While the ability to care for the soul was difficult in 1992, when Moore’s book was first published, it is facing an insupportable environment in 2023. The last several years have been catastrophic for the soul. The pandemic shut us off from friends, family, and social life, which are rivers that feed the soul. Our addiction to digital devices is epidemic. Traditional religion is in decline, and younger generations manifest soul sickness in depression, anxiety, and self-harm. George Will once called politics “statecraft as soulcraft.” Now we have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, two soulless politicians.

Our lives were once full of soul. We talked face to face, were less narcissistic and demanding, laughed at jokes that were sometimes raw and ribald, and forgave sins. Older people remember what was once the country’s great nightlife, what Norman Mailer referred to as “the nocturnal dream life of the nation.” Without cellphones and immersed in soulful nocturnal energy, people went clubbing and to bars and concerts to encounter romance, danger, mystery, and the other elements that formed the soul and determined its direction. “When these archetypal patterns [of the soul] come to life in a person,” Moore writes, “they usually have a strong force and allure. You are happy to be in love and can think of nothing else. You fear illness and death, and that emotion, with its clinging thoughts, gets hold of you. You glimpse a certain career, and you go after it with a passion.”