For thirty years, I have been accompanying people through religious questioning, deconstruction, and the work of rebuilding a life. This has been the sustained work of my adult life, developed through writing, teaching, community, and direct accompaniment. Some people were leaving churches. Others were questioning beliefs they had organized their lives around. Many had already walked away from religion and were discovering that the departure had settled fewer things than they expected. They knew what they no longer believed. They were still learning how to live.
Over time, I began to recognize something that changed the direction of my work. Religious deconstruction exposed more than problems with theology. It revealed capacities people had never been adequately supported in developing: trusting their own judgment, tolerating uncertainty, forming meaning, navigating disagreement, and belonging without surrendering themselves.
In 2019, I founded the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality** to give this work a community home - a place where people rebuilding after religion could explore meaning, identity, belonging, and the practical challenges of living without inherited answers. Across
That recognition eventually led me to the language of existential health. It also led to a larger conviction: our relationship to being alive deserves a more explicit place in how we understand health, educate people, organize institutions, and care for one another.
Over the past several years, I have taken a leading role in articulating that framework and building the structures to advance it. The Institute for Existential Health, my peer-reviewed scholarship, the Existential Health White Papers, our practitioner training, the Daily Reader, and my book The Practice of Being Alive are connected expressions of that work. Together, they represent an effort to bring existential health into public understanding and develop it as a coherent field of inquiry and practice.
A person might explain with considerable precision why they no longer believed in biblical inerrancy, eternal punishment, or a divinely ordained plan. They had read extensively, examined the evidence, and arrived at conclusions they could defend. Yet making an ordinary decision without someone else’s approval still felt dangerous.
Another person had rejected the idea that doubt was a moral failure but continued to experience uncertainty as an emergency. Someone else had left a community that demanded conformity and then found themselves disappearing into every new relationship. The beliefs had changed. Familiar ways of relating to authority, responsibility, and belonging continued to shape daily life.
I recognized these patterns in my own life after leaving evangelical ministry. Intellectual freedom arrived alongside the discovery that freedom required abilities I had not sufficiently practiced. Having permission to choose and knowing how to exercise judgment were different achievements.
What I was encountering were gaps in human development. I use that language carefully. A developmental deficit describes a capacity that received too little opportunity, encouragement, or practice. It says nothing about a person’s worth or intelligence. Someone might be accomplished professionally, deeply compassionate, and exceptionally well read while having had very little room to develop self-trust.
Religious environments differ enormously. Some nurture inquiry, emotional maturity, and responsible agency. Others organize life around obedience, certainty, and dependence on authorized interpreters. When people leave those environments, they often discover how much of their orientation had been supplied from outside themselves.
The path forward therefore required more than revising a worldview. People needed opportunities to practice discernment, establish boundaries, recognize their feelings, make commitments, and stay present when life refused to provide guarantees. A replacement belief system would leave much of that work untouched.
I pioneered a reconstruction focus in the religious deconstruction space, bringing sustained attention to the life people were trying to build after inherited beliefs and structures lost their authority. Alongside the necessary examination of what people were leaving, I kept returning to what they needed in order to move forward: self-trust, discernment, emotional maturity, meaningful relationships, and the ability to choose without guarantees.
By reconstruction, I meant the rebuilding of a life. The question reached into how people made decisions, navigated conflict, understood their desires, formed commitments, and participated in community. Changing a theological position did not automatically change the habits of self-abandonment or dependence that had formed around it. Those patterns required attention and practice in their own right.
This reconstruction focus became a defining thread of my work. It gave people language for a stage of the journey that often received less attention than the departure itself. It also moved my inquiry toward human development: what capacities help a person exercise freedom, sustain belonging, and give their life meaningful shape?
That question became the bridge between my work in religious deconstruction and the framework of existential health. Thirty years of accompaniment had brought me to a concern with how people develop the capacity to live after the answers that once organized their lives no longer hold.
I began calling this work existential health because the questions reaching me concerned people’s relationship to existence itself. How do I live knowing I will die? What deserves my attention? How do I belong without disappearing? What makes a commitment worth keeping when no cosmic authority guarantees its significance?
By existential health, I mean the quality of our relationship to being alive, including the capacities through which we inhabit life with depth, coherence, and dignity. It concerns how we engage meaning, identity, belonging, freedom, responsibility, uncertainty, mortality, love, and suffering.
The language gave coherence to experiences that otherwise appeared disconnected. Difficulty making decisions, compulsive searching for certainty, estrangement from one’s own life, and the inability to identify what matters sometimes shared a deeper problem: a person had insufficient support for developing their own orientation.
Religious deconstruction made this visible, but its significance extended far beyond religion. A person who has never belonged to a church still faces mortality. Someone comfortable with their faith still confronts loss, uncertainty, and the responsibility of choosing. Retirement, migration, illness, parenthood, divorce, and cultural upheaval all bring people into encounters with questions no inherited script completely resolves.
The work began among people rebuilding after religion. Its subject became the human task of building and sustaining a life amid conditions none of us chose.
As the framework developed, I became increasingly interested in what people were able to do with their experience. An account of meaning has limited practical value if a person remains unable to recognize what matters to them or give it a place in their life. A philosophy of freedom becomes consequential through the exercise of judgment and responsibility.
One capacity I call reality contact: the ability to register what is happening before forcing it into a preferred explanation. This includes acknowledging pain that a reassuring story has concealed, noticing when a relationship requires self-erasure, or admitting that something once life-giving no longer fits.
