Some time ago, I created an experiment on this Substack called decon(Recon)U.
The idea was to imagine a different kind of university. Not an institution organized around experts dispensing authorized knowledge, but a learning community built around questioning, experimentation, critical consciousness, lived experience, and the difficult work of constructing a life after inherited certainties begin to fall apart.
I called it a heretical reconstructive learning community.
The word heretical mattered. Its Greek root, hairesis, carries the sense of choosing for oneself. Deconstruction eventually brings many of us to precisely that threshold. Once the authorities, doctrines, institutions, and inherited frameworks that organized reality lose their unquestioned status, we face a more demanding task than disbelief.
We have to learn how to choose.
It asked us to examine how we know what we know, who taught us what counts as knowledge, where meaning comes from, and how much of what we experience as reality has been socially constructed. It explored what happens when the sacred canopy that once held our world together disappears, and how we might live without simply replacing one authority structure with another.
Those were the questions behind decon(Recon)U.
I eventually stopped adding new articles to the series as my work moved in other directions. But returning to these pieces now, I don’t see an abandoned project. I see an early expression of questions that have continued to shape my work in religious deconstruction and reconstruction, non-religious spirituality, Existential Health, and increasingly, Existential Education.
So I am opening the complete seven-part series to all subscribers and collecting it here in one place.
Consider this the decon(Recon)U curriculum.
The opening article lays out the experiment itself: what would education look like if its purpose were not conformity to an authorized account of reality, but liberation?
decon(Recon)U begins with the premise that learning is never merely the acquisition of information. Education shapes what we consider possible, whose voices we trust, what questions we are permitted to ask, and ultimately the kinds of human beings we become.
This first piece invites us to imagine learning as an act of reconstruction.
Deconstruction eventually becomes a question of authority.
Who gets to tell you what is true? What happens when inherited authorities no longer deserve the confidence you once placed in them? And how do you reclaim your own capacity to know without simply becoming closed inside another certainty?
This essay explores epistemic rebellion: refusing to surrender responsibility for knowing to institutions, traditions, ideologies, experts, or communities that demand obedience as the price of belonging.
Disobedience here is not rebellion for its own sake. It is the recovery of intellectual and existential agency.
We often imagine meaning as something created privately inside the individual mind. But none of us begins with an empty consciousness and constructs a world alone.
Language precedes us. Culture precedes us. Relationships precede us. Stories, symbols, institutions, histories, bodies, environments, and communities participate in shaping what becomes meaningful to us.
This article challenges the myth of the sovereign mind and asks what meaning-making looks like when we recognize ourselves as participants in a world rather than detached consciousnesses inventing significance from nowhere.
Deconstruction often leaves us somewhere between worlds.
The old framework no longer works, but the new one has not yet taken shape. We have left one place without arriving somewhere else. This condition can feel like failure because we have been trained to equate orientation with certainty.
Third Space explores another possibility: learning how to inhabit the unresolved territory itself.
Instead of rushing toward another system capable of eliminating uncertainty, we develop the capacity to remain curious, responsive, and alive while our understanding is still forming. We learn the strange but necessary art of being unprepared.
Drawing from the tradition of critical pedagogy, this piece asks what happens when education stops treating people as containers waiting to be filled with someone else’s knowledge.
Our lives become sites of inquiry.
We examine the forces that have shaped us, the assumptions we have inherited, the systems in which we participate, and the possibilities available for acting differently. Learning becomes less about mastering approved answers and more about developing the consciousness and agency necessary to participate in our own liberation.
The classroom becomes life itself.
Human beings do not simply inhabit worlds. We build them.
Societies construct elaborate systems of meaning that eventually appear natural, inevitable, and sometimes sacred. Religion has historically provided one of the most powerful versions of this architecture, creating what sociologist Peter Berger called a sacred canopy over human existence.
Deconstruction exposes the scaffolding.
But discovering that worlds are constructed does not mean nothing is real or that anything goes. It means we become more conscious participants in the worlds we are continually creating together.
The question changes from Which world must I accept? to What kind of world are we building?
Leaving literalism does not require abandoning mythology.
Human beings have always used stories to encounter realities that resist simple explanation. The problem begins when myth is mistaken for unquestionable fact or becomes an instrument for controlling what people are permitted to imagine.
Using the Aztec myth of the Fifth Sun, this final installment explores another relationship with mythology: one in which stories become resources for imagination, reflection, and liberation without requiring us to surrender our authority to them.
We do not have to choose between believing myths literally and throwing them away. We can learn to participate in them differently.
I did not know when I began decon(Recon)U exactly where these questions would lead.
Looking back, I can see the trajectory more clearly.
What began as an inquiry into epistemic authority led toward self-trust and self-authorship. The search for meaning opened into the deeper challenge of inhabiting reality without metaphysical guarantees. Critical pedagogy widened the conversation toward liberation, formation, and the purpose of education itself. And reconstruction eventually became part of a larger exploration of how human beings learn to live meaningfully amid uncertainty, mortality, change, belonging, loss, and the limits of what we can know.
Much of that work now finds expression in what I call Existential Health.
And decon(Recon)U feels newly relevant for another reason. Artificial intelligence has fundamentally altered our relationship with information and knowledge. Education can no longer justify itself primarily as the place where authorized knowledge is stored and transferred. Increasingly, information is everywhere.
That disruption creates an opportunity.
Education can become less about gatekeeping knowledge and more about developing human beings: critical consciousness, discernment, self-authorship, intellectual humility, participation, creativity, relational capacity, and the ability to encounter reality without immediately forcing it into inherited categories.
In that sense, decon(Recon)U was asking an educational question I am still asking:
What becomes possible when learning is no longer primarily about being told what to think, but about becoming more capable of thinking, questioning, participating, discerning, and being fully alive?
These seven essays are one attempt to explore that question.
They are now available to everyone.
I have made the complete decon(Recon)U series available to all subscribers because I want these ideas to circulate rather than remain behind a paywall.
If you find this work useful, becoming a paid subscriber ($50 annually) is one way to support my continued writing and the larger work of developing the field of Existential Health.
Paid subscribers also receive complimentary membership in the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, including access to our community conversations, workshops, discussion circles, support groups, and other programs.
Thank you for reading, sharing, questioning, and helping create the kinds of conversations in which something new becomes possible.
