world.

Rev. Dustin Jernigan serves as pastor of Jacksonville Presbyterian Church, which has been worshipping in Jacksonville since 1857. He and his wife, Caroline, count it all grace to raise their six children in Jacksonville. JPC worships on Sundays at 425 Middle St, 9am & 10:45am.