Another is self-authorship: developing the ability to participate consciously in the shaping of one’s life. We all inherit language, values, loyalties, and expectations. Self-authorship involves examining those inheritances, deciding what we stand behind, and accepting responsibility for how our choices affect others.
Meaning formation concerns how significance takes shape through attention, relationship, participation, and commitment. People often arrive looking for an answer to the meaning of life. The developmental work brings that question into contact with how they spend a morning, whom they care for, what they make, and which obligations they choose to carry.
Existential resilience involves remaining engaged with life through experiences that exceed our explanations or control. Grief, uncertainty, disappointment, and limitation test our ability to continue loving, choosing, and participating. Supporting that ability requires room for vulnerability, dependence, rest, and help.
** These capacities** develop through lived practice and relationship. Their development also depends on circumstances. A person facing violence, poverty, discrimination, or relentless insecurity needs material and social support alongside opportunities for reflection. Existential health must take the conditions of people’s lives seriously.
The more clearly this work came into focus, the more I questioned whether our familiar language of health adequately named it. Physical, mental, and social health each illuminate essential dimensions of human life. I came to believe that existential health needed explicit recognition alongside them.
Someone might be physically well, socially connected, and functioning effectively while feeling profoundly absent from their own existence. Another person might live with illness, grief, or psychological distress while retaining a substantial capacity for meaning, connection, and participation. These experiences deserve language precise enough to recognize their differences.
My proposal is that existential health constitutes a fourth, interdependent dimension of health. Naming it makes it easier to ask what strengthens or diminishes our ability to inhabit a finite, uncertain, relational life. It also gives educators, practitioners, researchers, and institutions a clearer subject for inquiry.
I took that conviction into academic work and submitted a paper, “The Architecture of Existential Health: Toward a Phenomenology of Meaning, Mortality, and Human Flourishing.” It was published in Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, volume 37, issue 2, in 2026. Read the paper’s abstract and publication details.
One reviewer wrote:
“This is a coherent, well written, systematically structured piece. The writer highlight a deep lacuna in modern/western theories and practices of managing physical and mental health. The writer identifies this as the existential dimension.”
Read Academic Paper ⬇️
That response captured the problem I had been trying to articulate. Something consequential in human life needed more sustained recognition. Publication brought the framework into a scholarly conversation where others could examine its assumptions, challenge its distinctions, and develop its implications.
Existential philosophy, psychotherapy, humanistic psychology, spiritual care, and other traditions have long engaged these questions. My pioneering contribution lies in the framework I am developing from that inheritance: existential health as an explicit dimension of health, organized around developmental capacities and connected to professional formation, institutional life, and public responsibility. The aim is to give this dimension a coherent architecture through which people are able to study it, cultivate it, and apply it.
As the scope of the project expanded, a team of us established the Institute for Existential Health. We wanted an institutional home capable of supporting the research, education, practitioner formation, publications, and collaboration through which an emerging field develops.
My role in this effort brings together conceptual development, public scholarship, institution-building, and practitioner formation. Each strengthens the others: practice generates questions, scholarship clarifies them, institutions sustain inquiry, and public writing brings the work into a wider conversation. That integration is central to the leadership I am undertaking in this emerging field.
Building a field requires shared concepts, useful distinctions, ethical responsibilities, and questions that others are able to investigate. It requires people willing to disagree productively and revise ideas in response to what they learn.
To make this developing vocabulary accessible, I have gathered its central terms in ** The Language of Existential Health: A Working Vocabulary for a Developing Field**. This companion article explains the concepts taking shape across my writing and offers a shared language for examining our relationship to being alive.
I published ** Volume One** of the
Read Existential Health White Papers, Volume One ⬇️
I have been completing Volume Two, which turns toward public applications: ** education**,
In education, the question includes what young people learn about uncertainty, identity, judgment, and a worthwhile life. In healthcare, it includes what happens to a person’s sense of self, future, and belonging when illness changes the terms of living. In public policy, it asks how collective arrangements support dignity, participation, and meaningful agency.
Community organizing raises questions about belonging, shared responsibility, and people’s experience of having a consequential voice. Corporate culture raises questions about work, human worth, and whether an organization’s demands leave people able to inhabit the rest of their lives.
These applications express a central commitment of the framework: existential health is shaped collectively. We have to examine the environments in which people are being asked to develop it.
A field concerned with being alive needs language that reaches people in the middle of living. Most people first encounter these questions through an ordinary difficulty: a decision they keep postponing, a relationship in which they feel increasingly absent, or a morning when their familiar routines no longer seem connected to anything they value.
To connect the framework with daily experience, I began publishing the through the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. The readings bring an existential question into focus, offer room for reflection, and invite a concrete practice. Their purpose is to help readers recognize something in their lives clearly enough to engage it differently.
The practice might involve making a decision without turning its explanation into a request for permission. It might mean giving attention to an activity that matters before demanding proof of its ultimate significance. Small actions give people somewhere to begin developing capacities that otherwise remain abstractions.
My new book, , brings the framework of existential health into the intimate territory of daily life. Drawing on thirty years of accompanying people through the loss of inherited certainty, it explores how we develop self-trust, form meaningful commitments, encounter mortality, and build lives we are able to inhabit. It gives sustained attention to the capacities that help us find our footing when familiar explanations no longer hold.
The book has held the #1 spot among Amazon New Releases in Existential Philosophy, bringing this work to a wider readership. For me, that reception points toward a need I have encountered throughout my work: people are searching for ways to live with depth, agency, and connection amid uncertainty. The book carries that search beyond academic discussion and into the decisions, relationships, losses, and responsibilities through which a life takes shape.
Alongside the formal publications, I hav…
