For a significant portion of my life, beginning the day spiritually meant entering a world that had already been interpreted for me. There was Scripture to read, prayer to offer, truth to remember, sin to confess, guidance to seek, and a God whose presence and purposes supposedly stood behind the circumstances of my life. Like millions of Christians, I learned some version of the daily devotional: withdraw from the noise for a few minutes, read something spiritually instructive, listen for what God might be saying, and carry that truth into the day.
I no longer inhabit that religious world. Much of the theology that once organized my life has fallen away, and I have no desire to reconstruct it under another name. I do not believe human beings need another system telling them what they must believe about themselves, what predetermined purpose their lives serve, or which authorized interpretation of reality they are required to accept. But leaving religion never convinced me that stopping, paying attention, examining one’s life, and remembering what matters were mistakes. If anything, I believe we need those practices more than ever.
That conviction eventually became the CNRS Existential Health Daily Reader.
Its story is part of a question that has occupied me for years, both personally and through my work in existential health: What kinds of practices help human beings live meaningfully when inherited structures of certainty no longer hold? What happens to spiritual practice when there is no doctrine to reinforce, supernatural authority to obey, or prescribed meaning to accept?
The Daily Reader is one attempt to answer those questions.
It would be easy for me to look back upon religious devotional practices only through the lens of what I no longer believe. Intellectual honesty requires examining the claims we inherit rather than preserving them because they once gave us comfort. But that is not the whole story. Religious practices were doing something in addition to transmitting theological propositions, and I think we lose something important when we fail to recognize it.
The devotional created a pause in the day. It interrupted ordinary consciousness and drew attention away from productivity, obligation, entertainment, and distraction. For a few minutes, a person considered life within a larger frame. You thought about your relationships, choices, failures, hopes, fears, character, and responsibilities. You remembered that there were dimensions of being human that could not be reduced to getting things done.
Religion understood something about us that our attention economy has learned for very different purposes: what repeatedly receives our attention gradually shapes the people we become. A daily practice is therefore never merely about the information being consumed. It is a form of formation. We are being trained in what to notice, what to value, how to interpret experience, and where to locate ourselves within reality.
My difficulty was not with the pause itself. It was with what frequently happened inside it. The interpretive possibilities had already been narrowed before the reflection began. Scripture possessed authority, doctrine established the boundaries, the tradition supplied the categories, and God supposedly had a plan. Human nature had already been diagnosed, salvation had been defined, and the ultimate purpose of existence was known.
The practice invited reflection, but often within a world whose fundamental conclusions were not available for reconsideration. Over time, I became interested in separating two things I had once assumed belonged together: the human need for practices of orientation and the institutional need to control what those practices are permitted to reveal.
People often describe leaving religion as though the primary event were a change of belief. Someone once believed in God and no longer does. Someone accepted the Bible as authoritative and now questions it. Someone belonged to a church and eventually walked away. Those changes matter, but they rarely capture the full magnitude of what has happened.
A religious system does not merely tell us whether God exists. It often provides an entire architecture of orientation. Within that architecture, we are given explanations for where we came from, what is wrong with us, and what our lives are for. We learn how suffering should be understood, which desires deserve our trust, where morality comes from, and what awaits us after death. Most importantly, we are given a place within the larger order of things.
Around these explanations grow rituals for birth, marriage, grief, forgiveness, celebration, death, and transition. Individual existence is thereby situated within a story that began before our arrival and is believed to continue long after we are gone.
When that architecture collapses, the person standing in the rubble has lost far more than doctrine. A whole system of existential orientation has been disrupted. The questions religion once answered remain, but the answers no longer possess their former authority.
This is one reason I became dissatisfied with deconstruction as a complete description of life after religion. Deconstruction is necessary when inherited frameworks no longer withstand examination. There are beliefs that should be questioned, authorities that should be challenged, and structures that deserve to come apart. But human beings cannot live indefinitely inside the act of dismantling. Eventually, the question changes from What do I no longer believe? to How will I live now?
That second question is much more demanding. It asks how I will relate to uncertainty, mortality, belonging, identity, responsibility, suffering, desire, mystery, and meaning when no external system possesses unquestioned authority to settle those matters for me. This is the territory that eventually led me toward the work I now call existential health.
Existential health concerns our relationship with the fundamental conditions and questions of human existence: meaning, identity, belonging, mortality, agency, spirituality, self-trust, uncertainty, and our participation in reality. These are not subjects reserved for philosophers, theologians, therapists, or moments of crisis. They are woven into ordinary human life, whether we name them or not.
Nor are they problems we solve once. We do not finally settle mortality or arrive at an identity immune to change. Meaning is not discovered once and deposited permanently into an account. Belonging shifts as relationships, communities, bodies, cultures, and circumstances change. Our understanding of ourselves continues to be revised by experience, sometimes gradually and sometimes through events that divide life into a before and an after.
Being human therefore requires ongoing orientation. We are continuously making sense of where we are, what is happening, what matters, who we are becoming, and how we will participate in circumstances we did not entirely choose. The quality of our lives depends partly upon our ability to undertake this work without requiring reality to become simpler than it is.
Modern culture often responds to this difficulty by offering resolution. Religion promises ultimate answers. Self-help promises optimization. Wellness culture promises techniques for becoming whole. Political and ideological identities provide ready-made explanations of what is wrong and who is responsible. Digital platforms offer endless opportunities to construct, perform, and confirm versions of ourselves. Different as these systems are, each becomes dangerous when orientation hardens into dependence and we lose the ability to remain coherent without its explanations.
The deeper developmental task is not to construct an interpretation of life so airtight that uncertainty disappears. It is to develop the capacity to remain in relationship with reality as it changes. That requires more than ideas. It requires practice.
The Daily Reader grew from this realization. I wanted to preserve the practice of attention without reproducing the architecture of obedience. I wanted something that respected the importance of daily reflection while refusing the assumption that reflection must lead everyone toward the same conclusions.
I had no interest in creating secular scripture or replacing religious certainty with my own. After spending years examining the consequences of outsourced authority, the last thing I wanted was to become another voice people consulted each morning to discover the approved interpretation of their lives. The contradiction would have been obvious: a project devoted to restoring human authority could easily become another structure people depended upon to tell them what to think.
Instead, I began imagining a different kind of daily practice, one that returned people to themselves and to reality. The reflections could offer language, perspective, questions, and practices, but they should ultimately turn the reader’s attention away from the author and toward the life happening in front of them. The goal would not be agreement. It would be greater awareness, discernment, and participation.
This distinction gets close to the heart of existential health. A practice organized around outsourced authority begins with the question, What am I supposed to believe? A practice organized around existential responsibility asks what is actually happening, how I am interpreting it, what assumptions I have brought with me, and how I intend to participate.
That does not mean every answer found within ourselves is trustworthy. Self-authorship is not self-infallibility. Our perceptions are partial, our motives mixed, and our interpretations shaped by histories we did not choose. We carry biases, wounds, defenses, desires, cultural inheritances, and blind spots. Recovering authority over one’s life therefore requires something more demanding than simply trusting every impulse. It requires learning the practice of discernment.
One of the central ideas emerging from my work in existential health is the distinction between capability and capacity. Capability concerns what we are able to do. Capacity concerns what we are able to hold. Much of modern life is organized around expanding capability, while comparatively little attention is given to developing our capacity to remain present to realities that cannot be quickly solved, controlled, or explained.
There are experiences no worldview eliminates. Someone we love dies. A relationship ends. Our body changes. An identity that once organized our life stops fitting. Something we devoted years to fails. We discover that an institution we trusted was not what we believed it to be. We look at the future and realize there is no way to know how the story will unfold.
In such moments, the desire for interpretation is understandable. Interpretation creates containment. We want someone to explain what the event means, assure us that it belongs to a larger plan, or tell us what comes next. Sometimes another person’s guidance is exactly what we need. Human beings are relational creatures, and self-authorship should never be confused with self-sufficiency.
There is, however, an important difference between receiving wisdom and surrendering authority. Existential health involves developing the capacity to remain present long enough to encounter our lives before forcing them into a predetermined explanation. It means learning to hold grief without immediately converting it into a lesson, uncertainty without manufacturing certainty, mystery without turning it into doctrine, and change without treating every destabilization as evidence that something has gone wrong.
This is why I think of the Daily Reader less as content than as practice. The subject changes from day to day, but underneath the different themes is a recurring movement: returning to reality, noticing our experience, examining the frameworks through which we interpret it, and participating consciously in the life that is actually ours.
There is a reason I wanted this practice to be daily. Existential health is not primarily an intellectual achievement, even though ideas and language are central to my work. Sometimes a new concept gives us access to an experience we have been living for years without being able to name. The right language can illuminate an interior landscape that had previously remained obscure.
But insight does not automatically become capacity. We become capable of inhabiting reality differently through practice. Self-trust develops as we make consequential choices, live with their consequences, learn from experience, discover that being wrong does not destroy us, and revise our direction without interpreting revision as failure. We become more capable of uncertainty by actually living through situations in which certainty never arrives.
Most of this formation occurs in ordinary time. A human life is not lived primarily in dramatic breakthroughs, retreats, ceremonies, crises, or moments of revelation. It happens on an unremarkable morning while drinking coffee, answering messages, noticing tension with someone we love, walking the dog, worrying about money, remembering someone who died, or wondering what we are doing with the years we have left.
These ordinary moments are where our relationship with existence is actually being formed. The way we respond to frustration, disappointment, ambiguity, beauty, loneliness, affection, conflict, and limitation gradually becomes the way we inhabit a life. A spirituality adequate to being human therefore has to meet us there, not merely in extraordinary experiences but in the texture of an ordinary Tuesday.
This is also why I continue to use the word spirituality, despite understanding why many people who have left religion want nothing to do with it. The word carries considerable baggage. For some, spirituality became inseparable from supernatural claims, religious authority, or practices that required distrusting oneself in the name of surrender.
I have come to understand spirituality differently. I think of it as a way of inhabiting existence deeply, with attention to wonder, mortality, interconnectedness, devotion, mystery, meaning, belonging, and our relationship with realities larger than the isolated self. It asks what deserves our care, what we are willing to give ourselves to, and what kind of presence we bring to the brief and improbable fact of being alive.
None of this requires surrendering human authority. In fact, spirituality becomes dangerous when surrender is treated as its highest virtue and distrust of oneself is mistaken for humility. History offers more than enough evidence of what happens when people are taught that obedience to an external authority constitutes spiritual maturity.
The alternative is not narcissism or the fantasy that each person possesses a private truth beyond criticism. It is responsible participation. We remain teachable without becoming submissive, receive wisdom without handing another person ownership of our conscience, and belong without disappearing into the group. We remain open to mystery while refusing to let anyone use mystery as leverage against our judgment.
This is the spirituality I want the Daily Reader to embody.
There is a paradox at the heart of the Daily Reader, and I think about it often. If this work succeeds, readers should not become increasingly dependent upon it. A practice intended to strengthen existential authority has failed if it merely relocates authority from one institution to another.
Every institution faces this danger. A framework created to restore human agency slowly begins accumulating authority for itself. A community formed to help people recover their voices develops its own vocabulary, norms, status markers, and accepted conclusions. Before long, people learn what they are supposed to say in the new…
